Hamlet: Globe to Globe. Dominic Dromgoole
of impermanence briefly held. This requires truthful acting, alive to each moment as it comes, not trying to force it into a scheme. Actors can be eager for patterns to help decipher plays, and audiences as well. It takes discipline to resist the inclination to fall into the seductive falsehood of patterns, and to stay true to the wonderful inconsequentiality of life. But when every detail is animated, then we start to warrant that life – not speeches, or ideas, or patterns – is at the heart of the mystery of each play.
Our actors were up for this, and relished the responsibility. The extra challenge was not just embodying the feeling of the scene, but expressing it with nothing to help as a visual signifier. Without scenery, their bodies had to do rampart, or throne room, or closet, or graveyard. Each of them expressed with a different physical energy: Ladi was a boxer briefly, and has some of that watchfulness; Rawiri is all buffo comedy and prop-forward, bull-like energy; Miranda has a proscenium grace; Jen is a slip of a thing and looks like a delicate blossom. It was impossible to force them all to be the same, or to adopt a unified movement scheme, without bleeding the democracy and humanity out of the event. Each in their own way learnt how to occupy the empty space and fill it with their own imagination. And thus, with theatre’s natural complicity, ours.
As well as the life of a play, it is important to seek out its wit. This is not a matter of looking for laughs; it is finding the irony and the comic sense of each particular play and releasing it. When you get to know a new friend, you spend a little time winkling out their humour, finding out what sparks the twinkle in their eye (if you find nothing, then walk away); in the same way, you look for what curls the smile of a play. There was not far to look with Hamlet. No clown appears until the arrival of the Gravediggers, but up to that point an abundance of humour has spilt from the Prince himself. To a degree, he is the fool who is missing from his own play.
His very first line, ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’, is a thousand things, but it is also a serviceable gag. It is clear from his first engagements with Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that their friendships are based on sparring wit and competitive funnies. Hamlet himself is a bright generous wit, throwaway pearls spilling out of him. Compare him with any of the other major tragic figures. A night of Live at the Apollo with a bill of Lear, Othello, Anthony, Coriolanus and Macbeth would be big on heckles and short on laughs. But Hamlet could hold his own. Especially if his wit is played as giveaway and involuntary as it should be. If it settles into mordancy or sarcasm, then you’ve got someone telling you he’s the most intelligent person in the room, and we can all go home.
Humour ripples through the play. Polonius is a comic creation whose speeches have a not-entirely-under-the-character’s-control Shavian irony. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern travel a darkly comic journey from two enthusiastic boobies on a free holiday, to the heart of a corroding state, and on to their eventual deaths. Hamlet gives some of the best comic advice ever delivered to the Players, so he is clearly not only fun in himself, but a student of comedy. The play within the play, or at least the lines that Hamlet has written with some clumsy moral lessons for his mother, are so eye-wateringly bad, their intention must be humorous.
When the clowns do arrive in the form of the Gravediggers, they have deliverable material and a deadpan vaudeville exchange with Hamlet worthy of a partnership that has worked long years round the provinces. When Hamlet is brought face to face with death, it is with the skull of a comedian. It is the death of laughter that he registers as the most switching irony:
Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now. . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
It is a vivid and abiding image – a boy shrieking with laughter charging around on the back of a clown. It is a laughter that has gone now, but we know it was once there.
Even after this episode, the humour has not gone from the play, since right at the death Shakespeare throws on the campest and most ludicrous colour in the play, the flamboyant and futile Osric. This is not an inexorable tonal drift towards death; this is a sudden firework display of character comedy. At exactly the wrong moment. Shakespeare doesn’t just pull the rug of expectation away, he exposes the bottomless pit beneath it – the Chekhovian existential pit that always opens up when you get stuck with a weapons-grade bore.
Observing these things in rehearsal, delighting in the comic invention and observation the actors brought to the room, was not playing it for laughs, it was observing what is there, and allowing it to breathe. It oxygenated the room and allowed us to understand more of the play. It released the relationships and hence some of the pain at its centre. It ran counter to an imposed orthodoxy about how tragedies should be remorselessly tragic, but the Globe, I’m glad to say, had always bucked that orthodoxy. Happily, it had always been at war with all that Victorian crapola about suffering being allied to virtue, seriousness being good for you, and joy bad.
A year or so later, I was completely lost in Addis Ababa, a town of swirling complexity which defies conventional map-reading. I ended up walking along a motorway for a while, then speared off into what I took to be a park. Somehow I found myself in the presidential compound. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by dogs and men with guns, all shouting and barking with enthusiasm at the shambling foreigner. They saw me off. The compound, a sprawl of manicured acres, sat high on a hill looking out over a wide vista of tin slums, wooden sheds and half-built/half-broken blocks. Starving figures sat propped against the railings on the other side of the road. There was something obscene and desperate about the contrast. ‘You have to laugh,’ I thought aimlessly to myself, a bit of Somerset wisdom which has never left me. Just as I thought it, I looked up to see a roadside billboard garishly advertising ‘The First Indigenous Laughter School in Africa’. It was presided over by the World Laughter Master, Belachew Girma, a man who has broken all known records for continuous laughter. Research revealed that he holds regular classes to teach people how to laugh continuously for hours on end. Ethiopia’s very own Yorrick. I have thought of him every time since, whenever I encounter the po-faced sternness of those who say that tragedies must be tragedies and laughter can never walk through them.
The attitude is not just about laughter; it is more about spirit. Listen to the energy in that ‘Speak the speech’ exhortation. This is not a moany boy; it is an exhilarated fire of breathless anticipation falling out of a hot-wired brain. It is an instruction for acting generally, but also for this play in particular. It is a call for wit and brio – the French cavalry cry of ‘À l’attaque!’ In a 1960’s arts programme, an unashamedly old-fashioned bit of television, Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole discuss Hamlet, quaffing whisky and chain-smoking cigarettes with sixties cool. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the principal fact about Hamlet is that he is a ‘genius’. Where Othello’s central characteristic is that he is a black man in a white man’s world, King Lear’s that he is a tyrant and a bad father, Anthony’s an old soldier, Hamlet’s is that he is a bona fide genius. A Mozartian prodigy of thought and feeling, out of step with his own world, who cannot help spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, but a true one, and a significant instruction for the whole play.
Central to the playing is the way we handle the verse. Much has been written, much spoken and much argued over in relation to how best to treat Shakespeare’s verse. On the one hand there are the iambic fundamentalists, who believe passionately that every foot (two syllables) should be stressed the same way with a clean de-dum stress on the second syllable at all times, and that the end of every line should be given a light pause. At the other end of the spectrum are those who don’t give a toss, and who mutter, shout and maul the verse in any way they like. Both are criminal, the latter deserving of a longer sentence. In the middle is our resident guru at the Globe, Giles Block, who believes that the stresses are flexible, that there is a form in the verse, and that observing that form, and its hidden music, is the best way to understand the intentions behind the thought.
A year later, and a long way from the Globe, I was sitting in a nomadic tent in Hargeisa, being taught the many forms of Somali verse. The highest literary poetry,