Even with Shakespeare’s fabled and misleading ‘little Latin’, he would have had Cicero drummed into him several hours a day for long years of his life. My hunch is that little made him happier. Cicero’s many volumes of letters, miscellanies and philosophical writings offer a comprehensive portrait of a complicated and changing mind, and a vivid image of the human wrangling of the end of the Roman Republic. Beyond them the speeches, transcribed with rigour by his amanuensis Tiro, offer a greater pleasure. Not only do we hear the fresh unmediated sound of Latin speech as it was spoken, but we also hear a genius of language take the art of rhetoric to new heights. Cicero perfected the syntactical rules within which we still live, and rules which, when well learnt, unlock new systems and worlds of thought. ‘Not only. . . but also. . .’ itself is one of Cicero’s favourites, along with the tripling of decorative subclauses and a thousand other tricks which he mastered, and which a fellow wordsmith like Shakespeare would have chortled and chuckled with happiness at encountering. Cicero’s voice is sly, sarcastic, often small and petty in its judgements, but its music is breathtaking.
The word rhetoric implies something dry and stiff, a bone-dry bore orating slowly, but in Cicero’s hands and those of his followers, it is something very different. It is jazz. The masters learn the rules, the chords, the sequences, the antiphonies and the harmonies, and then they let rip. In the process of letting rip, they get to places, musically and in thought, they did not know they could reach. This is what rhetoric is for. It is process not product. It is also the heart of Shakespeare’s genius. Cicero spent years perfecting a skill-set, and then as a writer and as a speaker let himself loose. Shakespeare drenched himself in learning and in the world, and then floated free. Writing creates thought, thought does not create writing. The very process of sitting down with stylus and tablet, quill and parchment, typewriter and paper, keyboard and screen, the very physical process of scratching, scribbling, typing, inputting, the process releases ideas and insights which laugh to scorn all that planning and strategising struggle to achieve. Rhetoric, form and rhythm are ways and means of facilitating that release. Cicero’s speeches are the finest exemplars of that, and although Cicero himself is only a small walk-on part in Julius Caesar, his influence is all over the work. Polonius in his glories, and in his shortcomings, seems an ironic testament to that.
Just like Polonius, Cicero was an arch worshipper of the smoke and mirrors of state. The Romans created a political system so baffling and peculiar that it makes particle physics look like noughts and crosses. Consuls, tribunes, pontiffs, governors, praetors and aediles – each represent patricians, people, provinces and priests within interlocking spheres of influence. The ways in which they interact with and contradict each other defies understanding. The aim seems to have been to create a system of power-sharing so opaque that anyone considering challenging it would retreat in the face of the inevitable migraines involved in trying to comprehend it. It also created a fertile ground for lawyers, and even more so for those capable of pretending to an understanding. Anyone who could bring off a general air of ‘Ah yes, I would explain that but you would never understand it, wheels within wheels, old chap’ could have a field day with the levers of power. If you could elevate that clubbable exclusivity to the aura of one of the very few initiated, if you could pretend a hieratic insight into the great mysteries, then complex politics starts to approach a quasi-mysticism. As Cicero managed to, and as Polonius rather less successfully aspires to.
‘By indirections find directions forth’ indeed. No matter that it is all unspeakable, Wizard of Oz, smoke and mirrors.
* * *
The show in Djibouti was not great. The setting could not have been more beautiful: an open stage with the waves of the Red Sea folding in behind, the sun going down before. But it was on the edge of the hotel compound, and the pleasures of this gilded cage were wearing thin. There had been little or no marketing, and with half an hour to go there was not much sign of an audience. I wandered around the cavernous marble-ceilinged hotel foyer picking up a few lost souls looking for the show, then positioned myself behind the airport-style security at the front door to steer the few people allowed in towards our temporary theatre. Thankfully a group of students arrived to give us some contact with the locality. When we settled, there were only about 120 people – a bewildering mix of a few ex-pats, some financiers from the hotel, a smattering of Special Forces, a sprinkling of Djiboutians and the students. The posh locals seemed more interested in the table of drinks than Hamlet, and seemed a little put out they had to watch the show; the students seemed keen to sneak behind the toilet and have a smoke or snog each other. Bizarrely the Special Forces contingent seemed quite into it.
