Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  Also by Dominic Dromgoole

  The Full Room

  Will and Me

  DOMINIC DROMGOOLE

  Hamlet: Globe

  to Globe

  TAKING SHAKESPEARE TO EVERY

  COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Dominic Dromgoole, 2017

  Extract taken from Station Island © Estate of Seamus Heaney and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78211 690 5

  eISBN 978 1 78211 691 2

  Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For the family who went all the way round,

  For the family who stayed at home,

  And for Sasha, Siofra, Grainne and Cara

  Keep at a tangent.

  When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

  out on your own and fill the element

  with signatures on your own frequency,

  echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

  elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.

  Seamus Heaney

  Station Island

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1 Who’s There?

  2 Honouring the Upbeat

  3 Setting out Through the Baltics

  4 Words and Walls in Mitteleuropa

  5 Madness in Mexico City

  6 Polonius by the Red Sea

  7 God on a Pacific Island

  8 Murder and the Rice Fields

  9 Soliloquies in the Andes

  10 News from England

  11 Wittenberg in the Desert

  12 The World in Revolt

  13 Fighting for Eggshells and Revenge

  14 Mission Control

  15 Friendship on the Road

  16 Caesar in Zaatari

  17 Embattled Theatre Near the Great Rift Valley

  18 The Rest is Silence

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Naeem and Tom facing off as Hamlet and Laertes in Odeon Amphitheatre, Amman, Jordan. © Sarah Lee

  Amanda hides as Ophelia in a merry moment during the first ever performance of Hamlet in Myanmar. © David Hempenstall

  Walking into the sandstorm that stopped our show in the Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan. © Sarah Lee

  President Poroshenko and boxer Wladimir Klitschko looking a little nonplussed on the eve of the elections in Ukraine. © The British Council of Ukraine

  Two hundred ambassadors at the UN and, for reasons we never fully ascertained, Kim Cattrall and Laurie Anderson. © Russ Roland

  Rockstar screens in front of the Pacific in Antofagasta, Chile. © Magaly Visedo

  Our host Jama addresses a press conference in Somaliland. © Dave McEvoy

  Backstage with Phoebe and Keith in a Monsoon in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. © Piotr Zaporowski

  A square of all ages in Prague. © Karishma Balani

  A section of the four thousand who witnessed the show in Khartoum, Sudan. © British Council in Sudan

  Corpses strewn across the stage in Estonia. © Siim Vahur

  Beruce and Naeem do a fight call, the Red Sea rolling in the background. © Dave McEvoy

  Happy holiday snap on the Copán Ruins of Honduras. © Malú Ansaldo

  Publicity in Costa Rica, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast and Japan. © Malú Ansaldo, Beruce Khan

  Amanda points to Norway in a Yemeni refugee camp. © Jess Watts

  Saying goodbye to the Globe. © Sarah Lee

  INTRODUCTION

  WE PLANNED WITH GUSTO AT the Globe. Some believe that away days should be focused affairs in blank overlit rooms, with PowerPoint presentations, brows so furrowed as to be carved in stone, and bullet points ricocheting off the walls. Others prefer firing middle management through forests on zipwires, or forcing upper management to humiliate themselves on assault courses. At the Globe, we took a different approach – good eating and gargantuan drinking.

  2012 had been something of a landmark year. Inspired by the London Olympics, we put together a festival called Globe to Globe. It was a happy, simple and bold idea – to present within a six-week festival every one of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, each in a different language, each by a different company from overseas. We imagined that we would attract student companies and amateur groups, but as the idea spread, it captured the imagination in the way only stupid ideas can, and grew rapidly in scale. Everyone wanted to join in – apart from the French – and we were inundated with enthusiasm from all corners of the globe. We ended up with fifteen national theatre companies, shows from the most distinguished theatres in the world and some of its most distinctive artists. One country, South Sudan, formed a new national company to put on Cymbeline. The festival was all we could have hoped for, a generous eruption of humanity and art and dialogue.

  Big ideas like that, once achieved, leave a vacuum. Having ridden in such a balloon of happiness and open perspective, it was hard to land on the ground again. So for a few months after the festival, we wandered around busy but with a listless sense of inactivity in the back of our minds.

  We were on a two-day away day. The ostensible task was huge – to plan for a new theatre we were building, an indoor candlelit jewel to complement our outdoor citizens playhouse. It was due to open in twelve months’ time. Building it, programming it, managing it, staffing it – everything was up in the air and had to be settled over two days. Day one was Heston Blumenthal’s pub in Bray, followed by pints of gin in a shabby railway pub tucked in behind Paddington. Day two began pale and chastened, but settled into a very pleasant lunch in Scott’s of Mayfair, a fastidiously minty place that raised its eyebrows above its smoothed hairline at the caravan of bicyclists and mothers with babies and scruffy technicians who tumbled in. We planned well in there and then repaired to a nearby hotel for cocktails.

