Beside the numbing brokenness of everyone living in a uniform white container, the atmosphere was surprisingly normal. It was a Sunday, and the feeling was Sunday bright. We glimpsed a public meeting between several boxes; there were boys show-boating on their bikes, looking for trouble; there were kids charging around looking for excitement, infants wandering about looking lost, mothers carrying their babies. Several of the boxes had shop-fronts pulled up to make awnings, which provided shade for rudimentary cafes and sweet shops. There was a distinct impression of people in their Sunday best, and a few highly blinged-up women walked past, clearly on their way to a party. A young bicyclist scooted past us, riding high on his pedals. I looked at the seat of his bike. It was rigged out with a complicated wrap of casually elegant embroidery which covered some of the frame as well. Beyond it, whooshed up by the pace of the bike, a section of purple tassels frilled up into the air. There was a confounding flair about this small detail.
We arrived at the small UNHCR stockade in the middle of the camp, where we were to present the play. It was a fenced-in collection of buildings built for education, around an open yard, with a meeting place in the middle shaded by a tin roof. We spent much of the next few hours trying to get out of the yard and to wander around the camp. Promises were made, people were sent for, permissions were sought, release was pending, but it never happened. A crowd quickly gathered to gawp at us. The company with their easy guileless charm approached the crowd and started uncomprehending conversations. A band of hopelessly cheerful youth crowded on the other side of the fence, and the names of football stars were bandied back and forth. Miranda let them play her mandolin, Keith astonished them with some magic tricks, and the international language of double-jointed finger-bending was indulged in. We were under strict instructions not to give them anything, but they seemed to have too much dignity to ask, and the play of laughter and mock insult and mock outrage passed freely to and fro through the mesh. The company gathered to practise their songs and musical cues in the shade, and the familiar tunes in the alien setting further nurtured a sense of dreaminess.
I wandered around the other buildings. In one prefab schoolroom, there were six models which had been constructed as group projects to bring the class together. Designs and drawings for each plastered the walls, and the constructions from paper, card, wood and anything that can be scraped together were impressive. They were all of ancient Syrian monuments, relics from old civilisations. The sense of these shapes, of Ozymandias-like broken grandiosities, was hard-wired into these people’s genetic code, and displacement made them keener to recreate them. Articulating these shapes, recording them, making them real again, even with match-sticks and cardboard, seems to give security in a world that moves like a whirlwind. As IS charges round obliterating all traces of history, and of the world before Islam, this attachment to the ancient past in young minds was strangely fortifying. Of the six models, three of them were of ancient theatres. The impertinence of bringing theatre to a culture that was making uniquely sophisticated theatre when the British were still hurling cowpats at each other was underlined.
A small tin library was filled with women chattering in burqas. I asked if I could come in, they assented, and I wandered awkwardly amongst the books, my presence halting their chatter. The sheer tinpot courage of this – a tiny library for refugees in a desert – I wanted to lock in to my scrapheap of images as a symbol of hope. But alongside a few sensational bestsellers, and a few books about understanding civil war, the majority of the titles were given over to accountancy. There was a whole shelf for volumes on pension reform. The absurdity of this in this context almost had a sweet poetry to it. We are living in a Price Waterhouse world.
The show was supposed to begin soon, but there was a worrying lack of that vital ingredient: an audience. The start time was 12 p.m., and about five people had shown up. No one seemed worried, so we kicked around in the backstage area. By quarter past there were about twenty people. Alarmingly, at 12.30 the audience seemed to have shrunk back to about fifteen. The gag went around, ‘This show’s so crap, we couldn’t get an audience in a refugee camp’, and ‘Everyone’s got something better to do.’ The laughter was a little nervous. The speed of motion and the early rise was catching up with me, so I sneaked into a small space between a curtain and a wall, lay down and tried to sleep. A hazy doze shuffled in to my brain, murmured into by noises of nervous actors and audience bustle, the shut-eyed blackness perforated by the images of the last few hours which spiralled into the void then careered out again. Then a gentle surprise, a face looming out of the blackness, a shape forming out of the pool of ink, and then, reluctant to be too present, falling gently back into it. It was a face that I had dimly glimpsed in a similar trance years before. The same qualities I remembered – warmth, shyness, sensitivity, a discreet sensuality – then an ebbing away. A long way from a sighting, but if you’re going to get a sudden and strong sense of Shakespeare, why not in Zaatari. . .?
