Hamlet, Globe to Globe Read online

  All these old allies had hard questions about the working of the tour, about the pay and the conditions and the security and the time off, which we answered. But given the length of the commitment, and the hole it would punch in their lives, the amount they took on trust was affirming. They knew it was an adventure, they trusted us, we tipped our hat to them, and they came on board. There was something magical in their leap into the dark, something close to the heart of being in the theatre. Running away to join the circus is a cliché, but it has an application beyond Pinocchio – freedom, movement and independence are its essence.

  We had three more members of the squad to find – a further young actress, Jennifer Leong, who came recommended by a brilliant Cantonese company we had worked with from Hong Kong. And our two Hamlets. We explored a number of options in our heads for who to go after, but finally resolved that discovery would be the best route, to find young and new actors. Unknown quantities who would bring the excitement at being there and the openness that was at the heart of the show. We met a few, and were beginning to worry, when Ladi Emeruwa, an actor recently out of drama school, sent in a tape of himself doing a speech of Brutus. It was clear, and it was eloquent, and he was alive within the thought. He was soon on board. Naeem Hayat had played at the Globe in our Sam Wanamaker Festival, with a short chunk of Richard III. There was something indefinably compelling about him – he seemed to be able to sit in the middle of the maelstrom of the role and to be at the same time on a mountain looking down on it. We met him, he read beautifully, and he was in. The fact that both our Hamlets were not white, the fact that half the company were non-white, occasioned some comment but for us was as natural as walking into a brighter room.

  All groups that set out on any journey in the cause of Shakespeare live in the shadow of one set of names. In the First Folio, in a loving act of remembering and claiming, one of the early pages is headed The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes. An act of remembering, because many of these actors had died by the time the Folio went to press, including the author, Shakespeare, and the company’s brightest star, Burbage. An act of claiming, because the Folio was put together by two of that company, Heminges and Condell. Their loyalty for their old muckers breathes through the list. Those names – solid, yeoman English names, sturdy as the oak of the Globe – are: William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, William Kempe, Thomas Pope (unfortunately spelt Poope for posterity), George Bryan, Henry Condell, William Sly, Richard Cowly, John Lowin, Samuel Cross, Alexander Cook, William Ostler, Samuel Gilbourne, Robert Armin, Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Robert Gough, Richard Robinson, John Shanke, John Rice. A different England talks through that list – fields and woods and cooks and tailors and early churches and market crosses – and through those tough Anglo-Saxon consonants. These are not names from the upper classes either; these are from trade and from soil. The names that have adorned playbills and programmes ever since are many and various, but we were happy that our list of names reflected a modern and a changed England. In no particular order, they were Amanda Wilkin, Becky Austin, Beruce Khan, Keith Bartlett, Rawiri Paratene, John Dougall, Adam Moore, Ladi Emeruwa, Carrie Burnham, Jennifer Leong, Tommy Lawrence, Phoebe Fildes, Naeem Hayat, Dave McEvoy, Miranda Foster and Matt Romain. A different world, and worthy names to send out into it.

  * * *

  The meet-and-greet before the first day of rehearsals was aglow with excitement, the company and the Globe staff giddy with the future. With many of these large ideas, no one ever quite believes it is going to take place until you gather together in a large room and it becomes intimidatingly actual. The feeling of jumping off the cliff into the unknown promotes a sort of hysteria, like a children’s birthday party after the lemonade has been guzzled. I do my bit with the world map and say some words. After most of the staff have gone, I invoke the old Russian habit of a moment of silence before a long journey. We sit in a circle, quiet in our thoughts and starting to register the size of what is ahead of us. Nothing particularly magical happens, but it is a sound way of expelling some of the hysteria and settling people back into themselves before rehearsals begin.

  Five weeks later, and only five weeks to rehearse a host of different versions of the casting, plus a lot of music, plus a dumb-show and a jig, five weeks and we were ready to do our first performances at the Middle Temple. This ancient building, in the heart of legal London, was the room where the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place in 1602. We thought it a propitious place to preview the show before starting in the Globe. It proved tougher than we would have hoped. The room has a gravy brown-ness which makes it feel like acting in soup, the acoustic is rough, and we had to play in a very odd traverse shape, which made it hard to know where to pitch the play. The response from the audience was a bit ho-hum. This disheartened some of the company, who I think had assumed the quality of the show would automatically mirror the ambition of the endeavour. The one doesn’t necessarily follow the other. However, I was heartened. The show was there, the story was told, and it had a gracious modesty in the world. Too great an immediate success would have induced a grandiosity, which would have been a nightmare to tour. ‘See, see how great we are’ is not an attitude to take on the road – it’s not an attitude for anything really. We wouldn’t want to, in that acerbic Dublin phrase, ‘Give ourselves a big welcome’. The tread of the show along the road needed to be gentle and hopeful.

