The children in the audience screamed, and their mothers with them. Not a panicky scream, but a bottom-of-the-stomach wail. This was fear of God, of the end of days, not of a weather event. They leapt up and all rushed for the stage, some to cling to the actors, some just to stand there. It was as if where the play had been taking place, a makeshift space built only two hours before, was now invested with the power to rescue and save, as if the make-believe of the play could ward off the evil. The actors looked bamboozled – the dark, the haze, the screaming, the play all colliding. They stumbled on for a while, then gave up and sat down. As the audience stormed the doors, worried for other family members outside, the UN officials stepped forward and told them all to sit down. Everyone appealed for calm, and we knew that our tour, stopped by a sandstorm, had reached a new zenith of craziness.
I rushed outside. Since a child, an electrical storm had always tempted me to run out and dance happily within the bang, crash and wallop. A wall of wind tractored into me, sand strafed mouth and face and forced its way into my eyes. Wrapping a scarf around my mouth, I leant happily into the wall. The visibility reduced to two or three metres, other figures would suddenly appear from the swirling cloud, criss-crossing through the storm. Actors loomed up, cackling merrily within the madness. One slow step after another, hair sticking out behind me as stiff as my scarf, I was framed in a cartoon which defined the tour, bent almost double and walking steadily into a sand-blasting wind.
* * *
At dawn the day before, hoping to snatch a couple of hours of sleep in transit through Beirut airport on the way to Jordan, I went to charge my phone. Beside the sofa I was attempting to crash out on were two twin plug sockets sitting primly side by side, one French, one British: the modern reminder of the continuing influence of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This moment of colonial self- confidence, enacted by a British and a French diplomat in 1916 – Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot – carved up the Middle East with a ruler into a collection of nation states. Straight lines cut through ancient religious, tribal, national, gangster and family ties, with a pathological blithe self-confidence. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was never going to be a pretty business – empires don’t break up in a shower of rose petals and messages of love and understanding – but it’s hard to believe that its end was assisted by men looking at a map, intent on competing spheres of interest, with all the local understanding and emotional intelligence of a geometry set.
History was everywhere around me – the airport was decked out with huge photographs of Roman ruins, archaeological artefacts sat here and there on plinths, blocks of broken marble hinted at great narratives of the risen and the fallen. The bookshop in Beirut was light on sensationalism and heavy on history. Having flown on to Jordan in the morning light over the mountains of Lebanon and the Syrian desert, as I drove in from Amman airport towards my hotel, my driver, a third-generation Palestinian, was generous with his knowledge of the long story of the city.
Amman has been continuously inhabited for almost 10,000 years. Built around seven interlocking steep hills, it was an important stop on the caravan routes which slowly transported people and goods from East to West and back again. Homes and towers from the Stone Age have been found there; in the time of the Trojan wars, it had become the Ammonite capital, Rabbath Ammon, from where the inhabitants went into battle against Saul and David; in the Ptolemaic time, it was renamed Philadelphia; under Seleucus, a successor of Alexander the Great, it came under Hellenistic rule for a couple of centuries; then a brief moment under Nabatean rule; then King Herod, a Judean king under a Roman mandate, ruled it as part of the Decapolis, a league of Roman affiliated cities, when it blossomed into full Roman grandiosity. It declined during the Byzantine period and was overrun by Sassanians in the seventh century until they were thrown out by the Arab armies of Islam only twenty years later in about AD 635. The story, as told to me by my taxi driver, was dizzying, a wild game of ‘Who’s the king of the castle’ across millennia. And studded by names from Sunday-school picture books – Saul, David, Ptolemy, Alexander, Herod, Mohamed. These were figures from myth systems, tumbling out of brightly coloured educational books, and here I was in their back yard. The sense of contact with history was vertiginous.
The more recent history was no less disorienting, though its shapes were latterly defined against the television news rather than illustrated Bibles. After the Great Arab Revolt of 1916–18 Emir Abdullah bin Al-Hussein made Amman his capital in 1921. The city grew rapidly as a result of the wars of 1948 and 1967, when successive waves of Palestinian refugees were driven towards Amman; a further influx followed the 1990 Gulf War, and the continuing chaos in the region has drawn more lost people towards its towering hills. From a distance, it often seems that the Middle East (so named by the West, which claims naming rights over everything) is the research and development laboratory of human history, the place where conflicts, ideas and tensions are grown in petri dishes, only to be later marketed over time to the rest of the world. The earliest human stories grew here and have now expanded into myth. To be here within the fact of it was exhilarating, everything one saw bearing a crushing weight of imparted imagination.
Driving through the city to the theatre felt like a roller-coaster ride through the history of civilisation. You turned a corner and saw precipitate hills, all stacked with houses from different eras, each hill brought to sharp life by the lowering sun, each sliding in and out of view one against another, like movable scenery in a giant Pollock’s toy theatre. Each hill was covered in a clambering Lego set of construction, all in various shades of cream and buff stone. Almost half of each mountain of buildings was left unfinished, one or two floors completed before a halt was called, leaving metal foundation spikes sticking cheerlessly up into the air. All those promises of home standing half-achieved and tenantless had a steadily lowering effect. Monolithic outcrops of rock burst out of the ranks of human habitation like some primordial trapped giant within each hill trying to stretch its limbs.
