55 Colombia, Bogotá
Teatro Colsubsidio Roberto Arias Pérez
2, 4 November 2014
56 Ecuador, Quito
Teatro Nacional Sucre
6 November
57 Peru, Lima
Teatro Municipal de Lima
8 November
58 Bolivia, La Paz
Teatro Municipal Alberto Saavedra Pérez
10 November
59 Chile, Antofagasta
Parque Croacia
13 November
Chile, Santiago
Parque Inés de Suarez
14 November
60 Argentina, Buenos Aires
Teatro General San Martin
15–16 November
61 Paraguay, Asunción
Teatro Municipal Ignacio A. Pane
20 November
62 Uruguay, Montevideo
Teatro Solis
22 November
63 Brazil, São Paulo
Teatro Paulo Autran
25–27 November
Brazil, Rio de Janeiro
Cidade das Artes
30 November–1 December
Brazil, Belo Horizonte
Sesc Palladium
3–4 December
64 Venezuela, Caracas
Centro Cultural Chacao
8 December
7
GOD ON A PACIFIC ISLAND
HAMLET There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will –
Act 5, Scene 2
MIDNIGHT IN DOWNTOWN TAIPEI, AND neon battles with darkness to create artificial day. Jen and I are on the street outside a curtained entrance, trying to wheedle our way into a club. After some arguments over ID and some haggling over money, we find ourselves walking into a large rectangular room wholly draped in heavy velvet. The doors behind us clang shut, and we look nervously around for a non-existent exit. Paranoia is trickling in until a sudden jolt shakes us and we clock that we’re in a huge lift ascending slowly skywards. A second jolt and we arrive.
Friends who travelled in China in the mid 1980s had told me tales of discos defined by a stark sexlessness. They had danced awkwardly in white rooms lit with glaring strip lights, cans of Coke laid out neatly on metal tables, bubblegum pop shrieking out of Tannoys. Boys and girls, dressed respectably and shifting nervously from foot to foot, shrank from each other on separate sides of the room. This, they had been told, was the hottest scene in town. Well, things have moved on since. The lift doors in Taipei slide open to reveal monochrome pandemonium. Pulsating grids of white light cut expressive shapes on the matt-black walls. The bouncers – slender and smartly dressed – wear a cultivated look of deadpan violence. A bevy of underage girls, got up as some schoolgirl kung-fu fantasy direct from the brain of Quentin Tarantino, emanate a cheerful hunger for depravity. Cocaine seems to be obtained by a chit-signing system at the bar. Techno music thump thump thumps and booff booff booffs. There’s excitement in the air, a sense of liberation and play – this is a reworking of the tropes of Western youth style, not a carbon copy. If I had to give it a moniker, I’d call it Festive Cool.
It is in this penthouse of industrial hedonism that I reconvene with the company after a couple of months’ absence. The surprise on their faces at seeing me here, where I am a good twenty or thirty years older than most, is one of the pleasures of the trip so far. We hug and kiss and laugh at the unlikeliness. They are high on life – it is Naeem’s birthday, and Taiwan is the first city they’ve seen in several weeks. They have just completed their longest and most arduous leg, hopping across the South Pacific islands. This is Ulysses’ crew, fresh from gruelling Homeric adventures and determined to celebrate. We park ourselves on a banquette, and they circulate between there and the dance floor, the strobe flashes capturing them in jerky freeze-frame. On the banquette, whoever is taking a breather spills out tales of their recent travels in snatched, shouted fragments.
They have just come from Palau, a small island country in Micronesia, where, after much haggling over venues, a school hall had been secured and a princely audience of twenty-seven people assembled. Shortly before the show began, a grand Rolls-Royce drew up outside. Its tinted passenger window rolled down to reveal in the recesses a powerful-looking woman in dark glasses. Stage management approached with appropriate deference, only to be greeted by a barked ‘Where is my money?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Where is my money? No money, no show!’
‘Money for what?’
‘To perform in my hall. $1,500 right now. I am the Queen of Palau. No money, no show!’