  If all this sounds a trifle louche, it was. So before any Colonel Bufton Tuftons or Comrade Mumble Grumbles reach for the ‘how-dare-they-do-that-with-all-that-public-subsidy’ attitude, it’s probably worth mentioning that the Globe got no money from the government, nor from any major sponsors. We worked hard, and we earned all our own money. Although skating on thin financial ice led to a daunting level of high-wire tension, it also meant that, after much of the profit had been given to education, research and the building, we were free to spend the money that remained. Somewhere in that merry drinkathon, within a bleary mayhem of flirt and wind-up and raucous laughter, someone said, ‘We need another big idea, something like the festival.’ With barely a pause for thought, I said, ‘Let’s take Hamlet to every country in the world.’

  Such ideas have a peculiar naturalness. They arrive as if they were already in the room. Because they need no explanation, people grab them quickly and enjoy elaborating on them. They’re fertile ground for the contributions of others. Soon everyone was riffing on the idea and starting to work out the mechanics and logistics. Then, almost as soon, everyone was off the subject and back to flirting and winding-up and laughter. But the idea had a simple force which meant that it would stick.

  It travelled.

  * * *

  Hamlet is a unique play in the canon of world drama. Loose, baggy, sometimes unwieldy, c
onstructed from a known story and a previous play, its many details improvised from the pained and beautiful stuff within Shakespeare’s soul, it ranges across a northern European landscape dominated by a gloomy castle and splashed by a cold sea crashing on rocks. It is a landscape struck by more flashes of lightning than any work of art could ever hope to be. Those flashes of lightning come from many directions – linguistic brilliance, psychological insight, political acuity, mythic resonance and simple family truth. Together they combine to create a statement about what it is to be human that has never been surpassed, both in the age it was written for and since.

  It is hard to enumerate the number of directions from which it glances at you as you shift through life. The swirling mists of the Olivier film version were my first sustained contact. One of those television events from long ago when the nation sat together to share public culture. Quotes had been filling my ears from an early age. My parents were both Shakespeareans, my father in a public verse-quoting manner, my mother with greater privacy. There were profuse early readings, where bafflement would be disguised as mystic appreciation. As with many cultural artefacts we are dragged to at an early age, we feign excitement to satisfy the dragger, yet silently resent the difficulty. But buried in the experience, however resented it may be, some small kick of life, some small ignition in a part of ourselves we don’t fully know, tells us we must return to witness it again. A silent promise is made for the future.

  At a certain age, the play started to sing. Studying it with a mind less petrified by respect revealed its energies, its defiance and its exuberance. Performances could be relished rather than escaped. Hamlet the character began to take shape, not as a repository of cultural significance and oddly expressed wisdom, but as a sweet-natured and brilliant young man negotiating his way through a domestic and political nightmare. The language started to live with its own punk energy rather than the sonorous authority the Academy stifles it with. Much of the verse became necessary as solace. Hamlet has thrived in the public world, but its continuing life in the human heart is what has guaranteed its longevity.

  I didn’t understand the speech ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ when I first committed it to memory, and I’m not completely sure I understand it fully now. But it has lived in the larder of my memory for almost forty years, and can still be pulled from its musty recess to provide its familiar quantum of comfort. It offers no answers, nor any facile questions. It simply lets us know the same comforting message we offer our children when they cut themselves on the sharpness of the world. We tell them we suffered something similar at the same age. The fact we endured the same, a small act of sharing, washes away a little of the pain. In our worst despair, the fact that Hamlet has shared the like hurt or worse, and that his creator Shakespeare has expressed it with such a perfect dance of thought and word, tells us we are not alone in our sorrows.

  Hamlet’s journey through the play is specific, but within its broad pattern, and in his detailed responses to its various events, we appreciate a convulsion of the spirit we all know. It is Sartre’s nausea and the juddering tears of the junkie begging on the street corner; it is the sobbing of the infant at the most basic injustice, and the articulate despair of the graduate shunted into a world which has neither plan for nor interest in them. It is the confusion we know at all ages – the manifest injustice of the world – that something capable of creating patterns of such beauty is so often inclined to moral ugliness. It is the state of perception we carry within us as a template for understanding our world, yet while grateful for its insights, we live in fear of its capacity, since if indulged it can overtake all other modes of understanding and plunge us into an enclosed state policed by the act of perception itself.

