Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  He hears that Fortinbras is approaching, announced by cannon. He makes a last supreme effort to act the Prince, and to tidy everything up. What he is saying at the end matters, but it is not everything; what matters is the courage and the ebbing resources which go into keeping going, keeping talking. At the end, he is almost talking banalities (for the first time in the play). . . before finally he gives in:

  HAMLET O, I die, Horatio;

  The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit.

  I cannot live to hear the news from England,

  But I do prophesy the election lights

  On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.

  So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,

  Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

  We see a spirit, the brightest, pass out of the room before our eyes. For a moment, we and the world are diminished. That bright boy who fought so hard and so brilliantly against the entropy of the world, who listened and looked so eagerly and so haplessly for virtue and love, who tried so hard to halt the endless shrinking and falling and wasting away of all around him, and who seemed to protect us from the same, whoever we are and wherever we are in the world, that bright Prince is stolen from us by death.

  * * *

  For the very final performance on the evening of 24 April, I stand at the end in the middle gallery and watch as Naeem and the company play out the last moments of the play, their good taste and their fortitude pushing them through one of the best renditions they have given, despite the excitement and the sorrow swirling within them. This simple, simple show is telling itself one final time. The packed crowd is full of old friends and public all willing them through it. As the dead rise to dance their final jig, the crowd erupts, the groundlings with hands over their heads applauding, the galleries standing to acclaim. I rush back to the tiring house, then after their second call I step out to join them, as is the habit at the Globe, to say a few words. I am worried that I will collapse into tears, but the company around me look exhausted and liberated and free, and the Globe at these moments has such energy in it, such generous blessed health, as you look out in the shared light to see face on face, that I get through it. It is hard to feel sorrow when held within such an embrace of life. I thank the audience, I thank the creative team, I thank our mission control and everyone who has helped to hold the project together, and then finally the company themselves. Then I step back to let the company take their final call. As is the Globe habit on a final show, they throw roses out into the sky and the crowd, and roses are hurled back at them. I look back from the central doors and see the lit-up company standing and moving within a rain of roses falling from above, with a carpet of roses spreading around their feet and a storm of noisy goodwill landing around them.

  Eventually, they make their way back to the tiring house, where I await them. We fall immediately into greedy clutching, and tears flow freely. Partners are swapped in a carousel, a daisy-chain of bear-hugging, clinging to each other as if to stay upright, as if to stop from falling. The tightness of the squeezing, the unembarrassed need in it, tells its own story. Beyond this room wait lovers and family and friends, to reclaim each of these people for themselves and for the future. Within the room, still with make-up on and still dressed funny, this small company, who have shared the last two years as if they were one body, say without words, and just with their holding of each other, thank you, and sorry, and I forgive you, and I will miss you so much, and wasn’t that something, and, because of the cruel ephemeral nature of our game, goodbye. We have travelled all the way round one world, and now we are all going back into another. And into a long silence.

  191 San Marino, San Marino

  Teatro Nuovo

  12 April 2016

  192 Vatican, Vatican City

  Palazzo della Cancelleria

  13 April

  193 Italy, Trieste

  Il Rossetti Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia

  16 April

  194 Slovenia, Ljubljana

  Slovenian National Drama Theatre

  18 April

  195 Austria, Carnuntum

  The Riding Hall, Schloss Hof

  19 April

  196 Denmark, Elsinore

  Kronborg Castle

  21 April

  197–8 South Sudan and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (United Kingdom), London

  Shakespeare’s Globe

  23–24 April

  CONCLUSION

  THE COMPANY WERE PLAYING IN St Lucia, in the West Indies, and they had been told to expect a rowdy house. A little talking back and a little spontaneous collaboration from the audience was part of the culture here. There was a hum of natter throughout, and a constant sense of characters and choices being dissected, but it was far from intrusive. That is until Hamlet, by mistake, lashed out at the arras with his sword and pulled it back to reveal the mortally wounded Polonius. Hamlet left a pregnant pause here, probably over-pregnant, since it was interrupted by a woman’s voice from the second row, drawling out with relief, ‘Fiiiiinally, somebody dying’ . . .