  The next week we opened at the Globe, and the first performance on 23 April went through the roof. The first show of a Globe season always has a giddiness, and with the prospect of the journey beyond, it went into overdrive. Hysterical laughter, rounds of applause and a huge shout-out at the end. In truth, the show was still rocky, and the actors didn’t quite know how to handle the enthusiasm sweeping the room. They played three more at the Globe and were able to wrestle it into shape. They were also able to store within themselves the nuclear-strength goodwill that the Globe is able to generate, a radioactive glow that would keep them warm for months ahead. The show was not perfect, but it worked. It told the story, it carried the language and delivered it, and it presented the life within the story. This is not always what people mean by theatre these days. There is a difference between a car that works, and an exploding car with balloons on it. A car that works ferries people from A to Z, conveying them from where they begin to a different place, and along the way it shows them scenery, whether beautiful, sad or strange. A lot of theatre these days seems to be watching a car festooned with balloons explode, then bursting into applause and waiting for a blogger to deconstruct the event. Having been taken nowhere. Our show didn’t dazzle or explode, but it worked.

  And it felt ready to wander.

  * * *

  The other question thrown up by those two words, ‘Who’s there?’, is of course one of identity. That felt more pertinent than ever as we headed out into the world of 2014. We were walking into a world of awkward and uneasy identity. In the West there was a blaze of issues and confusions around identity politics. These sometimes seem like the invention of a crisis by those who have too much time to invent crises, and sometimes seem like the freshest political thinking in the world. Beyond the West, it seemed that everywhere was re-inventing itself, that the spread of lifestyle and choice and ideologies promulgated by the internet was eroding old distinctions. Beyond the ambassadors appearing at our breakfast and exaggerating their own differences, it felt like the broader population were starting to melt theirs, to share and to collaborate in creating new personal choices. There are minorities who cling all the more fiercely to their distinctive identities, white supremacists and Islamic jihadists most noticeably, but they often seem to cling to anachronisms so fiercely because they can see the tide flowing so ineluctably in the opposite direction.

  Stephen Greenblatt in his brilliant Renaissance Self-Fashioning discusses the cultural moment both before a
nd during Shakespeare’s life when the idea of a ‘self’ began to be considered, and the modes within which it was influenced. While recognising that the Renaissance period experienced a change in social and psychological structures, he throws a spotlight on how structures of power worked to impose forms of control on people as they were attempting to forge their own identities. In his pursuit of how identities are formed, he asks to what degree we are autonomous in the fashioning of our selves, and to what degree we are in thrall to the social contexts which surround us. The writing of his book was informed by the pessimism of America as it recovered from the Vietnam War, from Watergate and from the overwhelming sense that government and the corporate powerful were attempting to control the nature of individuals’ selves. His conclusion was that no matter how much control we think we have, our identities are formed through culture, its hierarchies, its systems and ideologies. Autonomy is denied: ‘in all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity’.

  How much more is this the case now? The internet, and particularly social media, often appears to be one big forum for bullying people into shapes. Personality itself sometimes seems to be little more than a fashion, an aggregation which changes daily of what it is to be cool and in the moment, an aggregation which changes with such swiftness that to swim within its swirling currents is a deadly business. The only law within this shifting norm is that you have to stay within it, however its styling may change from one moment to the next. And that anyone will be punished, and publicly, for stepping outside its crushing conformities. The speed with which the crowd punishes those who do not share those norms is terrifying, even though the very nature of self surely demands their rejection.

  How positive it felt, then, to send Hamlet out into this environment, a young man, under pressure, frantically trying to forge a new identity in opposition to the context that surrounds him. To send him out into a world of queasily shifting identities, the hero of all heroes who worried most consistently over the ongoing creation of himself. Not to provide any answers but to keep asking the question, ‘Who’s there?’

