Hamlet, Globe to Globe Read online

  An exhaustive hoovering up of every detail would be beyond me, but I was fortunate enough to see much that amused and provoked. Always through the prism of Hamlet. Each country has thrown fresh light on the play, its large themes and its smaller nooks and crannies, just as this protean play has been able to throw new light on the world and its many faces. The tour changed my view of the play, the play changed my understanding of the tour, and both shifted my perspectives on the world and on myself. I have tried to set down some of this dialogue between the play and the world, to see how each illuminated the other.

  This book will tell several stories, amongst others the story of Hamlet itself, of how this infinite masterpiece was born, how it grew into the world and how, with its generosity of spirit, it still helps us to understand our changing world. It will attempt to understand how the play has travelled so far and penetrated so deeply. At each moment, my response to the play shifted, with each insight bringing fresh confusion, each confusion fresh insight, and I try to mark those moments. I do so in the full knowledge that this is only watching a train covering a few stations on a long journey. Hamlet will never stand waiting for us; it will always demand fresh understanding. The moment of ‘Aha! I’ve got it!’ will never arrive, nor should it.

  Everywhere the play visited, it encountered countries of vast difference, caught in contrasting historical and political moments. The performance cannot hold a mirror up to so many forms of nature, but Hamlet, with his restless desire to dream up a new sensibility, speaks to all people in any moment trying to create a better future out of the ashes of a world that breaks their heart. As such, our production spoke to many of the people who encountered it, and learnt from them. Together I hope these stories, and this conversation between Globe and globe, give a little insight into our world as it is now, and also of this extraordinary play which still shadows and mirrors and changes that world.

  1 United Kingdom, London

  Middle Temple Hall

  18–20 April 2014

  United Kingdom, London

  Shakespeare’s Globe

  23–26 April

  1

  WHO’S THERE?

  ACTUS PRIMUS SCOENA PRIMA

  Enter Barnardo and Franciscus two centinels

  Barnardo: Who’s there?

  THERE IS NO BETTER OPENING line – the simplicity, the affront of it – ‘Who’s there?’ It works purely on its own surface, a nervous soldier on a battlement, in the dark and cold, asking with a shiver who walks towards him. It starts the play at a thriller pace and sets the blood tingling. We opened our production with the cast milling around amongst the audience and belting out a rousing song. It was interrupted the first time for a speech of welcome, with music underscoring, and then a second time abruptly – dead-stopping wandering, singing and music with a barked ‘Who’s there?’ The play was underway, swords were out, tension bristled the air. The first two words are an instant challenge to the theatricality of the event. Unless the director is very eccentric (many are), the old soldier – Barnardo – will be looking out front. The question immediately includes and excludes everyone watching. It makes them participatory because addressed, and shuts them out because the soldier cannot see, cannot know them – ‘Who’s there?’ Two syllables and immediate unease.

  Top of the Frequently Asked Questions as we set out on this adventure was ‘Why Hamlet?’ We flirted with other titles, but in our bones knew we were circling around and always returning to Hamlet. We had done two small-scale tours of Hamlet, in 2011 and 2012, so were confident that it worked, though we did cast our eyes along the waterfront. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has an unsurpassable flight and grace, but an actor squeezing into a tattered fairy costume a year down the road might have been disheartened; Twelfth Night is not robust enough of tone to survive the exigencies of touring; and King Lear is just too dark. Romeo and Juliet was a clear candidate because of its iconic status, but the play is structurally broken-backed. Packed with beautiful poetry and a searing story, it loses its way after the death of Mercutio and never quite regains it until the end. Carrying that Fourth Act around the world would have been dispiriting. Also, and this was the weightiest problem, Romeo and Juliet reveals its own meanings after a brief search. Six months in, and the company would have uncovered its secrets. They would have known what they were playing, which is fatal. If the tour was to be a valuable journey for the company, and thus for audiences, the play had to remain elusive. This was guaranteed with Hamlet. Hamlet is beautiful, a necessity, it is ram-packed with iconic moments which translate across cultures, a necessity, but most important of all it is mysterious, the greatest necessity.

