Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  There are also all the surveillance tropes within the play. Polonius instructs Reynaldo on how to draw out information disingenuously about Laertes’ behaviour in Paris, he sets Ophelia to walk up and down within the castle as bait for Hamlet, and he is a great one for nipping behind an arras and doing some overhearing. There is a clear and chiming parallel with Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. It is, however, so beaten to death as an interpretive tool that we shied away from it in our production. If every time you see a production it is packed with video cameras and listening devices and secret doors; if it feels like someone is relentlessly screaming, ‘Look, parallels! Parallels!’, it sometimes seems the honourable path is in the opposite direction.

  All such topics, including surveillance, were hot to touch for Shakespeare. His parents had seen three radical changes of religious thought within their lifetimes in England; the vulnerability of the state apparatus was revealed by the confusion before the accession of Queen Mary, and Elizabeth herself faced and faced down a number of potential revolutions. These were unquiet times, and sedition, both real and imaginary, bubbled away in every great house and on every street corner. It is hard for us to comprehend this sense of the permanent fragility of the state.

  Amongst others, there was one tragi-comic attempt at a rebellion by the Earl of Essex, shortly before Hamlet was written. On the eve of the rebellion, Shakespeare’s company had been requested to play Richard II, a play about the usurpation of a natural ruler. Forty shillings had secured their service. This commission reveals little more than the incompetence of the rebels. A beautiful, elegant drama garlanded with daisy chains of stunning but otiose poetry, little could be less fitted to prompt people to violence. A little crying, some soft thoughts about flower arranging maybe, but violence? No. Historians have marvelled that Shakespeare and his company were not punished for their two-degrees-of-separation involvement. It surprises me they weren’t offered thanks. At an earlier moment of tension between them, Essex burst into Elizabeth’s bedchamber when she was only partly dressed, before withdrawing out of a sense of decency. Not the actions of a self-respecting caudillo. All sorts of odd energies – gender, class, and history – collide in this moment. It would have been vivid in the minds of the audience when they witnessed Laertes charging into the private space of the King and the Queen.

  Any illusions that merry England was a quiet and jolly place were to be shattered within a couple of years when the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. This was a potential terrorist attack on a scale never witnessed before in history, intended to take out the entire apparatus of government in one nihilistic swipe. It was the culmination of a long period of religious schism, and of social unrest. The state violence that was used to suppress dissent was always going to provoke some form of blowback. Elizabeth and James were lucky to dodge it, though James’s son Charles and the nation later reaped the whirlwind.

  So in its own moment, Hamlet would have gained from the heat of contemporary concerns. A young prince in a neighbouring land, bristling with intent, is agitating to gain the throne. James VI of Scotland can’t have been far from anyone’s mind as the most eligible solution to the problem of succession. The threat of invasion, the watching of the borders and the ceaseless creation of new weaponry would remind everyone of the persistence of the threat from Spain. The apparatus of state surveillance would bring to mind Walsingham and Cecil, and their creation of the manipulative psychologies of snooping. And the dangers of a coup would have brought to mind not only Essex, but the long succession of foiled plots against Elizabeth. Shakespeare, with his genius for knowing how close to hover his fingers over the heat of a contemporary flame, was working with his audience’s all-too-real concerns.

  * * *

  It was the day before our performance in Kiev, and two days before the first elections in Ukraine held since the revolution begun in Maidan square. A British Council delegation arrived to take us on a tour of the city. We set off at a steady pace and were shown historic this and historic that, but we wanted to catch up on more recent history and smell a little of the residual cordite of revolution. We soon found ourselves by St Michael’s Church, a grand Orthodox edifice, which served as a sanctuary during the revolution. The fleeing and the injured took refuge within its walls – the medieval habit of religious asylum persisting in the virtual age. More ahistorical still, the bells of this church served as the most immediate form of communication during the rebellion. Whenever the riot police or the army tried to move in, the bells would toll forth, and crowds would flock in from all corners of the city to put a human buffer between the forces of rebellion and the forces of repression. So alongside the modern tools of rioting – Facebook, texting and YouTube – the heavy clanging resonance of church bells was used to bring a crowd together.