  2 Netherlands, Amsterdam

  Stadsschouwburg

  29–30 April 2014

  3 Germany, Bremen

  Bremer Shakespeare Company

  Germany, Wittenberg

  Phönix Theaterwelt

  2 May

  3 May

  4 Norway, Tromsø

  KulturHuset

  6 May

  5 Sweden, Ystad

  Ystads Teater

  8 May

  6 Finland, Turku

  Åbo Svenska Teater

  10 May

  7 Russia, Moscow

  Mayakovsky Theatre

  13–14 May

  8 Estonia, Tallinn

  Linnateater

  Estonia, Tartu

  Vanemuine

  16 May

  17 May

  9 Latvia, Rīga

  Dailes Teātris

  19 May

  10 Lithuania, Vilnius

  Palace of the Grand Dukes

  20 May

  2

  HONOURING THE UPBEAT

  HAMLET Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. . .

  Act 3, Scene 2

  ‘GOOD MORNING, MR PRESIDENT. WELCOME to the Globe!’ I say from the stage. From down in the yard, a confident, low and strong ‘Good morning!’ comes back at me. Having played to no shortage of prime ministers and presidents over two years of journeying, we have now landed the Big Kahuna. The least-disappointing man in the world, Barack Obama, stands in the yard of the Globe. He is on a quick visit to London, and to honour Shakespeare’s birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death he is paying us a visit. It is the end of our tour, and before we start a final weekend of performances we are giving a quick private turn. A security cordon has shut down the whole of Southwark, helicopters hover noisily above, and a liberal scattering of terrifying men with big guns sets no one at their ease. But in the theatre it is early spring and fresh, and the company are backing me with music as I say briefly who we are and what we do. Then Matt Romain tears into Hamlet’s advice to the Players, delivered straight to President Obama:

  Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. . . Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

  The Hamlets have been instructed when they soliloquise to quash their fears and talk straight at the President, to give an impression of the Globe’s direct communication. After the performance, he joins us on stage – as relaxed, warm and direct as one might imagine – and talks Shakespeare. I ask him if he has ever acted, and he comes straight back with ‘Have I ever acted? I act every single day. Every time I go down to Congress, I’m acting. When I sit down with certain world leaders, I have to do a lot of acting.’ It’s done with laconic timing, and with a surprising frankness before a group of actors he has never met. I decide to test his humour.

  ‘It’s great that Matt delivered “Speak the speech” straight at you, because it’s quite a lesson in oratory. . .’

  ‘Yes, indeed, there were a few tips I could take from that,’ he conceded.

  ‘Well, let’s face it, you certainly need them,’ I deadpanned.

  There was a spilt-second of glint in his eye, a flash of ‘who the hell is this guy?’, and then a big laugh. Whatever admiration we felt – off the scale already – flipped into overdrive. The President could take a tease.

  * * *

  These words, Hamlet’s celebrated advice to the Players, delivered before they perform his lamentable play, are, of course, lessons in acting rather than oratory. They are the prayer offered up by every playwright on the eve of each first night since. They can be brutally compressed into ‘Oh, please, stop acting and just say the fucking lines.’ Ever since first spoken on the Globe stage by Richard Burbage in 1601, they have been the ultimate rule book, which generation after generation of actors since, have done their level best to ignore. These words imprinted on their minds, they have walked off in the opposite direction and carried on mouthing, sawing, whirlwinding, o’erstepping and overdoing as if their lives depended on it. People treat these injunctions as if they were specific to the sins of Elizabethan actors. They are not; they are a perennial. Rehearsals for the last four centuries have often been simply a matter of returning and returning to their wisdom.

  At the heart of the speech is a cri de coeur for respect for the ‘modesty of nature’. The world is not full of people trembling or gnashing their teeth; it is full of people being. Nor of people muttering and mumbling either, sitting on the back foot and undercutting the energy of others. It is naturalness that is wanted – the same apportioned and appropriate energy we give to life is what we want to see on stage. Holding ‘the mirror up to nature’ is often quoted as if it means being studiedly contemporary, reporting on the world and trying to emulate what newspapers do; it is not. It is about being judicious and true in the playing of people and relationships; it is about being unforced and unaffected in the speaking of language. If that is played true to humans in the world, the form and pressure of the time will naturally make itself felt.

  How do you create a rehearsal room so these things can happen? First, you make the room sharp: not clever, not necessarily wise, but
certainly sharp. A room that is dull of wit will lead to a dull show. The wit, the insight, the spark of thought and imagination that is in the room will appear on the stage. This does not mean casting people who have university degrees. Nothing wrong with them, but they are not a necessity. It means casting people with emotional intelligence, with street-smart wit, and with an understanding of how language works in the space between people. Fill a room up with smart people and the play gets smart. Fill it with dullards – even if they’ve all got firsts from top universities – and you’re stuffed.