  They were performing in the west of Cameroon in a refugee camp set up for displaced people from the Central African Republic. They arrived on a bus in the morning with no idea where or how they were going to do the show. Tom Bird was with them and managed to secure a space outside a bar and, after an interview with the camp’s head policeman, permission to perform. However, the licence was conditional on the policeman’s desire to ‘be a presence there’, as he put it. ‘Fine,’ said Tom. Shortly before they started performing, two junior policemen were seen crossing a square towards the space they had created, bearing a large desk. They set it down, dominating a third of the space. The chief policeman arrived shortly after and sat at his desk, from where he observed the show as it swirled around him, with a suitably stern expression . . .

  Two stories picked out from a barrel containing thousands, from a tour which took a story for a walk, which listened to many of the stories of the world, and which generated a fair few itself. Every corner of the globe we live in is packed with tales, it is a world of proliferating narratives, all equally worthy of respect. The aim of our tour wasn’t to present one story as exemplary, or to say that certain stories should rule. Unification under one banner or creating hierarchies is not the Shakespeare way. The aim was to unearth other stories, and to spur more to come into the light. The tour was a provocation not a definition.

  ‘Why do it?’ was a question asked often. If I was feeling flip, I’d shoot back, ‘Why not?’ If not, I think I came to an understanding of sorts, though I think only a partial one. First and foremost, it was to prove that it can be done. That anything you set your mind to can be done. We live in an age full of limits, boundaries defined by tribes of people not wanting others to achieve anything. Nothing is allowed to step outside a set of norms, definitions of possibility set as an act of self-definition by the tribes themselves. The internet and social media sometimes seem like a howling scream of denial of pretension and ambition. Yet what would we have without pretension and ambition?

  Growing up in the 1960s, the space programme was always there in front of you as an impossibly daft, and chivalric, bit of dreaming. Tom Wolfe wrote about the contest between the Soviets and the Americans as a return to jousting. There are a million ways in which you can be cynical about it (and rightly), but there was a purity of romance, something properly Earl-of-Essex-daffy, about sending people 250,000 miles away to collect a bit of rock and bring it home. That size of dreaming, which the space programme so eloquently exemplified, we seem to have lost, terrified by this tribe of begrudgers on the left and this bunch of exploiters on the right. We seem to have resigned big projects to the corporations who seem more intent on controlling the dreams we have than opening out new ones.

  To compare what we achieved to the space programme is nutty aggrandisement, but it was a little push in that direction. All my working life, I have tried to push back against
whatever is proscribed, and at the Globe, happily because it lived outside conventional ideas of what a theatre should be, there was no one to say no. An international festival, yes; thirty-seven short films, OK; a new theatre, why not?; and a tour to every country in the world, I suppose so. We were blessed with an outstanding set of colleagues who thirsted for higher and higher challenges. They worked with the conviction, as expressed by one, that if hands were held tightly enough together over mad enough ravines, and if there were enough hours in the day, then anything was possible.

  There was a substantial element of taking an old classic out to the world as well. Being a play, it was not an edifice; it was an ever-shifting artefact as re-understood in each moment that it was performed. But it had gained some of the authority which accrues to anything that has had four centuries of use and life. Many in the bizarre world we live in would point at that as something to be ashamed of. That is an idiocy which we have to combat if we are to retain a grown-up international culture. We skirted around Syria in several countries as we toured the crescent that surrounds it – Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon. We were taking our old play around, and at the same time IS were circling within that crescent, intent on the wholesale destruction of anything ancient which didn’t fit their world-view. There was horror and outrage at these acts of Year Zero destruction, but not enough, and not enough resolution to stop it. We sometimes seem to be witnessing the erosion of a benevolent internationalism within which I grew up, the idea that people talking to people, and culture talking to culture, often through the ancient artefacts which in part define them, was one of the best hopes that we had.