  The protean nature of the text was as important as its elusiveness. We were visiting a vast variety of cultures, of peoples caught at disparate political and historical moments. There is something about the kaleidoscope of possible responses to Hamlet which suited a journey of such rapid and extensive change. Hamlet can inspire and it can challenge; it can provoke and it can console; it can rebuke and it can comfort. We needed to travel with a story that could talk to people in all these ways. It also needed to talk with purpose. Not with a message, God help us, but with a voice that had energy and purpose in its pulse. Hamlet is often given an obscuring energy as prescribed by a Victorian idea of tragedy – ponderousness and pain suffocate it with a pillow of self-glorying glumness. We didn’t do glum at the Globe – the sheer glee of the room would not allow it. Hamlet has a gleaming energy, and through its bright and shining leading man it has its eyes on the horizon of the future.

  As well as talking with variety, and with purpose, it is most important that Hamlet talks openly. It is not a muttering play, a manipulative play, nor a dishonest play. In its heart, and through the soliloquies which stud its progress, it is open. The paradox of being freely open and freely mysterious is a Shakespearean paradox. The man in the corner at a party, all dark and silent and brooding, is nine times out of ten not a man of mystery; he’s a man with not much to say. It is perfectly possible to be garrulous and to conceal. This play manages to be naked and invisible at the same time. A paradox contained within those opening words, ‘Who’s there?’

  So having decided on the play, we had to work out how to do it. Then the question ‘who’s there?’ developed a new pertinence. Who was there to help?

  * * *

  To focus our brains, we kicked off the same way we had our 2012 festival, by throwing a big breakfast for all of London’s ambassadors. This served as a mark in the sand, a way of getting ourselves organised and a way of making connections. The plan was to introduce ourselves, explain our plan and plead for help. A hundred ambassadors in a room at nine o’clock in the morning is a bizarre sight. Because of the variety and the early hour, everyone exaggerates their own distinctiveness, playing up their national stereotypes. A South American ambassador threw about extravagant Latin charm; the French representative looked unimpressed; the Scandinavians were blonde and kind, looking after the shy wallflowers in the corner; the Russian representative looked suspicious; a representative from the Far East boggled us with their efficiency. The event started to look like an oversized xenophobic sitcom.

  Tom Bird, our executive producer, a warm and scruffy presence, made a great speech, then we led everyone from our restaurant into the theatre and onto our stage. This was a calculated thrill: standing on the Globe’s oak boards is a privilege and never failed to give a jolt of energy. I stood in front of a map of the world and talked everyone through the journey. With outstretched finger, I outlined our imagined route across a beautiful map set up on an old wooden easel. From Europe through North America, Central America and the Caribbean, South America, West Africa down to the South, then across to Australasia, all around the Pacific Islands, and then working slowly back from the Far East and finishing with East Africa before heading home. With a few detours to avoid war and epidemics, this was pretty much the route we ended up following. There was something antiquated, of course, about a man s
tanding beside a map of the world and pointing out how we would chart a course through distant lands. It was an irony we were aware of and played up.

  The morning was a success. It galvanised us into action, though less than a tenth of our eventual relationships would come from this route. Governments can be useful, and they can be a burden. We were at pains to point out, from the beginning and throughout, that we were not going anywhere to play to local dignitaries or to be an extension of a diplomatic garden-party circuit. That we wanted to meet people and to play to audiences of people. In this we were 95 per cent successful. The number of countries we travelled to where tickets were free and where the audience was generously inclusive was one of the joys of the enterprise. There were a handful of cases where we felt we were being exploited and manipulated by a government to serve a purpose, and we pushed back. But in the vast majority of cases, we encountered innocence and enthusiasm. So the breakfast worked, and set a number of global hares running for us to chase. Business cards were collected in prodigious numbers, and the phones started to buzz.