‘Erm. . . we were told to pay the government!’
‘You do not pay the government. You pay me now, or no show!’
She refused to leave her empowering backseat, so they continued to pacify her through the car window while frantically ringing London to find out what was going on. Dealing with the Queen of Palau is not something they train stage management for at drama school.
There are horror stories from the tiny buckaroo aeroplanes in which they’ve traversed the vast Pacific, many of which did not have the capacity to carry our excess baggage. This has meant the frequent non-appearance of the flight cases that carry costumes and props, and comprise most of the set. After one too many occasions where the company were cobbling together a show from only a third of the necessary components, while stage management tried to trace swords, chemises and painted props across the Pacific basin, a communal cry of ‘Fuck it!’ went up, and they resolved to abandon the cases and make the show up afresh in each new country. Local markets were scoured for cloth and scarves to denote character, and imagination was called on to transform unlikely objects into key plot elements – billiard cues apparently the best stand-ins for swords.
Cockroaches are a regular theme of the reportage – everyone has a cockroach story. In the silent dark of night, and the claus-trophobia of small island life, many of the company have had little to distract them beyond counting and categorising the cockroaches assembled in their rooms. ‘It was this big.’ ‘There were this many.’ ‘There were three on my pillow. . .’ Cockroaches have infested the minds of the company as effectively and enduringly as they do the landscape. The king of the cockroach stories belongs to John. One morning, he had spruced himself up and headed down to breakfast in the company’s less-than-salubrious hotel. On returning to his room, he found a large portion of the ceiling directly over his bed had collapsed. It had been worn down by the weight of months’, years’, decades’ worth of cockroaches, which were now seething nightmarishly over the debris.
Besides these sordid anecdotes are happier tales of warm welcomes, and smartphone videos that capture brief, magical moments of contact. In Tuvalu, in a small space between the airport and the hotel, the company improvised a theatre for the day, and children watched them rehearse and perform with fascination. One pocket movie shows a gang of overjoyed four-year-olds dancing along in a frenzy of jerky happiness to the closing jig. Another shows a beautifully synchronised dance of welcome in a big sports hall in Kiribati. This form of greeting has been besmirched rather by its association with the image of visiting dignitaries sitting in besuited stiffness while indigenous people shake their bits and bobs at them. That’s a shame, because what better way is there to greet people than with a dance? In Somaliland, I sat in a straw hut as people strutted out a rhythm before us, and felt unaccountably happy. Several of the company joined them and danced along. Maybe our leading parliamentarians should be encouraged to greet visitors at Heathrow with an exhibition of ballroom dancing.
A different kind of dancing swirls around the floor in Taipei. The Taiwanese dance together in clumps, the gathering together not sexual in intent, more simple joy at the individual merging into a tangled mass of bodies. Our company dance alone, Western style, or in couples. The difference is marked, and the fact we are different in other ways – the only white, black and brown faces in the room – adds to
the festivity. Matt out of his own kindness finds a friend and brings him to our group. ‘This is Xiu Ling,’ he shouts. ‘He doesn’t have any friends here, so I’ve told him to come and join us.’ ‘Hello, Xiu Ling!’ everyone shouts over the pounding noise. ‘Isn’t Matt nice, we all think.’ Matt talks to him for about three minutes. Then he looks bored, dumps him and returns to the dance floor.
I’m too tired, too old and too leaden-footed to join the shifting throng and lower the temperature with my antique moves, so I sit still and the company yell more Pacific Island adventures into my ear. There are stories of sexual encounters in unlikely places (‘drabbing’, as the company have dubbed it), of snorkelling trips, of planes that bucked and lurched and tumbled like rodeo horses. . . But all the stories from the geographical swirl of the last few weeks seem to gather and converge around one place. One magnetic country draws the other stories together: Nauru.
