Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  The sense of forbidding didn’t stop once the gates had been passed. Each room displayed a prominent set of house rules. These included an edict against any gatherings, gambling or playing of games of chance. It was Keith’s birthday and, as Chief Spielmeister, this interdiction was going to hit his plans very hard. It also said that no women were allowed in boys’ rooms or vice versa. This immediately prompted Amanda to charge into Beruce’s room and display herself in a less than devout manner. A similar spirit prompted us later to tell the hotel that we were holding a prayer meeting in Ladi’s room, where we gathered to play a desultory game of poker. It was hard to work up a spirit of Runyonesque shadiness under strip lights, drinking Coca-Cola and with guards with machine guns patrolling the quiet night streets outside.

  The next morning, our youthful escort of AK47s returned, and we headed off into town to visit the Cultural Center whose founders had organised our visit. The streets were a technicolour riot, the most startling combinations of primary colours decking out each shopfront, some in abstract shapes, some just happy clashes of pigment punching into each other. Elsewhere the sun had blanched some of the earlier vibrancy into pastel shades. Shop painting felt like high-street art, pinging image and life out into dust and sand. For a while we lost our escort in the bustle and the chaos, and started to feel nervous, then it rattled up beside us, young arms merrily holding death in their grip, and we moved on.

  The Cultural Center had a high red-clay wall around it. We walked through the gates to discover a barrage of cameras and reporters and microphones. They all shyly backed away, staring at us as if we were aliens. This brought home how rare cultural visits were. We were the first company to visit in the history of the republic. The respect was excessive and disorienting, and we stepped forward quickly to shake hands and say hello and defuse specialness. A Foreign Office young bubble of enthusiasm stepped forward and introduced herself.

  ‘Hello, I’m —— ——, and I’m not here!’

  ‘Ah, hello, where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Addis Ababa. I’m not allowed to be here, because the country is not officially recognised yet.’

  ‘Ah, how often are you not here?’

  ‘Four days a week.’

  She introduced us to the Ambassador, who had flown up from Mogadishu. He was very much here and surrounded by a terrifying security detail, all ex-SAS, all scrawny, grizzled, lean statements of violence and intent.

  The whole group of us were led around the centre. We were shown a library, a small room with high shelves of books surrounding a plain table, and an exhibition gallery full of art wrought from horrendous pain – lost souls piling on top of each other on boats, and women twisted in metal chains of entrapment. Rape, hunger and flight breathed through the oil of the paint with a directness which made most art seem frivolous. And a theatre, which was a glory. A tiny oblong, it was built from wood strips, some boards and a load of crude mats formed by weaving wool through reeds. Seating about a hundred, something about its simplicity of construction and its focused shape felt perfect. A space for rough and sustainable magic. A ghetto blaster pumped out disco music, and we were treated to a display of local dancing. The company, being too generous to spend too long receiving, got up and joined in the dance.

  A table was laid out on a dais in the open air for a press conference. A crowd of journalists attended, and their excitement seemed disproportionate. One of them asked, ‘How are you so brave?’, and when we asked him to explain, he said, ‘How are you so brave to come here when no one else will come here?’ This was in some ways embarrassingly gratifying, and in more others embarrassingly wrong. All the courage was theirs in inviting us here, in creating a cultural centre, in keeping going. We were fly-by-nights, passing through. I tried to reply but got it wrong, and my answer landed too heavily on the air and took some of the magic out of the event. Unsurprisingly, the inevitable question about North Korea came up. ‘Everyone is entitled to a story,’ Amanda said, and I locked that away as a good line.