  Near the church was the first encampment we came across, this one detached from the main body two streets away. It was as if it had not been allowed to join the gang, or had upset the gang and been told to live elsewhere. Each of these encampments was a large higgledy tent, the size of a couple of rooms, secured straight into the tarmac of the road, surrounded by a small stockade, enclosed by more canvas or an improvised fence. Outside it was a small jar asking for offerings. A small birdcage had some threadbare doves in it. A young man came out of the tent, opened the cage, and took one out for me to hold. The dove’s wings were disabled, which seemed to reduce its resonance as the bird of peace. There was some quick commodification of peace and love going on here, but I put money in the jar.

  We walked on and into Maidan square. We entered at about seven, as a hot sun was going down and the day’s blanket of heat was starting to admit the night’s first breezes. We looked out over a broad square, filled with a little city (or big village) of interlocked and interlaced encampments. Smoke rose from 10,000 tarry cigarettes, from every small stove, and from the mobile kitchen which sat proudly in the yard of each canvas home. Firewood was scrappily stacked here and there. Dismembered cars served for outdoor furniture. Radios blared out cheap music. Hooch permeated the atmosphere everywhere, a miasma of vodka fumes. Every dwelling sported its own outdoors scrapbook of the revolution, photos of dramatic moments laminated into importance – a blaze of fire, a charge of shielded police, a moment of defiance. Beside the photos, other memorabilia – old weapons, improvised mortar devices, unused Molotov cocktails – were laid out as if deserving a museum’s respect. The revolution seemed to have been curated as quickly as it was made.

  Our guide explained the politics to us quickly – the square was now a state within a state, responsible only to itself. Each unit was made up of around a hundred people, each hundred elected its own representative, and each representative sat on a General Council of Advisers, which together decided policy for the whole of the community. They policed themselves, fended for themselves entirely, and together safeguarded the spirit of the revolution. No single leader, thankfully, seemed to have emerged from this mulch yet. At that moment, as dusk settled, it seemed hopelessly beguiling, a smoky moment of anarcho-syndicalism bursting through the tarmac of an ex-Soviet state, canvas fragility encasing hope.

  Beside the politics, the other strong element, although it seems effete to point it out, was the aesthetics. Different shades of olive and khaki-brown canvas overlapped each other, the colours of the forest challenging the grey of the cement. Overhanging the square was a block of offices, burnt out leaving a hollow shell, largely blackened and charred. Against this black, an artist had fired sacks of pink paint, which had hit the walls with a spreading splat, and left behind startled circles of pink. Small, fey and joyous exclamations beside such angry drama. Everywhere people had re-used their once protective gas masks to create sculptures. Mannequin figures topped with masks dangling their hosepipe elephant noses stood to attention and lolled on sofas. Elsewhere the masks hovered on poles above the encampments, like protective deities.

  Yet the politics and the aesthetics were all silenced by the unimpeachable li
nes of photos of the faces of those who had died in the square. Plain faces whose image was captured before they got caught up in history, plain and human, firemen and teachers, students and cooks, all unsuspecting of martyrdom. There was very little to be said about such faces, and their loss.

  A stadium stage sat in the middle of the square, where we had intended to perform a few scenes, but our British Council minders were wary of someone taking a potshot at us. This seemed far-fetched, nor did it show great faith in our ability to charm a crowd. We posed for a quick photo in the centre of the square, all dazed and flattened. Then Tom, our producer, and I had to nip off to do some press, and left the actors wandering. Some bought the ‘Putin is a Cunt’ badges which had quickly become bestsellers on the stalls. As I headed down into the metro, I saw how the barricades were made, the cobbles of the square having been torn up to build walls, and to use as missiles. In rehearsals with Julius Caesar back in London, it was clear how little the language and the technology of revolution had changed over the last 2,000 years – fire and cobbles.