The theatre itself was magical, and when the company arrived to play in it, we were all flattered by a sense of privilege. Named the Odeon, it was built in the second century AD, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, and had been in continuous use as a theatre for almost 2,000 years. Surprisingly, it was right in the middle of the city, at the bottom of a steep hill, and was part of what must be one of the first theatre complexes. Beside it, stretching a third of the way up the hill, was a Roman amphitheatre, carved into the rock, built for spectacle and able to seat 6,000 people. The Odeon, a perfectly proportioned arena around a thrust playing space, seated only 600. We are accustomed in the present day to seeing big theatres spawning smaller studio spaces alongside, but I had no idea the practice went back 2,000 years. We started reblocking the show for this space but realised there was no time, so everyone determined to busk it and appear wherever and whenever their legs would carry them. The city honked and beeped cantankerously outside, but as the day dissolved leaving an inky black above, the residue of the day’s light seemed to settle into the creamy marble of the theatre, emitting a soft reciprocal glow. The heat of the city dropped into and trapped itself within this encircled space, and as the audience filled it with noisy anticipation, the sense of event was thrilling.
The show was electrifying. The thrust space was a dynamic arena for the cast to move and swirl about in, and for human dilemmas to shape themselves across thrilling diagonals or triangles freighted with tension. The acoustic was perfect. Every word landed crisp and clear, and every character stood sharp and proud. Later, a student said to an academic travelling with us, ‘I was worried that the noise of the traffic outside would spoil the show, but it soon disappeared, and after watching Ophelia die, I just felt sad that the world was going on outside as normal, and no one knew that this young girl had died.’
When Hamlet returns from his aborted trip to England, he engages with the Gravedigger. He has his iconic moment with the skull of Yorrick, the cour
t clown on whose shoulders he had played and laughed as child. In that moment he stares death, actual and bony and hollow-eyed, straight in its fleshless face, and he feels not fear, but peace and understanding. It is a peace that is accessed through history. He holds the skull and asks:
HAMLET Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
HORATIO What’s that, my lord?
HAMLET Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?
HORATIO E’en so.
HAMLET And smelt so? Pah!
Puts down the skull.
HORATIO E’en so, my lord.
HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace thus. Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away’ –
Here we sat, in a city which Alexander might have passed through and Caesar visited, that Jesus might have drunk water in, and in which Muhammad might have broken fast, a city right at the crossroads of the human story, and these words twisted in the night air, looking backwards and forwards through time.
Shakespeare, across his work, uses time and history as a portal to calm. Much has been written and worried over as to what his religious inclinations were, if any. It has always seemed to me that he found in history itself, in its processes, its narratives, its crushing roll forwards, something terrifying and yet capable of affording a perverse transcendence. He writes of time as the ultimate arbiter, a force which crushes human struggles and renders them meaningless, and yet within the appreciation of that fact there is a liberation. To know that time passes inexorably beside us, or without us, and that like a hapless swimmer of the seas our task is to find the right pace of stroke to suit the waves which lift and drop, to know that and to keep ploughing gently forwards, footling but steady, small within the billow and the surge, yet able occasionally to sink happily into the ride; to know that, and to do that, is a sort of peace.
It is not a Californian prescription for mental health, and no one achieves it perfectly, of course. Hamlet, with his adventurous and experimental capacity, gets as close as anyone, but his achievement is prone to turbulence. No one, least of all Shakespeare, is saying that you can learn this stuff on a three-day course.
This is also transcendentalism with political bite. It is not Everyman who is finding his or her place in history here, it is the two most iconic figures from the ancient world, Alexander and Caesar, both humiliated by the wrangle of time. The greatest warrior of all time turns to dust which is remoulded to block a hole in a barrel of booze; the greatest politician is used to keep the draught out. This is an extension of the intellectual freedom Hamlet discovers earlier in challenging Claudius before he is sent away. Having killed Polonius in a surge of fury, his ‘antic disposition’ having led him far from his own calm place, he is quizzed by Claudius as to where Polonius is and replies:
HAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: Look you, a man may fish with the worm that hath eaten of a king, and a beggar eat that fish, which that worm hath caught.
CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET Nothing father, but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
This is a flash of illumination within a disordered mind: the later passage mentioning Alexander and Caesar the same thought handled with gentle bemusement. But within both is an anger at the ridiculousness of status, of baubles, of grandiosity and show, in the face of inevitable oblivion. The liberation here is realising the comedy of humanity’s farcical attempts to look significant and to set up hierarchies of importance. Since everyone ends up ‘going a progress through the guts of a beggar’ (and how vicious a phrase that is – not just being eaten by a beggar, but passing right through him), then to what end is the hopeless search for distinctions?