  I remember from my play-going life the LIFT festival run by the formidable Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, and regular arrivals at the Almeida, the National and the RSC of companies from abroad. LIFT survives and does great work, and shows pop up here and there, but with little of the focus, acclaim and éclat they used to. At one point when we were stumped for a theatre in Japan, we leant on the good offices of that mischievous angel of cultural internationalism Thelma Holt, a woman who for decades brought new voices and new cultures to this country. She secured us a date at the Saitama Arts Theatre, the home of the late great Ninagawa in Tokyo. She travelled out to see the show and sent me this note afterwards:

  Dear Dominic,

  I am writing to you from Tokyo as I am just back from the performance in Saitama. The ‘Hamlet’ was splendid and beautifully received. I don’t give standing ovations in theatres as I think it is a rather vulgar American custom, but I was on my feet at the end, and sharply told the British Council to get to her feet too.

  What they are doing is magnificent. This is not a ‘Hamlet’ in the West End and it is not a ‘Hamlet’ on Broadway. You know what it is: it is the UK at its best, when we really have turned our gaggle of actors into an ensemble. Their energy is controlled by them, and it is very seductive. What a hell of a tour they are doing.

  I feel this week as if I have been firmly corseted, but from the beginning of ‘Ha mlet’ my stays were unloosened.

  Thelma

  At the heart of that cultural conversation is and always has been those historical artefacts, be they ruins or churches or snatches of song or paintings or plays, that teach us who we are and about the otherness of others.

  We were touring in the name of a brilliant and beautiful young man, Hamlet, who sees doubt as a duty, and whose natural inclination at any moment is to stop and think, to place a pause of thought between intention and action. Who reminds us that procrastination is a virtue, not a vice. Within a play that feints at making an argument about human nature, but it is only a drop of the shoulder to deceive defenders. Finally, Hamlet works against all smokescreen certainties and painted cloth morals. I began this Hamlet journey in the belief that there was a journey through the play, and attempted to shoehorn the play into that shape. I learnt, as we all have to learn and learn again, that journey and the greatest art don’t go together. Hamlet, finally, just is. The play is about a life lived, and a life lived more fiercely and more alive than most.

  People have wasted long hours looking into fires for many millennia: it was the evening entertainment of choice for aeons. Until television came along (though isn’t television essentially the fireplace in the corner, with its flickering, insensible images?). Or they have stared for hours into candlelight. Isn’t that the compulsive element within Shakespeare’s Hamlet – this example of light and life stumbling towards death – and isn’t the simplicity of that what brings us back and back? Staring into the light.

  Shakespeare wanted to justify his art to life not to logic. The whole structure of Hamlet has no satisfying logic or perfection, but it is right and true to the chaos of a life. Fucked up by parents and sinister uncles, heartbroken by the cynical cruelty of the world, saddened by the cynicism and the shabbiness of the political estate, cruelly abused by the optimism of love, and then predictably run over by its disappointment, putting off our biggest decisions with too much thought and discussion, striking out at the wrong targets, let down by friends, and perennially uncertain about where we go when we die (for all the mad bluffing certainty of the religious, and the mad bluffing certainty of the irreligious) – isn’t that all of us? All around the world, I have seen audiences compelled by this figure, many without understanding a word he has said. Looking at Hamlet, aren’t we just watching ourselves naked?

  The other great fallacy from the start of the tour, beyond seeing a journey within the play, was that we would be having a benevolent effect on the world. Madness. The two fallacies probably feed into each other, seeing Hamlet as someone travelling towards a greater good, and the idea that he can effect it in the world. But maybe the greater good is different from the one I first imagined, maybe Hamlet is there to make things uncertain, and less easy, to scuff up a little trouble in the world. Hamlet is not there to turn us all into little Buddhas, or to represent Swift’s Houyhnhnms, creatures of perfect reason, but to remind us that we are imperfect, restless, reaching humans. And that we should stay restless and keep reaching.

