Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  As with the greatest magical realism, this is not just about setting up a checklist of different levels; it is about creating a story and a world where they can easily coexist. This is not about arranging a hierarchy of bits that are very important, those which are less important and those which don’t really matter, with serious anguish at the top and low comedy at the bottom. This is about everything, every colour, every trope, every mode, sharing the same space. Whether it is a ghost or a small and deftly drawn moment of naturalism, whether some light-hearted advice to actors or a rejected lover’s tears – all exist together. Each moment is strange and new, each moment welcomes the next in. In all Shakespeare’s plays, each detail within the picture matters as greatly as each grand horizon.

  As with physical detail, so with each moment, so with time passing. Hamlet welcomes every stranger, just as his author did. Each moment within time is as significant as every other. The philosophical space he arrives at towards the end, and which he articulates with:

  There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

  is often taken, by me at first as well, as being about a calm, a Zen plateau, and an acceptance of all. There is some of that, but it is also about relish, about being alive to everything, and to each moment you walk through. Before you recognise the providence in the fall of the sparrow, you have to see it clearly. Before you let the moments go as they wish to go, you have to try to make sure you are fully alive in each. Readiness is not just about sitting back passively and waiting for whatever cruel blows the world wants to chuck at you. It is also readiness for life, for joy, for excitement, for every goddamned sandwich.

  This is the same appetite for life that Kerouac celebrated in On the Road. Yet that book is about more, and if there is one thing it fetishises as greatly as movement and experience, it is friendship. The book is a hymn to the not quite love story between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty – they drive together, they listen to music, they share a love for a girl, they drink gallons of bad wine, they watch the sunrise, they taste the sweetness of the world. It is the dream writ large of every adolescent who wants a companion to burn bright with. The final words of On the Road are about friendship. As the sun goes down, the narrator tells us that when ‘nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty’.

  Hamlet concerns itself with friendship as searchingly as do any of Shakespeare’s plays. It is clear that Hamlet himself was a fizzing and ebullient friend before the roof fell in. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s first encounter with him is full of a buoyant intellectual banter which sounds like a group with a shared rhythm and a long history of shared riffing. Hamlet’s enthusiasm for seeing them, ‘My excellent good friends!. . . good lads’, is instantaneous, instinctive and thus trustworthy, as well as touching. Here and earlier with Horatio, Hamlet has a capacity to drop out of a glum mood at the sight of a friend, with the puppyish enthusiasm of the natural optimist. It is clear that there is a pre-existing friendship with Laertes of some depth, there is a courtesy towards Marcellus, and a long and heartfelt companionship with Horatio. When Hamlet welcomes Horatio with ‘We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart’, you imagine that Hamlet was once the life and the soul. The fizz of these pre-existing relationships makes the poisoning of them all the more sour. Shortly after Hamlet has welcomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with delirious spirits, he senses something odd, and questions them:

  HAMLET But, in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore?

  ROSENCRANTZ To visit you, my lord; no other occasion.

  HAMLET Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank you. Were you not sent for? Is it your own inclining? A free visitation? Come, deal justly with me: come, come; nay, speak.

  GUILDENSTERN What should we say, my lord?

  HAMLET Why, any thing, but to the purpose. You were sent for.

  ROSENCRANTZ To what end, my lord?

  HAMLET That you must teach me. But let me conjure you, by the rights of our fellowship, and by the obligation of our ever-preserved love, were you sent for, or no?

  GUILDENSTERN My lord, we were sent for.

  HAMLET I will tell you why. . .

  Hamlet conceals his genuine hurt, having too much kindness and dignity to belabour it, by flying off into ‘what a piece of work is a man’. His call on ‘the obligation of our ever-preserved love’ is a heartbreaking call on trust, which makes it all the more upsetting that that trust is broken, though it is to his friends’ credit that they do fess up. Hamlet bides his time to speak his mind in full with reference to this breach of trust. It comes after the disruption of the play within the play:

  HAMLET O, the recorders! let me see one. Will you play upon this pipe?

  GUILDENSTERN My lord, I cannot.

  HAMLET I pray you.

  GUILDENSTERN Believe me, I cannot.

  HAMLET I do beseech you.

  GUILDENSTERN I know no touch of it, my lord.

  HAMLET ’Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

  GUILDENSTERN But these cannot I command; I have not the skill.

  HAMLET Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

  ROSENCRANTZ My lord, you once did love me.