  Ayen was our introduction to Somalia. Our official host, and the man behind the Cultural Center, was Jama, a genial, bustling soul, whose energy was more that of a deal-maker than an aesthete. All the better for it – Lord save us from the aesthetes. Creating this centre was clearly a miracle of adamantine will and polygonal appeasement. The thought police didn’t want it, the real police were reluctant, the government muted, even those who most wanted it were frightened to ask, given the opposition of all the others. This was not the sort of opposition who write a tart paragraph in the latest Shakespeare quarterly; this was the type to lob a mortar. That was the reason we couldn’t play in the Cultural Center itself and were going to have to play in the hotel. There were insufficient defences against mortar attack.

  Hargeisa had built itself a proud national theatre in the 1970s, a cement lump like our own National. It was the pride of the city. When the occupying Somali power left in 1992, just before they departed they placed mines under that theatre and blew it to rubble, just to ensure that all that happy nonsense of laughter and thought and insight could never be enjoyed again. There is still something stubbornly subversive about the nature of theatre. Even now the power of words on stage reaching ears open to democratic thought sends a shiver down the spines of the powerful.

  We tried and tried and tried to get into North Korea, in spite of all the lambasting and mockery from the press and pundits. We were in briefly, and then our trip was cancelled because of a brouhaha at the UN. We picked up the pieces and tried again, and eventually manoeuvred their UK representative onto the sofa in my office. A delightful man, if guarded, he told us about North Korea’s cultural contact. This seemed to comprise the New York Philharmonic, Dennis Rodman, a tribute band called the Beijing Beatles, an enthusiasm for the film Bend it Like Beckham, and visits from the Middlesbrough Ladies football team. Middlesbrough featured very large in their cultural mythology – North Korea’s defeat of Italy there in the 1966 World Cup was probably their greatest moment as a nation. The meeting went well, and we were hopeful. The word came back that we could come, but only if the performance consisted solely of ‘music, dance and acrobatics’. No words could be spoken. No play had been enacted there since the beginning of the nation, and they weren’t going to start now. We declined. Extraordinary how words, even in a foreign language, pose a challenge that little else does.

  Jama told me how various religious and cultural authorities, both within and without, had turned theatre itself into a sin. He remembered Hargeisa, his hometown, as progressive and relaxed and free when he was young, a place where all opinions could flourish. Now an unholy mix of those with the most money, their pet demagogues, and those with the least, were clawing back all such freedoms. They wanted societies based on simple and manipulatable hatreds. ‘Shame on them,’ Jama said, his outrage spilling out, ‘and shame on the West for starving us of support and culture. Shame on the whole lot of them.’

  In the midst of this fear, Ayen and Jama had formed their Cultural Center. All around there was chaos and mayhem, some venality, much needless suffering at the shitty end of the international stick, and in the middle of it all, a few educational books picked up here and there, some strikingly naïve art giving witness to pain, and a place for people to sing and dance and tell stories together. ‘Those with the money [I think this vague expression was supposed to imply people outside Somaliland] dictate a culture of fear and hatred to us. Why should we not create a counter-culture? Tomorrow, after your Hamlet, Somaliland will be different.’ The weight of responsibility was impossible, the reality – that our Hamlet would change nothing – was undeniable, but the sentiment was overwhelming.

  We rumbled off over crumbling roads in convoy to lunch in a small tourist village. This featured a few reconstructed huts to show the lifestyle of the Somali nomad, and a couple of larger barns, built from the same combo of wood strips and matting. We were served a simple yet ornate feast of camel and goat and fish and corn, all appearing a
rtlessly in wooden bowls. Jama told me at length about the poetic traditions of this region, a whole cornucopia of different verse forms each calibrated in tone and rhythm for their particular task – forms and songs for addressing goats and camels. Sitting in a big nomadic tent and finding out about camel song was one of those moments where you have to check if you’re not dreaming.