  Of all the moments in the tour, possibly the strangest was the biblical sandstorm in the Syrian refugee camp. When the storm struck, and the light disappeared, and the wind bashed at the tin hut, the wailing children and their screaming mothers ran to the stage and grabbed the actors. They allowed the audience to grab them, and stood there in bewilderment and confusion. Though we were performing on a knocked-together set, in a beaten-up UNHCR hall, the actors were still invested with authority.

  My father has spoken to me about being an evacuee in North Wales during the Second World War and seeing Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike turn up with a rickety production of Macbeth in the local village hall. They also seemed to have the power to thicken the air around them, and seemed to be exemplarily human. For my father, they were an aid to understanding the world at that deranging moment. Within Shakespeare’s theatre, those actors whose names grace the First Folio, dishing out that singing beautiful verse to 360-degree theatres in a shared light, would have had an extraordinary authority, not from shouting or hamming it up, but from being human and modest and true, and helping the audience to understand themselves better in a world that was turning corners at electrifying speed. In Zaatari, we got a small impression of what that meant.

  Probably the most frequently asked question of all my time at the Globe was, why is Shakespeare so popular? I habitually trotted out some blah about his unique capacity to bring together the public and the private, which was true but became a little formulaic. In the middle of the tour, I was dwelling on this question as I walked a circuit of hills in Normandy, two of my daughters trailing behind me. They were just close enough for me to pick up traces of their conversation, which was a leisurely pass through their friends – who was getting off with who, who was having growing problems, who was having trouble with their mother, who was using their boyfriend to fill the gap left by their parents – a conversation filled wit
h examples, anecdotes and gentle analysis. Stories about people – that simple. One of the great pleasures of life, and the principal way in which we understand the world around us – we tell each other stories about people. Some of those stories are able to gather together around a central magnetising crystal a range of exemplary factors – political, psychological, magical – which when they grow organically together become a work of art, which can talk to everyone and help us to understand each other, across any boundaries. That is what we were testing when we took Hamlet to every country on Earth: how far a group of people could get, telling a story about people. We made it all the way round.

  The telling is an act of connection, we tell others to entertain, we listen to understand more. Within the act of telling or listening, we are learning and reminding ourselves that we are not alone, and that our lives are not entirely our own. The Hamlet tour was a small act of binding, a modest attempt to pull geography and history into a shared light, the light shed by an old play. It was a reminder of belonging, a reminder that although overwhelmingly and refreshingly different one from another as societies and as individuals, that our links define us as capably as our loneliness. That from the warm attachment of the womb through to the final separation of the tomb, we are bound to others, to those long gone, to those here now, and to those still to be. And that in every small act, of breaking or of building, we birth a future for ourselves and for each other.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THERE ARE TWO SEPARATE BUT confluent streams of gratitude: one for the book, and one for the tour. Since there would be no book without the tour, I’ll start with the theatrical achievement. My first and most obvious debt of thanks extends to the sixteen people who actually did it. Without their trust in taking it on, their courage in setting forth, and their endurance in bringing it home, there would have been no story. This is much more their story than mine, and I hope that they all get to tell their own. One evening in Bogotá, dining around a restaurant table, I asked the question, ‘Who’s writing a book then?’ The question floated around the table, and the answers came, ‘Yep’, ‘Yes’, ‘I think so’, ‘Well, a book of photos’, ‘A sort of journal’, ‘Yes, a book’. It turned out everyone was writing one, until we got to Rawiri, who said proudly, ‘No, I’m not writing one’, and then after a pause, ‘I’m getting someone else to write one for me.’ I hope they have all persisted, and their books find a way into the light.