It’s a radical statement now, and must have been yet more radical for its audience in 1603, when social distinction was delineated with painful precision, right down to the fabrics you and your class were allowed to wear. It’s radical to hear, yet more liberating to think and to say. Whatever the age, there is always an inclination for individuals to mythologise themselves, and often a social pressure to collaborate in their self-mythification. We are suckered into it, and join in the act of excess promotion, and end up frightened by those we have collaborated in glorifying. So it is always good to remember, and refreshing to say out loud, that Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump will be sent by history through the sphincter of a beggar.
There is also a sharp tweak of the Renaissance nose at work within Hamlet’s graceful humbling of Alexander and Caesar. Neither Hamlet nor Shakespeare had any idea that they were within anything called a Renaissance, yet they lived in an age with a rediscovered passion for the classical world. The idea that the Renaissance was about something being reborn has largely been forgotten. Many associate it with an aimless modernity involving Leonardo inventing helicopters; others just with funny trousers and swords. But it was a rebirth of classical thought and learning which drove it, and for a radical purpose. That thought was used to contextualise, and to subvert, the Christian hegemony of the day. The reverence for these figures within intellectual circles was freshly minted, so in reducing Alexander and Caesar to the status of dust, Hamlet is taking potshots at the fashion of his day, and its intellectual underpinning.
Sitting there, under the stars, surrounded by the hills of Amman, in a beautifully enclosed Roman arena theatre, unable to exclude the barking noise or the orange light of a modern city, but able to transport the historical imagination, sitting there in a city which for many millennia had witnessed the merry-go-round of human striving, as Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Ottomans, French, British and Arabs had all staked their petty claim against the shift of time, sitting there, it was not hard to appreciate and sympathise with Hamlet’s cosmic joking at the grand comedy of human enterprise, against the backdrop of history and change. At that moment, all endeavours, including our tour, seemed something of a whisper in the wind.
* * *
The next morning, we were up at five, shovelling breakfast into our mouths before setting off to the north of Jordan. Our destination was Zaatari, a UN refugee camp created to house almost 120,000 displaced Syrians. There was no way we could play in Syria itself, and this expedition, playing to Syrian people, appeared to us the best substitute. Further sleep was attempted, the company tangled into the funny shapes which minibuses prompt in order to find comfort, but the landscape proved too vivid to allow much shut-eye. The edge of town was a broken and busted scrapheap, scrags of old metal leaning against busted-car graveyards. Beyond the edge of town, the long roll of ochre desert began, the continuing sweep of dust shading slowly from terracotta to yellow. Occasionally it was broken by a gathered rise to a small plateau of rock, before flattening out again to its long continuum of nothing. Small settlements pockmarked the landscape, homes with stockade fences enclosing minimal numbers of desultory goats or camels, whose ability to eke something out of this barren land beggared the imagination.
How has this tough landscape been so endlessly fought over, and why does it continue to act as the nodal point of so many of the world’s antagonisms? Oil, yes, but there is something more as well. How did the three great monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which have had such a powerful hand on the historical steering wheel, get birthed out of this tough, scrubby land? Does the austerity of the landscape, its harsh blast to the spirit, provoke a need for a world elsewhere, for a religion beyond? Does God come from rocks not grass? I thought of a play about Farinelli we had recently played at the Globe. Written by a friend, Clair
e van Kampen, she merrily stole one gag from an email I had sent her, and exuberantly delivered by Mark Rylance it proved irresistible: ‘Many gods are fun. One is a nightmare!’ Does this barrenness lead inevitably to one god, and does woodland and running water lead to Panic fun? And how has the rest of the world been so bullied by the martyrdom of rocks, deserts and big skies? Why has this self-punishing monotheism, this determined pushing of the human away from its own body and its own physical world, so often won? And why does it keep winning, bullying the not-so-bothered-about-eternity majority with its bombs and its aggressive staring-eyed dumbness?
Why did it feel, stuttering along in a rickety minibus, like there was violence stored in the dust and the rock? Was that all projection? It didn’t feel like the result of spilt blood; it felt like something geologically inherent within the striated red of the rock and written into the desert dust. The violence felt necessary. It seemed to be pulling the muscles tight in every taut held body you came across. How can you sit in a peace conference in Vienna and talk all that away?
The refugee camp sat on a low-lying level plain, which made it impossible to perceive from a distance and rendered its size impossible to gauge from close up. This was an effective means of concealing the awfulness of the fact of its existence. We halted at various outposts, where bored fat men in military costumes from bad theatre productions sat smoking, looking at papers, and looking to slow time down to their pace. There were two armoured personnel carriers at the entrance, but the sense of threat was low level. An earth rampart further concealed the camp, again seemingly for disguise. Once beyond that, we entered a small city of white boxes. We were confronted with an endless vista of low white prefab units, all a similar shape, laid out in serried ranks intersected by avenues, in an endless de-personalised parody of a communal living space. Every box, rather depressingly, seemed to have a satellite dish.
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