* * *
When we flew from Addis to Hargeisa, the words ‘what a piece of work is a man’ popped into my head like a puffball in a spring field as I looked out of the window of our plane. Below us was the Great Rift Valley, the landscape that has had the longest relationship between human and Earth of any in the world. Though interrupted by the occasional boob-like swelling of mountain inclining out of it, and though some vertebrate spines of rock jag out of the evenness, the vast majority is a flat plain, riddled with inlay and crevices, like a woodcut of early civilisation. A landscape of grinding hardness, it is in permanent and dynamic conversation with wind and rain, where once a year brown gives way to green, and desiccation to life. A patchwork quilt of endlessly farmed land, a long history of cultivation has created a detailed check of reddish mud browns, shit browns, yellows and fauns. Weaving it together is a complex irrigation system worked out by nature and man, dark etches of tree-lined waterways varicose veining their way through the dryness, creaks and streams snaking through the earth, which has softly crumbled down into them.
Communities have gathered around nodal points of water. Ancient drove roads trace patterns across the landscape, pathways which nomads have driven livestock along for tens of thousands of years, towards bare circular clearings older than Stonehenge. From a height, the old nomad routes spread like raggedy spokes of a giant wheel, in starlight rays, away from the biggest gathering points. Routes like these, made from the feet of centuries, have a shifting poetry which roads and motorways cannot hold a candle to. Small stockades dot the view, wooden fences surrounding communities of huts. Organically circular, they look from the sky like cells or amoeba, some on their own, some clinging together to make more complex hydrocarbons.
But dipping further back into the past than agriculture, for many this is where the human story began, in this Great Rift Valley. Up the creeks that cut their way through the blasted earth, the stardust surprise that was Mitochondrial Eve herself, and her followers, the originators of homo sapiens, dragged their genetic inheritance. Woman and man began walking north alongside the watery tendrils which cut the plain, the human story beginning hiding in the crevices and folds of a great earth blanket, tucking into the small traces of green. Cradled by shade and water, she and we migrated up towards the same Nile all these creeks flow into, and on and out into the rest of the world.
What better name than Rift to describe the beginning of our human story. For Mitochondrial Eve, bearing that genetic uniqueness, that staining originality, it was a rift from all that was before. It introduced her and her kind to a long history of separation and aloneness. Always and ever since, arising out of the dust to be dazzlingly unique like Hamlet, but never amounting to any more than the dust itself. The difference hard-wired into her and us, the first and enduring alienation we have never found a way of overcoming. Cast out for ever from the Eden of simplicity, Eve, glared at and excluded, but soldiering on. Like the Earth and the Moon – separated at birth, yet still clinging to each other – the human and the world from which she grew. Eve and her descendants, feeling like a wound the distance and the difference, yet knowing like a comfort that all ends the same. A paragon, and a quintessence of dust.
Here spread out below, the land where the human experiment began its inane and beautiful flourishing almost 50,000 years before, and here above, a group of actors flying in an aeroplane, bearing amongst many other 400-year-old insights: ‘What a piece of work is a man. . .’ Another adventure in newness, another futile attempt to escape the dust.
And then the plane landed with the ugly efficiency of rubber hitting tarmac.
171 Belgium, Brussels
Théâtre Saint-Michel
11 February 2016
172 Mauritania, Nouakchott
Maison des Jeunes
16 February
173 Greece, Megaron–Athens
The Athens Concert Hall
27 February
174 Monaco, Monte Carlo
Columbus Hotel
29 February
175 Andorra, Sant Julià de Lòria
Centre Cultural i de congressos Laurèdia
4 March
176 Liberia, Monrovia
RLJ Kendeja Resort
7 March
177 Sierra Leone, Freetown
British Council Auditorium
9 March
178 Guinea, Conakry
Centre Culturel Franco-Guineen
12 March
179 Morocco, Rabat
Théâtre National Mohammed
14 March
180 Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Grand Theatre de Luxembourg
16 March
181 Liechtenstein, Lichtenstein
Saal am Lindaplatz (SAL) Auditorium
18 March
182 Switzerland, Geneva
Le BFM
19 March
183–5 Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger (France),
Paris UNESCO Headquarters
28 March
186 Israel, Tel Aviv
Cameri Theatre
30 March
187 Pakistan, Lahore
Perin Boga Amphitheatre, Kinnaird College for Women
1 April
188 Iraq, Erbil
Saad Palace
5 April
189 Iran, Tehran
Tamashakhaneh Iranshahr-Nazerzade Kermani
7 April
190 Afghanistan, Kabul
British Embassy
10 April
18
THE REST IS SILENCE
THE LAST WEEKEND WAS ALWAYS going to be tough. A collection of endings and beginnings, greetings and farewells, had been concatenated around the day when we celebrated both Shakespeare’s birth and his death: 23 April. It was the end of my ten years at the Globe; it was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death; we finished our season of the four late plays in our indoor theatre; we were unveiling a huge public project – thirty-seven short films capturing some of the essence of each of Shakespeare’s plays shown on thirty-seven large screens up and down the Southbank; a whole day of broadcasting for a new pop-up BBC channel from the Globe; in the morning a big service in Southwark Cathedral with Prince Philip; and most rending of all, the end of the Hamlet tour. Hamlet was coming home, and then dissolving to nothing. The rock that we had struggled to push uphill for two years, and which we had taken to 190 countries and several refugee camps, was simply going to disappear.