  Overwhelmed by these thoughts in that scattered age between eighteen and twenty-five, it was then that Hamlet gripped me. Hungry for a path through that maze, Hamlet’s story offered a movement towards the light. Towards the play’s conclusion, as the young Prince walks towards a trap set by his stepfather, a trap he knows he will not survive, his friend Horatio advises him that he can walk away from his own fate. He replies:

  Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

  Within a play of complicated expression, this section is an oasis of simplicity. Beginning with the first, heavily accented ‘if’, there are forty-two monosyllabic words in a row, with only one exception – ‘readiness’. This extended baldness of expression is exceptional in Shakespeare. For me at that age, the simplicity of this language, allied with the calm at its spirit’s centre, its message of transcendent acceptance of all the world had to offer, the good and the bad, served as a mantra.

  * * *

  Translated into too many languages to count, and performed more times than Shakespeare ate hot dinners, and cold ones, or drew breath for that matter, Hamlet is one of those rare documents that can be said to have brought the world closer together. Audiences all over the planet have shared in its capacity to enlarge the spectator’s openness and desire to question. It has not only shrunk space; it has also contracted time. Each person who watches or hears it is telescoped back to the moment in 1601 when an audience in the Globe first heard the opening words ‘Who’s there?’ Just as those first spectators share in every subsequent time those words have begun an evening of queasily soulful entertainment. We all share in the suspended window of time within which a play floats, experiencing our own night of only-happening-now uniqueness and sharing the pleasure with the millions of others who have heard the same words in other times and places.

  In 1608, on board a ship called the Dragon, Hamlet was performed by its crew off the coast of Sierra Leone for a group of visiting dignitaries. The crew remembered enough of the play from what they had seen at the Globe to shamble together a show. Within ten years of its first performance, groups of English actors, known collectively as the English Comedians, were performing it across northern Europe in abbreviated, action-packed adaptations. Since then it has played everywhere, in theatres, fields, caves, hovels and palaces.

  It has tested thousands of actors and actresses, leaving some exhilarated with triumph and some desolate with failure, and all hungering for more. It has been recorded, televised and filmed over and over and over again. The performances of actors from Sarah Bernhardt to David Tennant, from Mel Gibson to Maxine Peake have been captured for posterity, and the sheer inclusiveness of that brief list says much about the play’s openness to interpretation. It is recited in schoolrooms, quoted in boardrooms, mumbled by lovers, pondered on by sages, argued over by critics, passed on from parent to child, cursed by students, and wept over by spectators. In silence, it is stored in the heart as a fortifying secret by millions of us afraid of the bruising world. It is part of the fabric that surrounds us and sits within us. It has become, in large part, us.

  * * *

  In honour of the transcendent ubiquity of this play, on 23 April 2014, 450 years after the birth of Shakespeare, the Globe theatre, in response to a daft idea floated in a bar, set out on an artistic adventure almost as unique as the play we were honouring. To tour Hamlet to every country on earth. All 204. Or 197. Or however many were deemed to be countries at that particular moment. Unprecedented chutzpah and a healthy quantum of stupidity helped launch the mission. Beyond that, more practical factors made it possible. Over nine years, the Globe had formulated a style of touring as portable as the style in which actors travelled from the first Globe 400 years earlier. We had built up a network of international relationships with the Globe to Globe festival, which meant there wasn’t a corner of the world where we could not phone and find a friend. But more importantly, technology had come to a point with air travel and information hyperlinking where it was now possible to move a theatre tour across the globe at a plausi
ble speed and prepare satisfactorily for every arrival.

  The marriage of globalisation and modernity sometimes seems to transfer little more than paranoia and violence. But we looked at the possibilities thrown up by that modernity, and instead of saying ‘Why?’, we thought ‘Why not?’ Why not use the potential of the world to transport not terror or commodities, but sixteen human souls, armed with hope, technique and strong shoes, their set packed into their luggage, the play wired into their memories, and present to every corner of the world, with a playful truth, the strangest and most beautiful play ever written. Why not?

  Exactly two years later, on 23 April 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the same sixteen people returned to the Globe, having visited 190 countries and, via a series of performances in refugee camps, the peoples of 197 nations. They had played in amphitheatres, in bars, on roundabouts, in studios, on the shores of oceans, in front of thousands crammed into stadia, and in front of a handful of Romanian children in the rain.

  At this moment, it would be appealing to adopt a deep voice, or its prose equivalent, and write: ‘This book is the story of that journey.’ But it would be misleading. The story of that journey can never be told: it is too big, too profuse. Each gig offered up so much material, so many intersections with politics, culture and history, that each visit could prompt a book. There were 200 of them. It might also be something of an impertinence, as I only visited twenty of the venues, and those who really carry the stories are the company – the twelve actors and the four stage managers. They made the whole journey. They all have remarkable stories to tell. Each of the twenty countries I visited felt like an injection of rich information for the imagination to work over. A theatre company has a special capacity to learn about an area, freely moving from shambolic shebeen to ambassador’s drawing room. Each visit was short but never short on insights. There is much that a tortoise can witness that a swift will miss, but the opposite also has a certain weight of truth.