  The next morning started early at our venue – the Mystetskyi Arsenal. The arsenal was built by Peter the Great in the late eighteenth century, and someone had spent a large amount of money here, to turn it into Kiev’s premier modern art gallery. Entrance was through a walled garden, and the outdoor terrace, all sculpted hedgerows and splashing fountains, would be the pride of Paris or Munich. Maidan square felt a long way away. The gallery was presenting an exhibition devoted to Hamlet and Shakespeare, to link with our visit. The work, largely conceptual, with much video and film, was fuelled by a palpable anger which made its Western equivalent look very pale. In a witty touch, across the middle of the gallery ran a scaled-down bright-red gas pipe. It ran across at just below head height, so everyone had to duck underneath it, a permanent reminder of the necessity to bow the head to Russia. And the reason why.

  It became clear that amongst our hosts, and their mother hen who ran the gallery, there was a growing level of excitement. The Hamlet ticket had become a hot one, and there were queues of people outside using any trick possible to squeeze their way in. The audience arrived for the afternoon show, a young and game one, in dazzling couture. There was a relaxed feeling in the air, which felt wholly un-Slavic – the vivid colours seemed to have floated up the Dnieper from the Black Sea, the light style and the big open spaces down from the Baltic. We see the world in a simple West/East polarity, but Kiev seems to have a 360-degree perspective, having inherited its religious tradition from Constantinople below, and having traded and battled over the millennia with Scandinavia above. The matinee began, and though the audience were game and willing, it was an uphill task. The acoustics were in a land beyond the dreadful, and the layout, in a room bedevilled with monster pillars, had of necessity to be a compromise between traverse and front-on. By the end, the company had just about got the audience where they wanted them, attentive and receptive.

  By early evening, the over-excitement we had discerned earlier amongst the gallery staff had given way to hysteria. Everyone had a spring in their step, and the British Council staff looked like they’d just won the lottery. We were aware that we were a hot ticket, but seemed to have graduated from that to the show that had to be seen. Rumours were flying around of who might be coming, and the rumours grew a little substance when a small cohort of sharp-suited men, with discreet listening devices in their ears, descended on the venue, closely followed by soldiers with sniffer dogs. We were asked to vacate the stage as it was searched for incendiary devices.

  Within all this excitement, the staff of the gallery bubbled over with optimism. They talked of their feeling of freedom and of hope since the revolution. They acknowledged that all was not perfect, but for the first time in a long time they believed they were in control of their own destinies. They sensed natural justice in the air. And it did feel like that. That saturating hopelessness of the wholly corrupt state, the invisible but dense fog which weightens the movements of all within it, on this night, just before an election, with everyone turning out in a beautiful venue on a sunny evening, that hopelessness seemed imperceptibly to be lifting. It may have been destined to last no longer than that night, but that intoxicating expectation, that lift in the heel, that sense that anything can happen, felt a little like freedom.

  The British Ambassador arrived, shrewd and charming, and dampened any expectations of who might come. ‘They’ll never show up. They never do. Not on the night before an election.’ The garden outside the venue filled with the chicest crowd I had seen anywhere outside the Paris Opéra. And a lot sexier. I calculated that amongst a crowd of about 700, there must have been about 4,800 inches of heel. And about two miles of leg.

  Then, despite the Ambassador’s warnings, the big guests did arrive. The Mayor of Kiev, who was on his way out. The Minister of Culture, Yevhen Nyshchuk, a young man who looked like a Eurovision contestant but was one of the heroes of the Maidan. An actor by training and trade, he acted as a spokesperson during the rebellion, and as convener and compere for all the voices of revolt. The flashes popped merrily and then went wild as the purported next mayor of Kiev entered. This was the man mountain that is Vitali Klitschko, former heavyweight boxing champion and human totem pole at the heart of the revolution. He carried the sheen of the extremely well groomed and the very carefully held. Klitschko moved through the crowd trailed by cameras, with the steady confidence of the fighter on the way to the ring. Something in me suspected that he might be more intimidated by Hamlet than he was by Lennox Lewis.