  This is brilliantly set as a trap by Hamlet, and is crushing for Rosencrantz. Much as you admire Hamlet for the brilliance of the conceit and the elegance of the set-up, and though we are on his side, it does seem brutal as a public humiliation. Though not as brutal as his next action towards them, which is to send them to their deaths. When Hamlet is questioned about this by Horatio, his response is terse: ‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment; / They are not near my conscience.’ We have travelled a long way from the enthusiastic friend of the opening acts. But trust and truth are pivotal in the play, and to Hamlet particularly. Break trust once and you break trust always. They are rare commodities in Hamlet’s world, and that puts a higher price on them.

  There are two environments in which trust is an absolute: the military and the theatre. I would venture to suggest the theatre might have the better record. Theatre depends on an infinitely complex collection of moves, thoughts, shades and energies coming together at a particular moment and staying in some sort of pattern for the duration of a play. For that to be achieved, as a participant you have to have an absolute trust that your colleague will turn up, know what he or she is doing, and work with you throughout the course of a show. You have to cover their back if they are in trouble, and you expect them to cover yours. Beyond that trust are a complicated collection of etiquettes – not giving notes to your fellow actors unless invited to, not upstaging another actor, not crossing in front of another, and many more – which amount to a new code of friendship, at the heart of which is trust. Break that trust, as Rosencrantz and Guidenstern do with Hamlet, and the shut-out is immediate and complete. As it would be with any theatre company.

  All that is true for a week of playing a thriller in Frinton-on-Sea. If you factor in all the other elements of trust involved in a tour on the scale this company achieved – the number of dates to hit, the difficulties of the venues, the tension in some of the places, the frequency of physical illness, the awkward relationships encountered – trust becomes both more testing and more essential. No one made scout-master speeches about it (the moment you start making those, you know you
have already lost); everyone knew from their training that it was an absolute, that they had to have each other’s backs or the whole ship went down. The way they rose to that task – looking after each other when ill, covering for each other on stage, ignoring some idiosyncrasies, keeping each other afloat and committed, being generous to each other with who played what where – was an example of not only trust, but also of how to be human. I have never seen it paralleled.

  The saint of friendship within the play, and by example elsewhere and everywhere, is Horatio. He is the paragon of all the virtues we wrap together in a friend: loyal, discreet, sensitive, self-sacrificing, a good laugher, generous with listening, trustworthy. Hamlet says of him with a sparkling accuracy and a deep love:

  Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice

  And could of men distinguish her election,

  Sh’hath sealed thee for herself. And best are those

  Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled

  That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger

  To sound what stop she please. Give me that man

  That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him

  In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,

  As I do thee – something too much of this.

  That last ‘something too much of this’ is deft observation – both Hamlet and Horatio are embarrassed by the weight of feeling in the moment and have to brush it off.

  With Hamlet’s laser-like acuity, he identifies the quintessence of what we pray for in a friend – steadiness, lightness when the world is heavy, feeling but not excess. It is what we prayed for when we were picking our company, and by some miracle it is what we got. People who were ready to support each other, who could take the piss out of each other, who kept calm in testing conditions, and who felt strongly for each other but not to the degree that it was a burden. They were virtuosi of space, knowing just the right distance to keep – close enough to care, not so close that they suffocated. Always with an eye on each other, never watching obsessively. There were moments when they infuriated each other, moments when tempers were strained and temperaments clashed, but they found their own way back to an even keel, and all collectively worked to make sure that all others were well.

  Somehow, while carrying this whole goody-bag of virtues on his back, Horatio manages to remain a credible individual. That is another measure of Shakespeare’s genius. All the actors loved playing him; six of them eventually shared the role. And when we hit the final run of performances, it seemed to be the role that they found the most upsetting to say goodbye to. Horatio’s last gestures are heartbreaking, and a testament to his undying friendship. He tries to drink some of the remaining poison from the cup and to join his adored friend in death with the lines:

  Never believe it:

  I am more an antique Roman than a Dane:

  Here’s yet some liquor left.

  which always bring tears to my eyes – loyalty at the death. Hamlet forbids him with the injunction that he must stay and remember him correctly to the world, a final task that Horatio accepts. After his friend dies in his arms, he is in receipt of history and fiction’s most heartfelt and most tender words of farewell:

  Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:

  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

  Over the last few shows, the actor carrying this speech would find it hard to hold it together. It was, of course, largely because of saying goodbye to Hamlet, but something about playing Horatio, about the depth of care in it, became emblematic of all that they were to each other and to those they met. The moment spoke of all that the tour was: an adventure of friendship, a test of loyalty and steadiness, a journey into the goodness of the world. They were Horatios to each other, to the play, and to the world they travelled through.

