was being played by an English actor, Julian Glover, rather than by the Mayor of Gdańsk, who would seem to have had a better claim on the role. No matter; Julian made his way out of the audience, not without some difficulty through the smoke, to accept our company’s petition.
Shortly thereafter came the much-heralded banquet: a chance for people to enjoy food and wine and celebrate the new theatre. They still wanted to show off some of their new technology, so the hydraulic system became a dumb waiter. Traps were pulled away magically, engines whirred into motion, and from below the stage appeared tables laden with tucker. To everyone’s surprise, in the middle of the tables there was a naked lady painted gold. She was posed in what in yogic terms is described, I think, as the downward dog, and was wearing an impressive headdress. This we were told was Nefertiti come to bless the feast. She was surrounded by sandwiches, and sandwiches which had been made several hours before. The sight of a naked Nefertiti surrounded by sarnies, curling slightly at the edges, was too much for some of our company, who started to get a little hysterical.
The next day, our performance was something of a lost cause. The actors were game as ever, but the theatre felt like a new car, the sightlines were beyond hopeless for many, and the audience was full of people from the UK whom we do our best to avoid in London, let alone Gdańsk. They sat there with a sour incomprehension, wondering when something so simple was going to stop being so simple. Happily sitting on one end of the front row was Andrzei Wajda, the great Polish film director, and a personal hero, now sadly deceased. An impish 88-year-old, he beamed and gasped and chuckled his delight, and was full of a straightforward and acute appreciation afterwards. ‘Shakespeare as it was, Shakespeare as it should be,’ he said. We settled for that.
| 27 Iceland, Reykjavík Harpa | 23 July 2014 |
| 28 USA, Washington Folger Shakespeare Library | 25–26 July |
| USA, Chicago Chicago Shakespeare Theater | 28–30 July |
| USA, New York UN Building | 4 August |
| 29 Canada, Prescott St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival | 2 August |
| 30 Bahamas, Nassau Dundas Centre for Performing Arts | 5 August |
| 31 Cuba, Havana Teatro Mella | 7 August |
| 32 Mexico, Mérida Explanada de la Catedral de Yucatán | 9 August |
| 33 Belize, Belize City Bliss Centre for Performing Arts | 12 August |
| 34 Guatemala, Antigua Guatemala Santo Domingo del Cerro Cultural Park | 14 August |
| 35 Honduras, Copán Copán Ruins | 16 August |
| 36 El Salvador, San Salvador Teatro Nacional de El Salvador | 19 August |
| 37 Nicaragua, Managua Teatro Nacional Rubén Darío | 21 August |
4
WORDS AND WALLS IN MITTELEUROPA
POLONIUS What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET Words, words, words.
Act 2, Scene 2
PRAGUE, AND THE NIGHT WAS chilling fast, amply threatened by bulging storm clouds rolling towards us across the central European plain. We were in a misshapen courtyard, cobbled together by history, a medieval turret in one corner, a dull communist block of concrete in another, a chic cafe beneath a spreading oak in a third. Seven hundred Czechs and a few British expats were waiting in excitement on plastic garden furniture, wrapped in blankets and polythene sheets. We had found our way there through curving byways, up and down the vertiginous slopes of Prague Castle, shaded by the baroque excess of St Vitus Cathedral. Everyone gazed towards a viciously overlit wall.
Having sloped and slipped through the fairy-tale windings of Prague, it was a strangely blockish site to be presented with. But there was something arresting about it. Crude arc lights hit the wall hard and heightened its irregularity, its bulges, and its unevenness. Its irregularity threw out questions. Why does this uniform plane of brick give way to these bursts of concrete? An architectural revision crudely achieved? A twentieth-century bomb dropped from the air? An antique cannon blast from the plain below? And why is this tier of piled-up sandstone capped by a higher tier of more perpendicular carved masonry? Had it been a garden wall that had then become a castle rampart? Had new stone suddenly become available, which was thought to be more robust? Beyond the questions, there was the pleasure of the sight itself. A lovely dance of greys, off-whites and fauns, all stitched together by the streaks of dirty brown, the rusty dribs and drabs that centuries of rain effect on stone. It felt possible in imagination to run one’s fingers over its different surfaces. Smooth planed stone here, corrugated brick there, crumbly concrete above, stubbly rock below. A sensual pleasure achieved so completely by accident and history.
It was hard to look at the wall and not try to deduce what had happened in front of it. Prague is the ultimate Mitteleuropean crossroads of history where since Roman times and before, east and west and north and south have met and fucked or fought. Where chiefs and kings and emperors and despots have played ‘I’m the king of the castle’. Prague has a pastel prettiness which surrounds the playing of that game with a gilded frame. It heightens the sense of man enacting history while having a knowing sense of its actual fiction. The towering castle-capped hills serve as a backdrop before which people stage their odd show. Sometimes history feels real, plugging away at life in an industrial town in a valley; sometimes it feels unreal, storming up or fleeing down the hills of Prague.
Beside me sat the Czech Republic’s leading Shakespearean, a scholar who had translated every one of Shakespeare’s plays into Czech and whose versions were still respected and used. We had met at a reception earlier, and his enthusiasm for our arrival was humbling. A gentle courteous soul, he bore the scars of his country’s complicated history with a light grace. It was impossible not to warm to him and not to feel embarrassed by his excitement at our being there. Warmth radiated from him as if Shakespeare had entered the room. It feels churlish in the circumstances to say that the Globe in London is only a little more real than any of the others in the world, and that our actors are not ordained with any special Shakespearean-ness; they are just hard-working pros who have done a lot.
He sat beside me, and I briefly apostrophised the wall in front of us. Thankfully he didn’t treat me as mad, or laugh at me as a recreation of Brick Tamland in Anchorman – ‘Wall! I love wall!’ – but gently sketched in a little history.
‘Much history has happened in front of this wall. . . much cruelty. . . before this piece [pointing to some air in front of one section] for 200 years people were executed, hung and er. . . quartered and drawn as you say. . . the crowds would gather where we are now sitting. . . in front of this section [waving at some more pregnant emptiness] there was a prison where for many