With alarming suddenness, I was kicked out of my slumber and took my seat in a packed and excited hall. This lot may have been late, but they certainly brought a party when they arrived. About 300 people crowded the hall, dressed for a carnival, mobiles out; the chatter was high and happy, and had the vivid animation of a group of people who were not going to shut up however hard you tried. There was a cheeringly large minority of kids, who charged around the place, shouting, yabbering, leaping on strangers’ laps, laughter and happiness spilling out of them like water. The show started, and the animation didn’t decrease in the slightest. The kids continued charging about, and the actors joyously accommodated it. At one moment, when Hamlet got out his notebook to record the words of the Ghost, ‘My tables – Meet it is I set it down’, two young girls ran up and stood by his shoulder to see what he had written down. The Ghost went down a treat, a bit of white make-up, some staring eyes, and some rumble and thunder in the voice scaring the audience into silence. Ghosts felt real here. The story was clear, and a bit of explicit gesture in the acting gave much pleasure. There was a running commentary from everybody on everything – the stories, the actors’ gestures, the characters. The audience segregated into women on one side – bright, excited and engaged – and men on the other – either lazily disaffiliate if young, or gravely austere if old. Everything was filmed on mobiles, most from a single position, though one young man, in an insanely bright-pink jumper, moved around the audience, standing on a chair, hanging from a pillar, lying on the floor, all to get the best angle.
Then the sand came, and an already strange event flipped out into something else. The night before, in Amman, history flattened us into inconsequence; today it was nature’s turn to show us a glimpse of oblivion. Here we were, with the walls shaking, the sky filled with a thick haze, and the sun well and truly shut out. The reaction of the audience was a Shakespearean one: this was a properly ominous event. Heaven knows what fears passed through their heads, but for us it was another sign of our vainglorious irrelevance. In the middle of the storm, in a moment where it was hard to believe it would stop, the image of an enormous shift of sand burying us and all our silly gestures flitted through the mind. It was hard not to feel an appropriateness, that our endeavour would end up as a remnant in the dust.
What would be, what will be left of us? It is a question that exercises Shakespeare vividly and actively throughout his sonnets but rarely in his plays. Sonnet after sonnet recounts the power of time, its ability to crush kings and monuments, statues and the statuesque. But in each one, Shakespeare asserts the power of his words to survive, to endure beyond any destruction. There is a perversity in his faith in the indestructibility of words, beside the frailty of stone and power, even poetic words in delicate love poems. Shakespeare, as with many a great artist, always understood that strength is made of glass, and that tenderness is made of steel. The purest expression of this is in a sonnet:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive th
is powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
All that is substantial will dissolve, and words, frail floaty words, endure. Strangely the plays rarely enter into the same discussion. Cleopatra shows an awareness of and a fear about posterity, and how she might be represented by subsequent generations. She and her paramour are ever eager to remind us that they are peerless, in their own moment and in the annals. But largely the plays live in the fury of their own present moment. They find their own perspective and their own context within time, but they do not strain to assert their power to defeat it. Shakespeare took little or no care to present these plays to the world or to posterity – unlike the sonnets. For him, the plays seem to have been disposable and simply for the moment of performance.
So here in the ultimate land of the blasted monument, ground down by history, or covered inexorably in the swift or slow shifts of the desert, it was an honour for us to be asserting, however feebly, the enduring clout of these words. Here in Zaatari, the audience may not all have been listening, the stage may have been beyond makeshift, the context may have been bigger and more tragic than we could ever hope to match, and nature itself may have been trying to call a halt, but here we were merrily tossing out these gorgeous words into the void. However words survive, on stone, on paper, in books, in mouths and ears, in the air itself somehow, and even in the minds of young children who have come to hear a play presented by some batty foreigners, somehow we were contributing to that ineffable daisy chain in the ether.
The show resumed, with a peculiar calm, after the light returned. The world seemed to have shifted on its axis a little. The audience, at first, were chastened and attentive, as if God had told them to hush a little. Some words still acquired an extra resonance. When the Player King arrived and told of the death of Priam, the fall of Troy and the great grief of Hecuba, the air got sharper. Not only was this more from ancient history, and an ancient history that wasn’t too far away, but it was also a tale of a fallen kingdom and of the chaos which followed. It couldn’t help but ripple in the air before a room full of refugees. The boys were over excited by the violence against the women. When Hamlet got a little rough-house with first Ophelia and then Gertrude, they squawked with an awkward excitement. The women looked properly alarmed. The young man in the obscenely bright-pink jumper was now taking his film-making even further. He frequently encroached onto the stage to get an extreme close-up of an actor. Then rather disconcertingly he stepped onto the stage, ignored the actors and started filming the audience. As the end approached, and the swords came out, and death accelerated towards the stage, everyone crowded round and got their cameras out. At the front, there was a small group who had taken so heavily against Claudius that when he was finally killed, they burst into spontaneous applause and jumped up and down with pleasure. Killing bad kings, even in show, still clearly caused much delight.
