and to enjoy the bold ease of that. Again there were inhibitions. If you are not looking directly at someone, it is acting; if you are, it can feel like lying. They got over the other side of this and enjoyed the direct address, the clear engagement and the simple talking. There was a warm, happy energy in the room, and I noticed for the first time what lurks within the iambic rhythm – a hidden hope. As each gentle upturned stress occurred and passed from person to person, it pulsed a discreet energy into the speaker and listener, and beyond into the room. It gave a lift. I left the room in Addis Ababa with a better understanding of the nature of verse than I had achieved before. It is talking with invention, and with energy, and with a steady hope.
Just as each actor found their own way to make the scenes come alive, so they arrived at their own understanding of how to handle the verse. The seniors Keith, John and Miranda all had long years of Shakespeare with the RSC and others under their belts. The music was safely contained within them, so they could modulate delicately and freely within that music. Rawiri had much experience too, but a more declaratory style, which, together with his openness of face and heart, has a massive charm. Most of the young ones were finely tuned drama-school graduates who had an appetite for Shakespeare which was its own enchantment. There was a spectrum within their approach: Tommy has an easy conversational naturalness; Phoebe began as presenting a little more; Jen tended to the demure and the shy, and being the least experienced with the verse had the most to learn. But like any proper team of actors they lifted each other up. They watched each other and stole a little of this from him and copied a little of that from her. The last thing we wanted was an absolute consistency. A group of actors is not supposed to be a faceless unit; it is supposed to be a team of individuals, and by the end of rehearsals (thank the lord), a squad is what we had.
They needed to be. The conditions in which they made the play work over the next two years would have torn a fragile group to shreds and patches. I watched it in front of 200 ambassadors sitting at large desks in the UN; in front of a reluctant audience in Djibouti, with the waves of the Red Sea crashing loudly behind; to 2,000 restless students in an acoustic horror house in Phnom Penh; in a hotel ballroom in Hargeisa; in a tin shed in a Syrian refugee camp; and in a Roman amphitheatre in Amman. Everywhere they went, no matter the conditions, they tried to make the play come to life in front of whoever was watching. There were more extraordinary places I missed: 4,000 people crammed into a square outside a cathedral in Mérida, Yucatán; a roundabout in the rain in Bucharest; a bar in a Cameroon refugee camp; in a rock stadium before the crashing Pacific in Chile. Wherever they were, however impossible the conditions, or however speedy the set-up, they had each other, and they had the gentle support of each line of verse, its embedded rhythm tenderly placing a supporting palm on the base of their spines, the place where fear and exhaustion resides, and with the lightest touch it kept them upright and somehow kept them moving forward, into the story and towards the audience.
At one of the most difficult moments of the journey – one actor very ill, another about to lose a close relation, another nursing a great friend towards a young death, a stage manager having lost his mother-in-law, Paris having just suffered the Bataclan massacre which made everyone nervous about home, and with everyone blitzed by exhaustion – the tour for a moment looked threadbare and fragile. Everyone was finding ways of coping, but it was clear that we were not flying on full tanks. I wrote to them:
These are tough times. The play can help, your astonishing generosity to each other can help, the knowledge that you are doing something very special can help, the fact that beside all these personal heartbutts, and these more public tragedies, a lot of people are investing hope in what you are doing, that can help as well, but above all. . .
Be kind to each other, and keep putting one foot in front of another.
That is what Shakespeare’s plays teach us to do.
| 11 Belarus, Minsk Janka Kupala National Academic Theatre | 22 May 2014 |
| 12 Ukraine, Kiev Mystetskyi Arsenal | 24 May |
| 13 Moldova, Chisşinău National Teatrul ‘Eugène Ionesco | 27 May |
| 14 Romania, Bucharest St Anthony Square | 30–31 May |
| 15 Bulgaria, Varna Stoyan Bachvarov Dramatic Theatre | 3 June |
| 16 Macedonia, Skopje Macedonian National Theatre Macedonia, Bitola Heraclea Lyncestis | 5 June 6 June |
| 17 Albania, Tirana Teatri Kombètar | 7 June |
| 18 Kosovo, Pristina Teatri Kombètar | 10 June |
| 19 Montenegro, Podgorica Montenegrin National Theatre | 12 June |
| 20 Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo National Theatre | 15 June |
| 21 Croatia, Zagreb Zagreb Youth Theatre | 17 June |
| 22 Serbia, Belgrade National Theatre in Belgrade Serbia, Čortanovci Vila Stankovic | 18 June 19 June |
| 23 Hungary, Budapest Margaret Island Open-Air Theatre | 21 June |
| 24 Slovakia, Bratislava Slovak National Theatre | 24 June |
| 25 Czech Republic, Prague Prague Castle | 25–26 June |
| 26 Cyprus, Limassol Kourion Amphitheatre | 5 July |
3
SETTING OUT THROUGH THE BALTICS
HAMLET What players are they?
ROSENCRANTZ Even those you were wont to take delight in, the tragedians of the city.
Act 2, Scene 2
STANDING ON AN OLD WOODEN jetty washed grey-green by the sea in Ystad, in the south-eastern corner of Sweden. Murmurs burble from a nearby restaurant sitting on rotting stilts above the water, and small-town noises trickle towards the shore from the miniature metropolis. The quiet of the Baltic in front and the hills behind, as the sun goes down beyond them, is softly forceful. It is broken by the rude throat-clearing of a ferry’s foghorn as it sweeps into the harbour. Another ferry emerging from the port answers. They croak at each other cacophonously for a while. Sweden to Poland, and Poland to Sweden. The passage cuts a line across the Baltic Sea and the Hanseatic world, a stretch of water long used for trade, for war, and for travelling actors. It is easy to imagine from centuries past swifter and lighter vessels carrying a cargo of new stories from the London stage.
