Hamlet: Globe to Globe. Dominic Dromgoole

      2

      HONOURING THE UPBEAT

      HAMLET Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. . .

      Act 3, Scene 2

      ‘GOOD MORNING, MR PRESIDENT. WELCOME to the Globe!’ I say from the stage. From down in the yard, a confident, low and strong ‘Good morning!’ comes back at me. Having played to no shortage of prime ministers and presidents over two years of journeying, we have now landed the Big Kahuna. The least-disappointing man in the world, Barack Obama, stands in the yard of the Globe. He is on a quick visit to London, and to honour Shakespeare’s birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death he is paying us a visit. It is the end of our tour, and before we start a final weekend of performances we are giving a quick private turn. A security cordon has shut down the whole of Southwark, helicopters hover noisily above, and a liberal scattering of terrifying men with big guns sets no one at their ease. But in the theatre it is early spring and fresh, and the company are backing me with music as I say briefly who we are and what we do. Then Matt Romain tears into Hamlet’s advice to the Players, delivered straight to President Obama:

      Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. . . Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

      The Hamlets have been instructed when they soliloquise to quash their fears and talk straight at the President, to give an impression of the Globe’s direct communication. After the performance, he joins us on stage – as relaxed, warm and direct as one might imagine – and talks Shakespeare. I ask him if he has ever acted, and he comes straight back with ‘Have I ever acted? I act every single day. Every time I go down to Congress, I’m acting. When I sit down with certain world leaders, I have to do a lot of acting.’ It’s done with laconic timing, and with a surprising frankness before a group of actors he has never met. I decide to test his humour.

      ‘It’s great that Matt delivered “Speak the speech” straight at you, because it’s quite a lesson in oratory. . .’

      ‘Yes, indeed, there were a few tips I could take from that,’ he conceded.

      ‘Well, let’s face it, you certainly need them,’ I deadpanned.

      There was a spilt-second of glint in his eye, a flash of ‘who the hell is this guy?’, and then a big laugh. Whatever admiration we felt – off the scale already – flipped into overdrive. The President could take a tease.

      * * *

      These words, Hamlet’s celebrated advice to the Players, delivered before they perform his lamentable play, are, of course, lessons in acting rather than oratory. They are the prayer offered up by every playwright on the eve of each first night since. They can be brutally compressed into ‘Oh, please, stop acting and just say the fucking lines.’ Ever since first spoken on the Globe stage by Richard Burbage in 1601, they have been the ultimate rule book, which generation after generation of actors since, have done their level best to ignore. These words imprinted on their minds, they have walked off in the opposite direction and carried on mouthing, sawing, whirlwinding, o’erstepping and overdoing as if their lives depended on it. People treat these injunctions as if they were specific to the sins of Elizabethan actors. They are not; they are a perennial. Rehearsals for the last four centuries have often been simply a matter of returning and returning to their wisdom.

      At the heart of the speech is a cri de coeur for respect for the ‘modesty of nature’. The world is not full of people trembling or gnashing their teeth; it is full of people being. Nor of people muttering and mumbling either, sitting on the back foot and undercutting the energy of others. It is naturalness that is wanted – the same apportioned and appropriate energy we give to life is what we want to see on stage. Holding ‘the mirror up to nature’ is often quoted as if it means being studiedly contemporary, reporting on the world and trying to emulate what newspapers do; it is not. It is about being judicious and true in the playing of people and relationships; it is about being unforced and unaffected in the speaking of language. If that is played true to humans in the world, the form and pressure of the time will naturally make itself felt.

      How do you create a rehearsal room so these things can happen? First, you make the room sharp: not clever, not necessarily wise, but certainly sharp. A room that is dull of wit will lead to a dull show. The wit, the insight, the spark of thought and imagination that is in the room will appear on the stage. This does not mean casting people who have university degrees. Nothing wrong with them, but they are not a necessity. It means casting people with emotional intelligence, with street-smart wit, and with an understanding of how language works in the space between people. Fill a room up with smart people and the play gets smart. Fill it with dullards – even if they’ve all got firsts from top universities – and you’re stuffed.

      Before anything else, you read the play, sit round a table and make sure of one thing: that everyone understands every single word of each scene they are in. There is nothing more depressing than a stage of actors who have no idea what is coming out of other people’s mouths, nor even sometimes their own. This happens not