Fourth Act to England, which is in a client relationship with Denmark. He escapes his fate there through the intercession of some pirates, and pirates are the first and last word in internationalism. This is not a narrow or insular play. It is in its geography a Hanseatic play, a league of countries surrounding the Baltic, held together by trade, by conquest, and for a short while by the touring chutzpah and ambition of English actors. We are following an old cultural drove road.
In about 1600, the first theatre was constructed in Poland. A former fencing school in what is now Gdańsk (then Danzig), it was converted to host professional players from London. A rectangular courtyard space open to the elements, modelled on the Fortune Theatre in Clerkenwell, it proved popular with the locals, and audiences flocked in. The traditional practice was for these English companies to petition the local mayor, requesting permission to play. Copies of these petitions to the mayor of Gdańsk are extant and provide evidence of the touring tradition. They are fawning in tone but shot through with the deal-making toughness of men who know their own worth. There are moans about the rain at recent performances, negotiations over ticket pricing, and accounts of having to improvise venues at the last minute when the plague would not allow access to the fencing school (our Hamlet tour had to skirt West Africa for similar reasons).
In a classic bid to reassure the burgomasters, they plead: ‘Our entertainment will be so modest and polite that nobody will be offended by it; on the contrary, there will be all manner of instruction for everyday life to be gained.’ It sounds like an application to the Arts Council stressing educational value. Permits were often refused, with forbidding words about how taxes weren’t paid on the last visit, and sometimes granted, though accompanied with dire warnings about the fines that would follow excessive fly-posting. These petitions form a sweet testament to how little has changed over the intervening centuries: making and staging theatre is still an odd blend of flashy bombast, pragmatic horse-trading and naked begging.
Shakespeare and his colleagues’ approach to the international market was a large part of the London theatre scene in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare’s world was a genuinely European one, both in its ambitions for its work and in its audience at home. London was a city teeming with overseas visitors; Shakespeare himself boarded near the Blackfriars Theatre with a French family. Most of our knowledge of the layout of the Globe comes from a diary entry by a Swiss tourist, Thomas Platter, and a sketch of the Swan theatre by a Dutchman, Johannes de Witt. The Globe has always had a reciprocal relationship with the wider world, accepting audiences at home and travelling out to meet them.
* * *
It used to be taken as read that the early modern acting companies upped sticks and left London to go on the road because of the plague. That, and the rage and contempt of the city fathers. There’s truth in both, but there is now ample evidence that touring carried on when the London theatres were open and healthy, and that companies ran an extensive touring programme alongside their building-based work.
Why tour? First, money. There was an audience of hungry citizens unable to come to London to be entertained. There were also wealthy parochial patrons eager to impress client networks and posh neighbours with shows they could sponsor and present. Money, and making it, is the most original practice of all. This is hard to credit in our day, full of shyly presented outreach programmes so stuffed with proof of virtue and condescending good works that mischief and fun (the motors of all good drama) hardly get a look in. Equally defeatist is our glum expectation that people deserve a medal for playing in ‘the provinces’, an expectation fuelled by a snobbish centralisation of artistic legitimacy. Within such contemporary contexts, it is impossible to get our heads around the confidence and desire with which these companies would travel. They didn’t arrive timidly in the hope that an audience might show up, promising workshops and Q&As as an inducement; they kicked the door down, saying, ‘We’re here! Come and get it. We’re going to shag some story into you.’
Touring was in these people’s blood. For several hundred years, British theatre was touring. The fun palaces built in London in the 1570s and 1580s were Johnny-come-lately edifices. For centuries, British theatre had improvised stage realities, conjuring up Christian ritual in the courtyard of an inn, ancient Rome on booth stages in market squares, and English history at one end of a Guild Hall. Theatres were made not from wood and brick and plaster, but from the collaborating imagination and willpower of actors and audiences.
Shakespeare’s own company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were a touring company long before they found a home. 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.
* * *
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