Four days before it had begun, tangled in absurd logistics, an extra level of complication had of course been added by the visit of President Obama. As curve balls go, that was the curviest. The President doesn’t just drop in. For days, armies of visitors checked the place out – security, and press, and protocol organisers. When he did arrive, police and homeland security shut down the whole of Southwark. Robocop-like figures crowded every doorway of the Globe, the brutal modernity of their firepower and protective clothing clashing weirdly with the oak and the plaster.
An hour before he arrived, we were rehearsing a quick omelette of music and soliloquies to present for him. A helicopter appeared overhead and drowned out all noise (the Globe’s lack of a roof makes it ever vulnerable to curious helicopters). ‘We can’t have that,’ I shouted over the noise of the blades towards a White House aide. ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll get the head of security.’ She came back instantly with a man who was extremely civil and taller than Goliath. I craned upwards and repeated, ‘We can’t have that’, civilly but loudly. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you have to have the helicopter; we need the coverage.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We won’t do the show then.’ He looked at me briefly, muttered something into his collar, and the helicopter flew smartly away.
Three days before, I had spoken to the company, all gathered around a mobile phone in Vienna airport. I had been told not to name our visitor, so simply said that the least-disappointing man in the world was showing up. Even though I was in London, I could hear the hyper-ventilation and supp
ressed joy as the news passed through the group. They were flying on to do two shows at Elsinore before coming home to London. They played in the Great Ballroom of Kronborg castle, the same austere palace of marble and wood that several members of Shakespeare’s own company would have played in in the 1580s. They played before Queen Christina of Denmark, just as George Bryan and Thomas Pope would have played before King Frederick II. Various circles were being brought to a close. The Danish audience loved the teasing way the company dealt with the Danish royal, and treated the play very much as their own.
On the Saturday morning, we all had to come in at 7.30 and pass through airport security in the foyer. After our rehearsal, we were ushered into the wigs and wardrobe space backstage to await the arrival. It felt odd and a little resistible that this army was moving into our house, forcing us to live in our own corridors. As the world’s least-disappointing man moved through the backstage area, we shadowed him, chaperoned by his staff. We were full of giggles and silliness, and kept being told to shush by aides various. As we were about to go out and meet him, I turned to the group and said, ‘April Fool!’, and they burst into big laughter. More shushing, and then we were out and off.
The company did great. The music relaxed the air and made the presentation less formal. Obama stood in the yard on one side, almost a hundred press on the other, the actors in the middle, and Matt, Ladi and Naeem steered us through the major speeches. They were crisp and clear and precise and spoke with feeling, and the President was attentive and alert. I invited him to come and join us on stage, and he did, shaking everyone’s hand. We chatted of this and that, his honesty and his warmth disarming. At the end, he was told that I was leaving my post the next day. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. ‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Well, maybe you can come and hang out on the beach with me.’ That just about made my year. We did a photo together, shaking hands. Involuntarily a noise came out of my gut, which could just about be discerned as me saying, ‘Thank you, sir. You have been an inspiration to me and to my daughters.’ He looked alarmed at first, since the gruff noise sounded more like someone making a discreet pass than a message of gratitude, but he settled, said an uncertain ‘Thank you’, and was then ushered away. ‘That was better than the whole tour,’ Ladi said.
Activity was frantic as we tried to kick our public event into life and force the company which was mounting the big screens up and down the Southbank to agree with us that turning them on might be advantageous. This was a big free giveaway event which would play over the weekend to a couple of hundred thousand people, some dedicated Shakespeareans, some casual passers-by. Simultaneously I had to rush to Southwark Cathedral, the community that Shakespeare and his company would have worshipped in, the place where his younger brother is buried, to attend a service which Prince Philip was attending. This combination – playing to a huge public audience being given culture for little or for free, while simultaneously playing to a queen, a president and a prince in the space of two days – was very Globe, both then and now. The service was slow (why is the Church so fond of pauses?), so I had to leave early to rush back to do a BBC live broadcast. The fiction of this was that they were filming the moment when the Hamlet company comes home, whereas the company had already been back for twenty-four hours. No matter, they entered the Globe through one of the vomitoria, and we all whooped and cheered, though our hammy acting of amazement had to be seen to be believed. We did a ceremony of greeting, which bordered on the hysterical, and then everyone prepared for the first of four shows that weekend. We still had real business to do.