  It was then he told me of their national poet, Hadrawi. A figure as influential in this region as García Márquez in Latin America or Shakespeare in England, and towering above any politician. He was still alive and had wanted to come to Hamlet but had not been able. An irascible old man, he had refused to become state poet throughout his life, preferring to be chief state critic. For his troubles, he had been imprisoned under three different regimes, each occasion making him more popular with the general public. He now had something of the status of a living god. His poetry sounded, from Jama’s description, like a sort of dynamic performance poetry, a blend of ancient form, modern politics and the inspiration of the moment. Somewhere between Homer and rap. To audiences of thousands, he launched himself into a microphone, seized the attention of the room and devastated everyone. The work was part improvised, part full of his own stock of phrasing, all full of his own wisdom.

  I asked Jama to give me some of his favourite lines – he quoted me something packed with husky aspirant h’s, and long swaying vowel sounds from which dust seemed to rise. The form is full of alliteration, a memory tool as well as a musical flourish, where the opening letter scatters itself through the sentence that follows, both at the beginning and within the words. He then translated the line for me as:

  I am bitter and sweet, both at the same time found in the same place. . .

  In the cold light of day, that may look a trifle banal, but in a big nomad tent, with a mouth full of lemony camel, it more than passed muster. In that moment, it was sort of everything.

  * * *

  Hamlet’s conundrum, as set out in ‘what a piece of work. . .’, seemed out of place here in Hargeisa, and yet, through a paradox, acutely appropriate. The lament of a fully privileged Renaissance prince could seem fey in such a toughened environment. Hamlet lived in a castle, Elsinore, where musicians sat all day long in solitary rooms playing their instruments so their lonely music could travel along interior pipes to rooms which could let in the music or stop it with the opening or closing of a soundproofing vent. This was the most labour-intensive stereo system in history. Elsinore, when it was built towards the end of the sixteenth century, was one of the wealthiest and most impressive edifices in Europe. The Danish king, training his cannon on the straits which gave the world access to Russia, Sweden, Finland, Poland, the Baltics and northern Germany, and vice-versa, had one of the easiest and most profitable tax harvests of all time. He turned it into the magnificent heap of gloominess that is Elsinore. Hamlet had been educated to the highest standard at one of the most forward-thinking establishments of his day. All of the accomplishments and achievements of the Renaissance congregate together in this young man.

  A small portion of his exultation at the glories of the universe comes as a result of royal privilege. A larger portion as a result of his education. The vastness of his knowledge, the opening up of classic texts, the liberation they offered from an identity-constricting Christian order of being, the thrill of being able to think, to express thought and to find new forms within which to express that thought – all has whisked him to the top of a tower of possibilities:

  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. . .

  He is not only saying these things; he is claiming for himself the right to say them. And within that act of naming, the right to be them. These are assertions as well as statements. To say this is an act of self-enfranchisement. Claiming parity with angels and gods may seem like hubris, but in an age when travel and science were opening up whole new worlds both micro and macro to the all-seeing eye of man, there must have been something celebratory about them. To see the great beauty of the spreading universe, and to find the perfect words to express its expanse, is both an act of description and of appropriation. I invoke therefore I own. The view from the top of the tower is exhilarating, and might delude anyone into an impression of divine self-investment. But it is also vertiginous.

  Clear sight exposes potential but also reality. Hamlet can see the great dance of being human, and at the same time the paltriness of human behaviour. Science enables but it also reveals. A telescope or a microscope can open up thrilling new details or vistas, but can also strip away mystery. It is exhilarating to see so much sky above, but terrifying to live over an abyss. Hamlet is one of the many journeymen, if not the prime one, on our lonely path away from our first selves and towards we know not what. Glorious but stupid us, and reaching further, frontiering and pioneering away, reaching and reaching too far, and forever losing our own base. Not good enough to be gods, and not good enough to be animals.

  In the tent in Hargeisa, Jama quickly offered up another few lines from his national poet Hadrawi, in another swirl of rasping vowels, and again offered his own swift translation:

  The real victory comes when you put all things together

  Both the split and alienated self

  And the dissenting body politic

  Holding them all in one place is the victory, not one side

  beating the other. . .