At our ambassador’s breakfast in the summer of 2013, one man had swept in late. Dressed in a Savile Row suit, a thin body propping up a lion’s mane of hair, the classic British public-school jutting jaw, he looked quite the most important man in the room, surveying the crowd with a gaze of advanced entitlement. Was he a high-up at the UN, a Foreign Office bod, a director at the British Council? We approached him with trepidation.
‘And where are you representing?’ we asked gingerly.
‘I,’ he began with a thunderous confidence, and then faltered a little. ‘I am the High Commissioner of Nauru.’
‘Where?!’ we chorused – the words ‘Where is Nauru?’ singing through our heads.
He looked a little crestfallen and pressed a brochure into our hands. This was the first I’d heard of this country, but the picture on the front of the brochure was pure enchantment. An aerial shot of a perfect disc of an island set in the deep blue of the Pacific. He explained that it was the smallest populated country in the world, an atoll briefly replete with wealth until Australia scooped out its central resource of guano to use for phosphate fertiliser and then deserted it once that resource was depleted. He told us that it was a beautiful place, that they would never have heard of Hamlet there, nor probably Shakespeare, nor most probably England.
Nauru became the focus of our sense of quest. This faraway place, foreign in landscape and culture, geographically inaccessible and a million miles away in mindset, became the symbol for the scope and ambition and otherness of our mission. ‘We’re even going to Nauru,’ we’d say to people, and watch bafflement crease their faces. ‘We’re on the way to Nauru,’ we’d tell ourselves as we started trying to define the scale of what we were doing. ‘We’ve made it to Nauru,’ we announced with a huzzah to the office, when pictures of the company dismounting from a small plane and walking towards a WELCOME TO NAURU poster digitally whooshed back to London. We’ve arrived in paradise, we thought to ourselves. From the stories I’m now hearing in Taipei, the truth was more muddied.
‘Oh man, Nauru!’ they shout into my ear. ‘We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’ ‘Longest three days of my life.’ A lot of the prevailing madness in the South Pacific leg seems to have coalesced in Nauru. The Australians, having stripped the island of its one natural resource, are now compounding the crime by exporting their most nutritionally void foodstuffs to Nauru markets. The grass fertilised by the plundered phosphates has fed cows and pigs, whose fatty offcuts return to Nauru in the form of nuggets and other processed lumps of protein. This has created not only an obesity problem, but also a pervasive listlessness – the sort of wholesale depletion of willpower and energy you see in any McDonald’s on a weekday morning spread out across a whole island. As well as treating the island as a waste receptacle for its abattoirs, Australia uses it to detain and process refugees, who have made the long journey from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of our company had travelled to the detention centre on their day off and spoken to those held there. There will always be a chasm of logic and justice between a group of people who have chosen to charge round the planet enjoying mobility, variety and new cultural encounters, safe in their dreams of home, and those who have been compelled by a criminally unfair planet to set out on dangerous voyages in hope of a better future. But our company, with their generosity and tact, tried to bridge it by asking and listening.
Standing in the nightclub, I hear second-hand stories of boats that set sail full of people and docked half empty, whose passenger numbers were whittled away by hunger and violence and madness and suicide. These people had travelled through unimaginable horror stories, only to end up sitting on a disc of volcanic rock in the Pacific, while the Australian government turned a blind eye to their existence. On the island itself, there was tension and unease between the refugees and the indigenous population. A couple of years before, in an eruption of violence against the cruelty of their guards and the hopelessness of their fate, the detainees had rioted and burnt down part of the detention centre, the spiral of desperation leading them to destroy their own environment. In a year when the Mediterranean as well as the Indian Ocean was brimming with new narratives of migrant despair, it made the joy and the excitement of our travel look all the more like luxury. And hurled fresh questions at its purpose. What to do with the world’s manifest cruelty and daftness and sorrow? How to respond? For the moment, there is nothing to do but listen to more stories.