Things got decidedly odder later. Our host was keen that we join him in his home after the show. He had issued the invitation during the monologue the day before, and had rung twice to confirm it. Having enjoyed his company, many of us were keen, and he hung around afterwards, being generous with compliments, and watching as we dismantled the set. We then set out in two vans and drove to a diplomatic area near the hotel, where we found large residence after large residence, each surrounded by a high white wall, each white wall enclosing palatial emptiness. The streets were deserted. No cars, no people. On a distant hill, we saw the city of Djibouti, a tumbling metropolis of houses and life. Here there was emptiness and silence. It was all manicured and elegant in the desert night air, but felt like a zombie film before the zombies show up. We swung through heavy iron gates into our host’s residence, a cool white building set in a cool white compound. A string of buildings created a quad, on one side of which was his home, beyond his very own infinity pool, and beyond that a long private beach leading down to the sea. Paradise but again eerily empty.
Our host bounced from pillar to post with excitement. He scurried us through his home, showing us every room as if we were at the Ideal Home exhibition, pointing out with particular pride the pictures of himself with several large fish (always a danger sign), switching lights on, as if he had just moved in. He flicked the switch to illuminate the pool from underwater with the pleasure of a child showing off a toy. After he had shown us everything, he sat down and looked at us with a peculiar expectancy. As if it was our turn to start amusing him. Some odd silence gave the impression we were now supposed to burst into song, or start telling sad tales, or take our clothes off and start performing sex acts on each other.
What he seemed completely unprepared to do was to feed us or slake our thirst. A company of actors after a show has very powerful and simple needs. Food and drink. Nothing was forthcoming. When he began another monologue on geopolitics, expecting us to all sit and look entranced, I expressed rather forcibly the idea that food and drink were a little more than necessary. He looked a little cussed, then suggested that I went with him to the kitchen. He seemed to have a hard time finding it. When we eventually reached the kitchen, he said, ‘Aha! Let’s see what treasures we have in here’, and walked straight into a laundry cupboard. Having located the fridge and the cellar between the two of us, I reassured him that I could take over from there and that he could return to the guests. I opened the capacious fridge to see – what else? – block after block after block of foie gras. Literally nothing else. I scoured the rest of the room for biscuits and returned to the throng with a mountain of foie gras and a few bottles of vintage champagne.
When I returned, he was entertaining everyone with a discourse about the difficulties of creating true democracy in Djibouti. With a small population with ancient regional and tribal differences, it is a delicate matter creating a system when a simple majority government can’t reflect the vested interests of each group. As has been witnessed elsewhere in the region, and not that much further afield in Iraq, a first-past-the-post system can’t guarantee a place at the table for all the different ethnic and religious entities. The result is a power-sharing arrangement with representation according to tribal numbers. This formula where everyone is g
iven a voice seems an elegant solution, and one which he had in part authored.
He was proving persuasive and fascinating again, and the company were feeling warmer with a lump of foie gras inside them, and half a bottle of Lanson. But the strange confusion as we had arrived, and the over-excitement at our presence, had diminished his mystical authority not a little, and there was a dangerous sense of humour floating around the group. We were sitting around a marble-slab table beside the outdoor pool under the stars, and mischief was tickling the air. Our host was telling a long story about how a Spanish warship in the port had accidentally fired off a missile headed for the diplomatic zone. As he reached the moment where the missile shot off, he flung out his hands and caught Amanda square in the tit. She said nothing, he said nothing, sadly no one did, and a small titter of giggles started to play between us. He then told a long story about the arrival of something called the Kent in Djibouti. Unfortunately, he had a very peculiar way of pronouncing the word Kent. For a while we wondered if this was a product called Kent, the Duke of Kent, or just someone he didn’t like very much. It is very hard to ascertain what it was without saying ‘Keyunt’ a lot. Which didn’t reduce the hysteria of the room. Eventually, we ascertained that it was a ship called the Kent, but by this stage the room was close to hilarity. I said that it was time for us to go to bed. Everyone leapt up with alacrity.