  The explicit intent here is political, but the binding together of the broken self, together with the collapsed polity, seems to offer Hamletian solutions, however impermanent. In Hargeisa, we saw the inverse of Hamlet’s speech. Here there was no Renaissance luxury, little dizzying sense of new potentials; here there was toughness and brutality, here far too much of the insolence of office, enforced with bullets and knives. But alongside that harshness, you saw acts of commitment, all the more remarkable for their context. A bright splash of shopfront art, a desire to enable others to understand more through a library, a need to bear witness to horrors through painting – these may not be Hamlet’s Renaissance ideas of dizzying potentiality, but they were as great an expression of what it is to be human, and to reach for more. Given the courage it took to make them, it is hard to sum up the totality of their grace.

  ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ summons up brilliance when we say it in the comfort of the West, where we think of Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart as being at the summit of human endeavour. But when you see life at the rawer end of experience, it is modest acts of courage and human ambition that summon the spirit of Hamlet’s hope.

  Then, just in case we over-sentimentalise Jama, he gave us his last bit of poetry, a man’s song to his camel. Giggling throughout his recital, he translated it and apologised for its chauvinism:

  When you die, the people will go hungry,

  When a man dies, society will collapse. . .

  When a woman dies a man prepares to go out and find

  another wife. . .

  Jama hooted with delight at the disapproving faces of the women on our team.

  * * *

  The performance that evening was tough. We were playing in a low-ceilinged ballroom at the hotel, with the least-sexy flat-white (with a shade of green) lighting in the history of luminescence. Pre-show there was the usual front-of-house chaos, though happily the room was packed, and with people who we would want to be there – students, actors, local people – whose excitement was palpable. There were riots going on in town, different gangs were rumbling, and everyone arrived late. The Minister of Planning got stoned on his way to the play, his car was a write-off, and he was lucky to escape with his life. The Ambassador’s detail were all jiggling around looking indiscreet.

  The show flickered and faded, within a very mobile audience, who were either on the move or using their mobiles as a complement to the show. But from many there was a fascinated attention as if they were looking at somethi
ng rare and odd. Laughter erupted with easy abandon, and at the end when the swords were out, and when people started dying at an express rate, the audience got up and crowded down to the front, all pulling out their cameras to record it, chattering away with excitement. It was like a group of people witnessing a street brawl. Then a standing ovation, which was customary, and after that, one of the most moving events in the course of the whole tour. When the clapping stopped, the audience all sat back down, folded their arms and stared at the space where the show had been. They looked at the vacuum, so recently filled with swirl and event, with an expecting silence. They didn’t want to leave; they wanted the storytelling to go on. They wanted the empty space to be filled with more serious nonsense. The silence was embarrassing but beautiful.

  Something had to spoil it, and in the context it had to be me, so I was dragged down to the front and made a brief speech in praise of Jama and Ayen. There was more applause, and then the stage management appeared to do their lightning-fast striptease of the set, and everyone drifted away into the Somali night.

  A young woman had attached herself to us like a limpet throughout the trip. The next day she sat and talked with us, and accompanied us to the airport. She wanted to be a playwright, an international playwright she said, the next William Shakespeare. She told us that she liked the trust in our group, that we had made her proud, and that more groups like us should visit. She said that we were good food. We promised to put her in touch with theatres in London who are interested in international writing, which we did. We left her with sadness, and with the guilt of knowing how easy it was for us to move on.

  A young baggage handler at the airport shouted out to us all how much he loved the show. He leant in to Naeem, who was Hamlet, and whispered, ‘But you were the best!’ A guy who served us coffee told us that his best friend had seen the show and thought it was ‘Top!’ The young woman who was the last stop in immigration had also seen the show, and announced that her father was a famous poet, and wanted to talk about Shakespeare’s poetry. The length of the conversation almost made two of us miss the plane. Clouds covered the landscape on the journey back to Addis, unlike on the flight out.