On the company’s second day in Nauru, simmering resentment had turned to naked aggression when opposition Nauruans lost patience with the government and attacked their own parliament building. Accusations of corruption involving Australia and the infamous guano were flying, and the company witnessed a jostle-off that culminated in a brief storming of the doors of the parliament. The following morning, they watched an opposition politician slamming the government on television. To their surprise, the same man was sitting on their plane leaving the island that afternoon. Take-off was delayed, then delayed again, and eventually several police officers boarded the plane and asked him to disembark. He refused. Things got heated rather quickly. Suddenly there was a technical problem with the plane, and everyone was asked to disembark. When they returned to their seats, the opposition politician had disappeared. A Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fate if ever there was one.
* * *
The weirdest story from the Nauru adventure is saved for last. In the world’s smallest island nation, by some miracle of coincidence, the company had encountered a man who was attempting the same global journey as themselves. But this affable, well-set chap from the American Midwest was on a different mission. His aim was to walk through every country in the world bearing an enormous cross on his shoulders. It was a contemporary recreation of Christ’s slow walk to Calvary. Handily, his cross has wheels. Aptly, his name is Keith Wheeler. Though the cross is impressive in stature, it is retractable enough to be taken on planes as hand luggage. His inspiration is the equally aptly named Arthur Blessitt. If you don’t believe me, check out their websites.
Our Keith spoke to Mr Wheeler and discovered that he had been a student pole-vaulter at Arkansas State University when he’d had the calling. On Good Friday 1985, he swapped one pole for two and began his walk of more than 25,000 miles to 150 countries on all seven continents. He has been in jail forty times, been run over three times and left for dead twice. He said the only time he met any real antagonism was in Christian countries because he does not align himself to any particular branch of Christianity.
He was in Rwanda during the genocide and went into Iraq before the last war. Unable to gain a permit to enter Iraq, he carried his cross up to the Jordanian border, asked to meet Saddam, then went on his knees and prayed. The border guards after much kerfuffle and frantic phone calls allowed him through, and he had an hour-long meeting with Saddam. The company are impressed by his sincerity and his simplicity, and, though by no means an evangelical group, they respect, more than anyone probably, the scale of his achievement. In Nauru, he had been there during the rioting and had interceded just as it was getting hea
ted. He claimed he walked into the crowd with his cross, started to pray and everyone calmed down.
Our company have different and personal reactions to religion. Amanda’s parents are both Anglican ministers, her mother a celebrated one, at one point tipped to be the first female bishop. Of Jamaican heritage, her mother runs a parish in Hackney and is a former chaplain to the Houses of Parliament, in which capacity she once spent all night sitting in silent vigil with the dead body of Margaret Thatcher. Matt’s parents are both rabbis from the more liberal and progressive end of the Judaic faith, his mother one of the first female rabbis in England. Jen’s background is culturally Buddhist, and her devoutness takes particular and unconventional forms.
Naeem is one of the most quietly yet determinedly spiritual people I’ve met. In rehearsals and on the road, I have frequently seen him react to difficult situations by dropping anchor in silence and stillness. When he has to absorb a new idea or circumstance, you can see him lower his internal temperature: as if he builds a high marble ceiling over his head and solid stone walls around him, shutting out the noise and heat of the world so that he can resolve its conflicts within the cool blue of his own private mosque. His parents are devout Muslims, so devout that sadly they have not allowed themselves to see the show and witness what their son Naeem is doing.
Once, over lunch in Djibouti, we discussed how religion informs each of our lives. The conversation was the kind of mishmash of belief and doubt and idiosyncrasy we have come to expect in our lapsarian world, where the fervent faith of previous generations has faded like the colours of frescoes in old chapels: ‘My religion is a private thing, made up in my own way’. . . ‘I use it to help find some sort of moral path through the world’. . . ‘It gives me a sense of community’. . . ‘I see God in everything’. . . ‘I can’t believe in the old structures’. . . I was as lost and as stumbling as the others. Agnosticism is conditioned by its own lack of articulacy; it has neither the brutal realism of atheism, nor the passionate certainties of religion. It operates in the no man’s land where the mind searches for words that do not appear, to frame an image whose shape is shrouded in mist.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 12