  * * *

  I travelled back from South America to the UK via Los Angeles to check in on our production of Lear which was playing there. I had always been a fan of LA, but after the joys and excitements of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, it offered a brutal lesson in deflation. I thought of Walter Benjamin and his concerns over the lessening of aura in any work of art in the age of mass reproduction. LA suddenly looked like a manufactured version of South America, with all the concomitant dilution of effect and reduction of charisma. It may have been my own hangover from the vitality I had been sharing in, but it felt feeble in spirit and, as a way of disguising that, aggressive in attitude. It wasn’t helped by the fact that Santa Monica, where we were, was full of displaced flat-faced Brits there for the American Film Market, their accents drearying the atmosphere. It looked like all the angry and desperate of Soho had been scooped up and tipped into LA, everyone shaven-headed with pilot sunglasses and stubbling away like amateur Jason Stathams. With nice girls from Surrey trying to look like Russian molls.

  But as ever in LA, there was the ocean to redeem it, the waves consistent and repetitive in their soft crash like a mantra. Walking through the forest of leaning wooden struts which hold up Santa Monica pier as the sun went down into the Pacific was a strong way to calm the spirit, almost as effective as churchgoing in South America. The ceaselessly alternating white staining of the sea’s edge by the froth, whitening, bulling away, whitening again. And the headmistressy scurry of the minuscule sandpipers, rushing with feathering tread ahead of the surf, is one of the world’s great consoling natural comedies.

  I think of Dean Moriarty, and Kerouac, and of our company; of the endless renewal and refreshment of touring, and the purity of movement. I remember hearing Peter Brook on a radio show with his Midsummer Night’s Dream company, talking about the delight of touring, saying ‘it gives one a reason for starting again as each new day breaks’. I think of the sheer, unadulterated joy I have experienced moving through the world with this company, and how illicit it feels, and how we sometimes seem to have misplaced the ability to put our courage into happiness, reserving it for seriousness and sorrow; how we often seem to have forgotten how to take pleasure from the world, and how to see the sweet, beautiful good in it. How we have turned Hamlet into this icon of glumness, when his spirit spills so much light into the world. And I think of a friar who came in to talk to us when rehearsing Measure for Measure. A lovely, sweet, open man, he was honest with us about every inch of his life, the disappointments and the failings and the rewards, and how testing and how extraordinary it was to be always out in the world, always meeting the worst and sometimes the best of what the world has to offer. When I asked him how he coped without the cloister that a monk enjoys, without that place of peace, he said as if surprised and without hesitation, ‘The road is the cloister, and the cloister is the road.’

  * * *

  I flew back to London, and when I arrived back in Paddington, my way was blocked by an enormous, sad and tattered Pudsey Bear. It did not look like cultural vitality. As I drove through London, along Buckingham Palace Road, hussars on horses pulled highly polished, antique machine guns in preparation for ceremonies for the war dead.

  147 Angola, Luanda,

  Centro Cultural Brasil-Angola

  27 November 2015

  148 Cameroon, Yaoundé

  University of Yaoundé I

  30 November

  149 Central African Republic (Cameroon), Mandjou

  Mandjou Refugee Camp

  2 December

  150 Equatorial Guinea, Malabo

  Centro Cultural de España

  5 December

  151 Gabon, Libreville

  l’Université Franco-Gabonaise Saint-Exupéry

  9 December

  152 Senegal, Dakar

  International School

  12 December

  153 Cape Verde, Praia

  Feira da Palavra Praça Central

  14 December

  154 Guinea–Bissau, Bissau

  French Institute

  17 December

  155 Republic of The Gambia, Banjul/Serekunda

  Ebunj
an Theatre

  20 December

  156 Ireland, Dublin

  Smock Alley Theatre

  2 January 2016

  16

  CAESAR IN ZAATARI

  HAMLET ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,

  Might stop a hole to keep the wind away’ –

  Act 5, Scene 1

  IT WAS THE CHANGE IN the light that first tipped us off. The window frames, wood against tin, had been tapping nervously for a while, and looking out of one window I could see the canvas outside had begun to billow before starting to snap and slap the sides of the hall. Then, as the frames began to clatter and bang rather than tap and rattle, the light began to shift. There was no electricity in the camp – the UN having refused permission to turn the generator on – so the hard white light coming through the windows of the functional hall was all we had. That light turned from white to yellow, and then a deeper honey yellow, and just as that happened, the air itself started to thicken. The actors and the audience were enshrouded in a hazy miasma, as if the world had gone sepia. Then the light turned a heavy orange, and as the banging and clattering crescendoed into a load roar, the light disappeared altogether, and we were plunged into black. A biblical sandstorm engulfed us.