He insisted on showing us the consulate. As we walked to it, he kept slowing down whenever he got near a picture of himself with a fish, and drawing breath ominously, before I hurried him on. The consulate was sumptuous, dripping money and power and art to the appropriate degree, but escape was becoming important. Hysteria was growing but also an eerie sense of being locked in, incarcerated in the lovelessness and deadness of power. Just as we were heading for the vans of departure, I was walking abreast with Rawiri. We heard the ever-ebullient Keith behind us saying to our host, ‘Tell you what, why don’t you tell us your most exciting fishing story?’ Fortunately, stage management saved the day and bundled us into vans. Our hysteria was spent as we drove back through the empty streets of the diplomatic area.
* * *
It often seems that if there were to be an eleventh commandment, it would be ‘Thou shalt hate lawyers and politicians’. They run through popular culture emitting the same pleasant odours as bankers. Almost every story seems predisposed to bring them to a grisly end in art and life. Polonius’s demise is in small part tragic, in large part comic. However fond of him we have become, to be stabbed to death behind a curtain and then have your body dragged around a castle in an attempt to find a hiding place lacks dignity. Cicero’s life came to a squalid end. Having survived ceaseless shifts of power and the whims of various factions, the violent ugliness within authority caught up with him, and he was stabbed to death by a self-appointed militia. The Roman’s end is rarely presented as a cause of great sorrow, more often as the becoming end for an ambitious shape-shifter. Both Polonius and Cicero love gossip, both love sitting in the middle of the matrix, reading the shifts of the wind, until their sense for its movement runs out, and it crushes them. Power is a ‘massy wheel’, and dancing attendance on it exacts a heavy price.
But it is a mistake to dismiss such figures, however easy a target. Cicero, within all his vicissitudes and shifting allegiances, did try to maintain the existence of the Roman Republic and to resist the inevitable arrival of the Roman Empire. Not too shabby a cause to die for. The Roman state for all its Gordian complexity did maintain a (just) functioning democracy for almost half a millennium, which is not bad going. The French are self-parodic with their diplomatic equivocation and their contrived hauteur, but who but the French could have achieved a gathering of opinions and a consensus as they did to effect a climate change deal at the end of 2015? They may dance lightly, but it takes a light touch to draw others into a dance.
The Poloniuses of this world, whether Cicero in the long distant past, Cecil in Elizabeth’s court, or an honorary consul by the Red Sea in the present day, may grease the wheels in a way that we disdain, but they also keep the machine moving; they may equivocate a little too much, but sometimes we need a little equivocation; they may be a little economical with the actualité, but they also arbitrate, and someone has to arbitrate; they may talk nonsense and cause delay, but they also soften the blows of history a little. If we despise lawyers and politicians, what is the alternative? People of action and principle? God protect us from them.
The world of Hamlet gets darker after Polonius’s death. For Ophelia and for Laertes catastrophically, and their grief is a measure of the emotional value of their father. In the world of the play, without Polonius’s fussy, theatrical scheming, the door is opened for the harder-nosed brutality of Claudius. Much of the wit and the comforting human smallness is bled out of Elsinore with Polonius’s passing. A domestic tragicomic atmosphere descends into brutal tragedy. The delightful cadence of Polonius’s music falls out of the play’s harmonics, and much humanity goes with it. There is little doubt Hamlet regrets his actions. When Claudius asks him immediately after the killing where Polonius is, Hamlet’s response is whipsmart and automatic: ‘In heaven.’