The show finished, and the audience and the energy that had filled the room both melted away. Some had clearly found it mystifying, some a little ridiculous, some had relished a great story, and some seemed to have eaten up every moment. I did a ridiculous interview with a film crew, which was frequently interrupted by a precarious pop-up UN banner placed behind me that kept toppling and falling onto me. A small group remained to talk to the actors, and swapped stories and sang a song to us. They told us that they hoped we would come back, and next time to Syria. We were all too punch-drunk to absorb the surprise of the day, and most slept out the journey back. One further final detail of weird poetry had silenced me. . .
As Hamlet died, at that exact moment, another noise softly filled the room, a gentle and percussive thap-thappity-thap on the roof. As Hamlet died, the rains came.
157 Lebanon, Beirut
Emile Bustani Auditorium, Al Bustan Hotel
4 January 2016
158 Kuwait, Kuwait City
American United School Auditorium,
6 January
159 Saudi Arabia, Jeddah
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
9 January
160 Bahrain, Manama
National Theatre Cultural Hall
11 January
161 Qatar, Doha
Al Rayyan Theatre Auditorium
13 January
162 Yemen (Djibouti), Obock
Markazi Refugee Camp
16 January
163 Chad, N’Djamena
Théâtre Maoundoh-Culture
18 January
164 Mauritius, Moka
Mahatma Gandhi Institute Auditorium
22 January
165 Madagascar, Antananarivo
Dôme RTA
25 January
166 Comoros, Moroni
French Institute
27 January
167 Seychelles, Mahé
University of Seychelles
31 January
168 France, Calais
The ‘Jungle’ Camp
3 February
France, Paris
Théâtre de la Tempête
5 February
169–70 Malta (and Libya), Sliema
Salesian Theatre
8 February
17
EMBATTLED THEATRE NEAR THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY
HAMLET What a piece of work is a man!
Act 2, Scene 2
IN A SURPRISINGLY DOMESTIC MOMENT of betrayal, a small hill in a play full of high mountains and sheer cliffs, Hamlet is let down by his two university friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They have arrived to holiday with him, yet after a brief passage of interrogation reveal that their presence, at the behest of Claudius, is to spy on Hamlet. Out of this uncomfortable moment, Hamlet, with characteristic perversity, forges from his mind the most astonishing passage of prose ever written for the stage:
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. . .
The spice in the soup here is a pinch of play-acting. Hamlet is lying (‘wherefore I know not’) – he does know, all too well, the cause of his own grief. A little of his feigned ‘antic disposition’ stirs some manic freedom into his invention. But the lie, and the acted mania, liberate mind and tongue to pour out truth like water from the tap of his melancholic soul. It is a paean to the potential of the world for beauty and the human for grace, and a heart-sore critique of the disappointments when that potential is so rarely fulfilled. It is the hymn spoken with joy at dawn and with sadness at dusk by every melancholic since. It is a proof of soul. It says that you can see the glories of the world, and can see through them at the same time. For many it is now a pose; for Hamlet it was fresh as a daisy and dangerous as a petrol bomb. This is the human claiming new space for himself, new Renaissance capabilities, claiming equivalence
with God and the angels, and at the same moment seeing the futility within such claims.
* * *
Somaliland was our toughest gig to that point, an independent republic carved out of the north of Somalia twenty-three years earlier and still not recognised as a state by the African Union or the UN. It was dangerous – not quite Mogadishu, but not far off. Before we set off, we gathered in a hotel room in Addis Ababa and were given a security briefing by stage management. The atmosphere was unsensational but tense. When we arrived in Hargeisa, we were shuffled into a private room as they arranged the armed convoy to ferry us around. John and I sneaked back onto the airstrip for a cigarette. Our bags and sixteen flight cases scooted past on a trailer tugged by a tractor. It was driven by one of the happiest men I have ever seen. He revved his engine, toot-tooted his horn with reckless abandon and waved to us. Just witnessing him bucked the spirit. We smoked in silence for a while. Then the little tractor, barely bigger than a sit-down lawnmower, passed back the other way, its elation seemingly increased, now zig-zagging merrily to compound the pleasure of the revving and the toot-tooting and the waving. We remained in silence for a while, until John said, ‘That is exactly the sort of job you dream of having half an hour before a press night.’
We were shepherded together by Ayen, an elegant Somali woman and one of our chief hosts. Part resident in London and part in Hargeisa, Ayen had come into our offices early in the process of the tour and had moved heaven and earth to get us there. Behind heavy gates, we climbed into three black-windowed Land Cruisers and set off. Beyond the gates were two pick-up trucks, crammed with boy soldiers loosely holding Kalashnikovs, one of which preceded us, the other followed. This was a long way from a genteel tour of the Home Counties. We drove to our hotel and weaved our way through a long series of crash barriers, metal grates and industrial lumps of concrete.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 30