  Then the big prize arrived – Poroshenko, flanked by a swarming security detail and his family. He walked in with a becoming modesty and deference, but still. . . This was the President-elect, appearing in public on the eve of his election. At Hamlet! The Ukrainians found it hard to believe that all these figures were gathered in one place. We couldn’t believe it. The Embassy and the British Council were about to spontaneously combust with delight. The brouhaha in the theatre was mental. Our cast came out to greet the audience before each show, and there was an insane scrum of actors, camera crews, politicians and hangers-on at the front of the stage. It looked worryingly as if the show might never begin. Politicians emerged from the scrum to make speeches, very long speeches. Their detail went for little, since it was swamped by the pandemic elation simply about being there. Then finally the show could begin.

  Again, it was a trial to wrestle the audience into a state of attention. Secret-service men jumped up and down like jack-in-the-boxes, and the audience was too excited by the audience to focus on the show. To cap it all, they were attempting a live feed of the show to the rest of the Ukraine. To do this, they had picked a Keystone Cops gathering of student broadcasters, who spent most of the first half hour plugging and unplugging leads in the middle of the audience, berating their primary-school-age camera operators, and then descending into noisy conference. Happily, the show was rough theatre, built for the open air, and didn’t stand on its dignity too tightly. The actors knew how to blend muscle and tenderness to quieten the audience down. The show, like all Globe shows, was one of connection, so line after line went straight into the eyes of the rows of politicians. Contact was soon made, and connections started to proliferate.

  The ousting of one king, and his replacement by another. The poisoning of a king (those who remember Yushchenko’s poisoned bright-orange demeanour before the last revolution couldn’t miss that one). The chafing of a younger generation against the morality and strictures of an older one. The impatience of Laertes. Line after line pinged into the moment and came brightly alive: ‘The time is out of joint’. . . ‘Something is rotten in the state’. . . ‘Take arms against a sea of troubles’. . . ‘No king on earth is safe’. . . Many more lived a brief added life in the resonance of the moment.

  Most of all, I was happy that this was a bright Hamlet, a renaissance Hamlet, a celebration of his energy. On this bright evening for this town, it would have been impertinent to come from west
ern Europe and sulk and moan and pule in their general direction. To joy in this remarkable Prince, and in his desire to find a modern, and a new, in a world that stands stiffly and uncomprehendingly against it, felt right. It felt like a due tribute to the moment we were in. Much didn’t land, much did, yet at the end, the audience erupted and cheered. They were cheering as much for who they were, and where they were, as they were for the show, but it was a treat for us to share. The President-elect and his family were beaming and full of compliments, the Ambassador cock-a-hoop, and the Culture Minister couldn’t be shaken off, he was so merrily abuzz.

  As everyone stood around glad-handing, the stage management and the company descended swiftly on the set, and within twenty minutes it had been dismantled and disappeared. The dignitaries departed, and we all retired to a bar to watch Real Madrid finish off their city rivals in the European Cup final. The matter of the day, of the two days, had been too rich to absorb at speed, so we went to a couple more bars, and washed such matter away with sausages and vodka, and reconciled all the unreconcilables with teasing and laughter.

  Up at dawn to catch a taxi and fly away, I drove out as the sun rose over the forested hills and the broad Dnieper. The Ukrainians were waking to go to the polls and choose a future for themselves. They were a people without illusion, they knew that Poroshenko was much of the old and a little of the new, they knew that the tension with Russia would not resolve itself painlessly. But whether in the thickly charged air of Maidan square, or in the lightly scented fragrance of the garden outside Mystetskyi Arsenal, they seemed to know they had tasted a little of their own future, and were hungry for more.