Hamlet: Globe to Globe. Dominic Dromgoole
They frequently visited Stratford upon Avon, granted permission to perform by Shakespeare’s father, John. The young Shakespeare would have been ushered to the front of the audience by his proud alderman father in Stratford’s Guild Hall. Something in one of those performances, some stray gesture of magical unlocking, maybe an actor looking deep into his eyes with their perennial promiscuous connection, could have ignited the desire to make theatre within the young William. No matter that they would have been intoning some thumping old lump of Tudor poetry, the boy would have been hooked. There is speculation that his first experience of making theatre was after hitching a ride with a touring company and thrilling to the freedom of life on the road.
This is another central fact about touring. It is a blast. It is the single reason why touring began, continued and still continues. Theatre has become so defensive as a business, having to protect itself from the depredations of pundits and critics, always looking to find virtuous and socio-political reasons to justify its own existence, that it forgets to mention the principal reason why people get involved in the first place. It is the best time that you can have without drugs. Touring sharpens the pleasures that life in the theatre naturally affords – the sense of fleeting connection, of families created that are intense and short-lived, and all the more intense for their shortness. It also distils the outlaw pleasure of trucking into a place, painting the landscape around you in new and surprising colours, gifting a story, some laughter and some new thought to a community, and then getting out fast before the ties of responsibility, or the heavy hand of the law, catch up with you.
When Shakespeare has Hamlet welcome ‘the tragedians of the city’ into the narrative of his own world, he is setting off chimes for the audience, and in self-reflexive fashion for the author. The play they perform is clonky. Though ‘The Murder of Gonzago/Mousetrap’ (with Hamlet’s additions) is terrible by comparison with the real play, the freedom with which the Players blow through the cold stone world of Elsinore offers a glimpse for Hamlet and for us of a better way of life. They are free to come into the world with noise and joy; free to make frustratingly real connections with their phoney feelings, while Hamlet cannot connect with his own real ones; free to cock a snook at the court in a play that says much that is unsayable; free to speak truth to power. And then, crucially, free to go.
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Back in Ystad, we were not exactly speaking truth to power, but we were honouring touring theatre traditions by getting very merry. A fierce show was followed by a hosted event at the theatre, turbo-charged by the audience’s excitement. ‘But I do not understand, it is just the play,’ a Swedish theatre-maker burbled at me, ‘it is just the play. It is so naked. It is so exciting. Just the play.’ We had a similar effect at our first international gig in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg playhouse, a grand old theatre which houses the great Ivo van Hove’s relentlessly experimental Toneelgroep company. You could sense the unease from the hyper-cultured audience as we began. Nursed and nurtured as they were on radical deconstructions and conceptual reworkings, the sheer nudity and bareness was a shock. For a while, you could sense their feeling that this was all a trick, and that at a certain point a huge amount of scenery would swoop in and make an elaborate point about war or gender or corruption in FIFA. Then you followed their growing realisation that this is what it is, and instead of worrying about having to have an attitude about something extraneous to the play itself, they were simply being asked to watch the play. You could almost sense a letting go of tension, a shoulder-dropping freedom as they realised that an attitude was not required, simply a head and a heart. Their relief was palpable, and in Amsterdam and in Ystad they rose in exhilaration at the end.
We repaired to our Spartan hotel, which we filled with Hellenistic delirium. It was early in the tour, and the company were all cautiously careful about each other’s boundaries. There were no such worries between the company and the theatre staff, and boundaries were merrily crashed through. The scream of ‘Jacuzzi!’ went up, and everyone crowded into the one room with a functioning Jacuzzi and then all dived in. I didn’t because I was tiring rapidly, and because younger actors have the most absurd bodies and comparisons are odious, so sloped off to pass out. The next morning offered the pleasure of watching extreme hangovers meeting a Nordic breakfast. Gherkins, pickles and coleslaws have a disorienting effect on delicate stomachs.
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It was a determination of mine from the moment I arrived on Bankside that we would revive the first Globe’s practice of going on the road. It was time for the Globe to spread the word beyond the polygonal enclosure of its own walls. We travelled first on a circuit around the United Kingdom, then reached out to Europe, then to the USA, and now, with Hamlet, were covering as much of the planet as we could.
Why did we risk the dignity of a loved institution with this new endeavour? First, we were filling a hole. Touring Shakespeare had been a continuous tradition since the plays were written. These plays were made for walking, not for sitting at home, but when we began our touring, the tradition was withering on the vine. Companies that had toured for decades had decided to dump that tradition and ditch their audiences, without leaving so much as a note on the kitchen table. The holes we were filling were not just cement municipal theatres that have to be filled with product; they were holes in the stomachs of people who had grown up with an appetite for the unique food Shakespeare provides.
Shakespeare wrote for the rough and simultaneously sophisticated instrument of the Globe, and towards the end of his life with an eye to the indoor theatres and the new storytelling and technological advantages they offered. But he also had a constant memory of the melodramatic pulse of the older forms of storytelling. The rough magic of touring companies was hard-wired into his understanding of theatre. He wanted to adapt and grow those energies, but he did not want to extinguish them. Shakespeare was never crudely dismissive of these forms. His affection for the hard-nosed pros who drift through Hamlet is palpable, as it is for the rude mechanicals in Dream, and for the absurdly pretentious presentation of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s. Nor, though an artist, was he as po-faced about being an artist as many of those who have reinterpreted him. He made his art out of mud and laughter.
There’s a fashion in theatre now for creative elements to dub themselves theatre-makers. ‘I’m not an interpreter of plays; I’m a theatre-maker,’ they tell you rather shrilly. Fundamentally, this seems to mean they tell other people what to do, while they furrow their brows earnestly behind fashionable spectacles and practise some happening hand movements. Give them something to actually make – to sew, to clip together, to lift, to light, to attach – and they will break down in tears. Our touring shows had to be mountable and demountable within a couple of hours. Some of my sweetest moments in my time at the Globe were helping in that process. Then, when our stage management told me to go away because I was not helping, there was a similar pleasure in watching the economy of effort, the dexterity of hand and the skill of mind with which they completed their task. On beaches, in piazzas, in grand auditoria, in scruffy ones, they made a theatre each time. The simplicity of that, the purity in process, the truth in endless motion, is what our touring aimed to preserve.
Touring kept us honest. Our small-scale tours were the antidote to the institutional self-importance which being static can encase. If you are putting out chairs in a mud-sludged field, if you are improvising tickets for an insta-box-office from a book of raffle tickets, if you are dismantling a set as the rain pours down, it is hard to take yourself too seriously. However much you might try. We come into the theatre for the simple pleasure of giving joy and sharpening insight and honouring truth. It is easy to get diverted from that. We went on the road not only to risk our dignity, but actually to lose it. If you can’t risk your dignity, you are lost as an artistic institution, and if you can’t happily give it away, then you’re lost as a theatre. There was something about doing this barebones, back-of-a-van, booth Shakespeare, at that moment and onwards, that served as a two-fingered salute to those who would build a moat around his work.
There is still a gatekeeper mentality in much of the Shakespeare world. Gestures, extravagant ones often, are made towards accessibility and openness and internationalism. When faced with the reality of that openness – a reality presented by the Globe with its twenty years of tickets at £5 catering to many millions – the high priests of the Shakespeare