  * * *

  The next big challenge was to announce the project to the press. This was ever a delicate business, since the dangers were twofold. First, that they would ignore it completely; second, that they would seek out ways to ridicule the whole thing. Why this is their collective first instinct is beyond me, but there you go, we get the press we deserve. We knew that we needed an endorsement of some sort, from a source of unimpeachable integrity. We put out many virtue-seeking feelers and felt we were drawing a blank, then, just as we were about to send out a press release, an email came through:

  The six simplest words in the English language are TO BE OR NOT TO BE. There is hardly a corner of the planet where these words have not been translated. Even in English, those who can’t speak the language will at once recognise the sound and exclaim ‘Shakespeare!’ Hamlet is the most all-encompassing of Shakespeare’s plays. Everyone, young or old, can today find an immediate identification with its characters, their pains and their interrogations. To take Hamlet in its original language around the world is a bold and dynamic project. It can bring a rich journey of discovery to new audiences everywhere.

  This comes with every wish for all your projects.

  Ever,

  Peter

  This was a boon. Peter Brook, the great director and visionary of internationalism, was the right person. He is a sage soul who has long since reached a place of international respect. His words were dropped into the press release, and out it went.

  All on that front was going well, then two weeks before we went into rehearsals we were approached by the Sunday Express asking how we felt about going to North Korea. We explained that we were going to every country in the world, that everyone deserved Hamlet, and that North Korea was full of human beings. They started talking about how Kim Jong-un had killed his uncle and had him fed to the pigs. It was clear their agenda was set. The journalist was an intern working part-time there and (fair play to her) was the only person who had worked out there might be a story in this. We discovered that she had got a condemnation out of Amnesty International. I had been a fully paid-up and admiring member of Amnesty for many years and was miffed that they hadn’t contacted us about it. I rang their press officer, who had made the statement to the freedom-fighters of the Sunday Express. He was quick to make his feelings clear: ‘We believe North Korea is an oppressive regime, with no respect for human rights, and that it is wrong for you to stage Hamlet there.’

  ‘Well, we see the point on human rights, but we are taking this show to every country in the world, and North Korea is a country—’

  ‘You’re doing what?’

  ‘We’re going to every country in the world.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes, did you not know that?’

  ‘No, I thought you were just going to North Korea.’

  ‘Well, we’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid.’

  ‘No, really, every country in the world? Wow, great idea.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the only reason we’re going to North Korea. Does that change your opinion now you know why we’re going?’

  A long pause. Then . . .

  ‘We believe North Korea is an oppressive regime, with no respect for human rights, and that it is wrong for you to stage Hamlet there.’

  The story ran. It made a minor splash in itself, but it set a ball rolling that followed us around the world, and the North Korea question popped up with deadening frequency. We were able to hone our response early – that we were travelling to play to people; that we were not there to defend any regimes, we were there to defend Hamlet; and that we believed that every country was better off for the presence of Hamlet. This response became practised, maybe over-practised. It would have been great to say more. That aside from North Korea being a murderous and mad dictatorship, which is a given and a disgrace, it often seems that if it wasn’t there, people would invent it, since it fulfils a function that the rest of the world needs. Every playground looks to find one kid to ostracise, every village needs to choose one family that it treats as beyond the pale.

  * * *

  Our first Hamlet tour, before we decided to go global, had begun in Margate in 2011. We had such fun doing it, and audiences lapped it up so greedily, we toured it again the next year, with a large section in the USA. No one ever felt it was definitively this or that, but it felt fit for purpose. The second tour I wasn’t free to direct, so asked Bill Buckhurst, an actor transitioning to directing, and doing so well, to take the model I had created – same set, same text and same music – and to make it better. He went with the brightness and energy of our approach, and filled it with a greater urgency and need to tell itself. For the round-the-world tour, I asked Bill to work on it with me, so that we might have the best of both productions. Happily, he agreed.

  Together with its designer, Jonathan Fensom, we had come up with a loose aesthetic that resembled a 1930s socially progressive touring company, like Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl’s Theatre of Action outfit. Donning a cloak here or a hat there, the company could quickly acquire the shapes and silhouettes of Elizabethan clothing. Over the two previous tours, working with two composers, Laura Forrest-Hay and Bill Barclay, we had put together a suite of music and songs which helped define the evening. Warm folky songs to relax the air and dispel the Shakespeare/Hamlet fear; and utilising the skills of the actor-musicians, a bit of everything else – some fanfare music, some atmospheric scrapings for the Ghost, some keening violin work to skim across transitions, a gentle pipe tune to introduce Ophelia, drums to punch the urgency along. Everything played live, and everything in sight. No concealment at the Globe: a show was a show.