When the first matinee was about to start, I nipped into the theatre to see the show up. Above the stage we had placed a screen on which, during the preshow, as the actors milled around and greeted the audience, we were showing a series of images from the tour. They triggered a rush of memories and feelings: Ladi standing in the Zaatari refugee camp soliloquising to a room of Syrians; a group of kids in a sports hall on a Pacific Island; the company jigging on the sands of Djibouti to a gathering of Yemeni refugees; the assembled ambassadors of the UN (that picture raised a laugh); the improvised space in Cameroon; the wide courtyard in Latvia; many more of the actors caught in the articulate whirl of storytelling, and the audience attending with the stopped breath of excitement; in all of them the generous faces of the actors and the shining faces of the audience. The photos stopped, the actors began the music for the opening, Tommy stepped forward and said, ‘Good afternoon’, and the audience roared and roared and roared. And roared. The affection shown to the company, for their efforts, for their steadiness, for their achievement, for all that mileage, was overwhelming.
* * *
There are a host of ironies running through Hamlet’s last words, ‘The rest is silence.’ Peter O’Toole used to tell a story of when he played the part at the Old Vic. At the end of his first day of doing the complete text in two shows, an eight-hour marathon, he said, ‘The rest is silence’, then muttered loudly for the benefit of the company, ‘And thank fuck for that!’ His fellow actors got such terrible giggles that when they had to hoist his corpse up on their shoulders, the whole caravan shook uncontrollably, and they almost dropped him. Not least of the ironies is the wrongness of it. If there is one thing that Hamlet has not been since his first death in 1601, it is silent. He has reincarnated, and his words have been quoted and requoted more often than any dramatic character. He may die in one place, but he springs back to life instantaneously somewhere else in the world, questioning, answering, talking.
The last scene is a whirlwind, and a bugger to stage. I think we only got close to bringing it off two or three times in the hundred or so iterations that I saw over the tour’s many performances. There is so much plotting to cover – the fight, the sword that is tipped with poison, the goblet within which Claudius drops a poisoned pearl and its movement around the stage, the multiple betrayals. It is a hard enough technical achievement to tell the simple story, let alone cover the relationships: Hamlet’s reconciliation with Laertes; Claudius’s parting from Gertrude; Gertrude’s reach-out towards her son; Hamlet’s conclusion with Claudius; his farewell to Horatio; and his final farewell to his greatest love and his greatest adversary: life. All happens in only about five minutes of stage time. It is hard within that typhoon to keep gracefully on top of the action and to give each moment its appropriate weight. Within that chaos, we have to watch Hamlet die. Whether we love or loathe Hamlet, whether we admire or disapprove of the actor playing Hamlet, the mechanics of the play have compelled us to feel intimate with him, and watching an intimate die is always a blend of compulsion and abiding sorrow.
From the moment the court enter the scene to join Hamlet, he knows in his bones that the end is approaching. He makes peace of a sort with Laertes, he leaves his mother and the court in no doubt as to the nature of the mental disturbance he has been through, then enters with spirit into the fencing duel. There is an astonishing Hamletian moment of civility in the middle of the frenzy. He makes a compliment to Laertes:
HAMLET I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance
Your skill shall, like a star i’ the darkest night,
Stick fiery off indeed.
LAERTES You mock me, sir.
HAMLET No, by this hand.
Even at this moment of extremity, with Laertes working himself up to murder, Hamlet swears that he is not mocking Laertes, nor would he. He is hurt at the suggestion that he might – even though he has killed Laertes’ father and been the cause of his sister’s death. In this instant, he can’t bear that he might be thought to be rude. It is one of Shakespeare’s contrary and all-too-true grace notes. True to Hamlet, and to human nature. It is remarkable how an intense politeness and civility about the tiniest things overcomes many on the point of death.
In short order thereafter, Hamlet bests Laertes in two of their three fencing bouts; Laertes stabs Hamlet outside the competition with a stroke that means his eventual death; Gertrude swallows the poison
intended for her son; Hamlet stabs Laertes with the poisoned sword; then Claudius too, whom he also forces to drink from the poisoned cup. After a lot of chat, a lot of mayhem, Hamlet, having procrastinated and delayed action for several months of life, several hours of drama, suddenly becomes a hurricane of action. This is partly psychological: Hamlet proves himself a creature of impulse, and when backed into a corner he lashes out, and effectively. But also it is a choice of dramatic rhythm: as a counterweight to the dreamy philosophical stasis before, a maelstrom of action. It is a just balance. It is also right that a swirl of activity surrounds Hamlet, that he is the still central point of a viciously spinning top. It is part of the nature of the play, a circularity of action, like the corridors that ring the central courtyard of Kronborg, a swirl of spinning atomic activity, which turns and spins the bright shining light at its nucleus.
Within all that centrifugal mayhem, there is something effortlessly light about Hamlet in the middle. After the nature of Laertes’ and Claudius’s plot has been made clear to him, he forgives Laertes for his involvement before he dies, then pivots and announces, ‘I am dead, Horatio.’ The baldness and the simplicity of that statement is overwhelming. It is possible to imagine it said with a gentle smile. He stops Horatio from killing himself, to protect his friend and his own reputation. His plea that his friend stay alive to tell his story and protect his name for posterity is a serious one. Upholding honour matters, as does maintaining the truth in a world that likes to blur it. Most vital is that the story is told with grace and dignity, not cheapened or made simple. This is a frequent concern of Shakespeare’s characters (Cleopatra is the most worried), as it was no doubt for the author in terms of how he wanted his work produced.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 32