* * *
The United Nations is a long way from heaven, though probably close to Polonius’s idea of Nirvana. It was our privilege to play there early in the progress of the tour – the first time a play had been performed in one of its grand chambers. We tried to get into the Security Council chamber but were blocked by the Russians – how UN is that? – so had to settle for the ECOSOC (the United Nations Economic and Social Council) chamber next door. We built a stage and performed to 200 ambassadors banked up behind desks decked out with flashing lights and national nameplates and microphones. Not the warmest environment to engage with, though thankfully there were 400 members of the public at the back. To add to the oddity, in the midst of all the ambassadors sat Kim Cattrall and Laurie Anderson, for a reason that no one could fathom. The British representative had told us to cut the show down to two hours, because no one would stay longer. We refused. He then told us to cut the interval, because everyone would leave. We refused. Happily they stayed, and applauded warmly at the end.
Functioning as a pressure-cooker meeting place for all the world’s Poloniuses and wannabe Ciceros, the UN is not backwards in aggrandising its own mystique. It was built to pull all of the world’s problems into the enclosing fog of its own smoke and mirrors. The process of getting inside was a protracted one of consultation, begging and form-filling. And a lot of waiting – the ultimate tool of power. All of that, the history of the place, and its mythification by television news, conspired to fill us with awe on approaching it.
An awe which the place itself rather sweetly fails to justify. The atmosphere is shabby earnest – tired carpets, old paint and sad 1950s optimism. The staff, from bored security men to Monica Lewinsky lookalike interns and over-zealous health and safety officers, all seem to accept they are participating in a comedy rather than a power play. A majestic Hepworth outside, a tapestry of Guernica within, ethnic artefacts at every turn – the sheer aesthetic quality of these objects seems to act as a rebuke to the shabbiness that encases them.
The United Nations was probably more effective at pulling off the trick of power and mystic arrogance before the lethal thugs of the Bush administration got it in their sights. The impression it conveyed to us was of a down-at-heel debating chamber filled with goodwill, but ill-equipped to deal with the brutalities of a freshly psychotic world. It made one feel nostalgic for its days of influence, and, because of its doddery frailty, made new sense of the value of the Poloniuses and the Ciceros. Rather them than the Cheneys and the Jihadi Johns. As a Palestinian said not so long ago, ‘We are rather tired of living in the tragedies of Shakespeare. We would be very happy to spend some time in Chekhovian tragedy. Heartbreak and longing would do us just fine for a century or two.’ The United Nations was built on the dream that the world could hold back, could swallow its rages and its injustic
es for a while and let those energies scatter to the winds while oratorical windbags filled the air with delicate rhetoric. It’s a comical dream but better than many a tragic nightmare. The Ciceros and the Poloniuses are ridiculous, but you remove them at your peril.
* * *
We returned to Djibouti almost a year later in the tour. Something about the gilded luxury of the first visit had left a sour taste, and there was a desire to redeem it. Mr Grumpy Boots and Mrs Mardy Knickers back in the United Kingdom were always trying to fling the accusation of exclusivity at the endeavour, however distant from the truth it might be. We were only able to replace the sour taste with a sad one – such is the bitter comedy of our present world – since the opportunity came to return to Djibouti and play to more displaced people, this time Yemenis fleeing their civil war. A healthy crowd of several hundred gathered on the sands of the dunes and watched with affectless delight.
John was playing Polonius. His interpretation had morphed several times during the course of the tour, according to his changed understanding of the role, from stern authoritarian to confused fool to warm-hearted duffer. As the tour matured towards its end, his characterisation was now a lovely agglomeration of each. Impressive and scary and human in equal measure.
The audience loved him, and at the end they went wild for the jig, the music and the dancing soft-footing into the deep silence of the sand. The sight of John’s Polonius dancing in the desert before a crowd of refugees, stiff collar and creased trousers in good order, head held proudly steady, his pomposity as absurd in this alien place as it possibly could be, yet all the more human and all the more beautiful for its daftness, was a steadfast tribute under a hot sun to the survival instincts of the Poloniuses of the world.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 11