  At the end, as in all Globe shows, an eruptive and joyous jig, choreographed by the jig-meister Siân Williams. Every show at the first Globe – even a tragedy – would end with a jig, where the whole company danced together. In the original Globe, they would interrupt the dance, and the comedian in the company would tell jokes. We didn’t go that far, but we did enshrine the spirit of jigging. It is a wonderful way of cleansing the theatre after the emotion spent in it, of letting the air in the room shrug off any residual pain with good grace. In the jig for Hamlet, the dead bodies left sprawled across the stage – Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes and Hamlet – were one by one finger-clicked back to life, with an invitation to a dance. They rose to join. Many interpreted this as a message about bringing the dead back to life, but in fact it was just a solution to the perennial problem of how to get dead bodies off a stage. The jig started slow and then accelerated to a thigh-slapping, hand-clapping frenzy that never failed to raise a joyous cheer. These were the bare bones, and they were bare indeed, of the production we had made. At the end of the first half, we did the dumbshow which the text demands. It started with two of the actors lowering two planks to meet each other. Written on them was ‘TWO PLANKS AND A PASSION’, an old actor’s phrase defining all you need to make theatre ha
ppen. That was the spirit of the show. Now we needed actors to flesh it out.

  * * *

  Casting was always going to be the biggest challenge. Peter Brook says that casting is 80 per cent of what he does, and he spends careful years doing it. He invites potential colleagues to hang out and befriends them, long before he thinks of offering them a role. We didn’t have that amount of time but respected the care in the process. When people asked, I said we were looking for ‘actor-astronauts’, people of balance and strength who could float out in space for a couple of years. Actors who could keep themselves steady, take good care of each other and keep their minds on the task in front of them.

  Everyone’s definition of good actors is different. I favour those who bring energy to the room, who bring wit to the language, who have heart but don’t show it off, and who are steadfastly and uniquely themselves. Many directors want actors who erase their individuality to conform to the director’s idea of a syncopated uniformity. I like individuals. Uniformity on stage breaks my heart; it is not a suitable response to plays or a world full of dappled things.

  Above all else, the actors must be kind. When we were casting at the Globe, we always enquired around about how an actor was to work with. The Globe was reliant on actors – not on directors or designers. Trust and goodwill, as well as quality, were paramount. Trust that your actor would show up on time, cover your back and give you what you needed on stage was at the heart of our work. The importance of trust, and goodwill, were maximised on this tour by the many other potential difficulties involved. We needed great actors, but beyond that we needed great people. Luckily, we got them.

  There is a magical section – a montage – in the film The Sting when Paul Newman wanders around putting his old team of conmen back together. He surprises them in their present place of work, be it a bank or a bookies, and, appearing discreetly at the back of a crowd in their eyeline, touches his nose lightly or tips his hat to them. They immediately drop what they are doing, whatever it might be, to come and work with him. It is a witty visual hymn to the never-diminishing bonds of the team. The early part of our casting became a little like that, as we gathered together a core of trusted old friends. To share between them the senior roles – Claudius, Polonius, Gravedigger, Ghost, Priest, First Player and sundry old soldiers – we recruited three old friends who if not grizzled were battle hardened – John Dougall, Keith Bartlett, and the king of the Maori acting community, Rawiri Paratene. To play the several lines of younger men – Laertes, Marcellus, Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric and Fortinbras – there were two actors who had played already in our previous Hamlet tours of 2011 and 2012, Tommy Lawrence and Matt Romain, and another who had spent several summers with us, Beruce Khan. An actress who had played a previous tour, Miranda Foster, a thoroughbred, was keen to play Gertrude, the Player Queen and Second Gravedigger. Two further friends, actresses of enormous promise, Amanda Wilkin and Phoebe Fildes, came on board to play the Gertrude line, and the Ophelia line, and to cross gender lines as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Horatio. Four stage managers – Dave McEvoy, Adam Moore, Carrie Burnham and Becky Austin – miracles of industry and phlegm, were prepared and happy to put life on hold for a couple of years.