all else, the actors must be kind. When we were casting at the Globe, we always enquired around about how an actor was to work with. The Globe was reliant on actors – not on directors or designers. Trust and goodwill, as well as quality, were paramount. Trust that your actor would show up on time, cover your back and give you what you needed on stage was at the heart of our work. The importance of trust, and goodwill, were maximised on this tour by the many other potential difficulties involved. We needed great actors, but beyond that we needed great people. Luckily, we got them.
There is a magical section – a montage – in the film The Sting when Paul Newman wanders around putting his old team of conmen back together. He surprises them in their present place of work, be it a bank or a bookies, and, appearing discreetly at the back of a crowd in their eyeline, touches his nose lightly or tips his hat to them. They immediately drop what they are doing, whatever it might be, to come and work with him. It is a witty visual hymn to the never-diminishing bonds of the team. The early part of our casting became a little like that, as we gathered together a core of trusted old friends. To share between them the senior roles – Claudius, Polonius, Gravedigger, Ghost, Priest, First Player and sundry old soldiers – we recruited three old friends who if not grizzled were battle hardened – John Dougall, Keith Bartlett, and the king of the Maori acting community, Rawiri Paratene. To play the several lines of younger men – Laertes, Marcellus, Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric and Fortinbras – there were two actors who had played already in our previous Hamlet tours of 2011 and 2012, Tommy Lawrence and Matt Romain, and another who had spent several summers with us, Beruce Khan. An actress who had played a previous tour, Miranda Foster, a thoroughbred, was keen to play Gertrude, the Player Queen and Second Gravedigger. Two further friends, actresses of enormous promise, Amanda Wilkin and Phoebe Fildes, came on board to play the Gertrude line, and the Ophelia line, and to cross gender lines as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Horatio. Four stage managers – Dave McEvoy, Adam Moore, Carrie Burnham and Becky Austin – miracles of industry and phlegm, were prepared and happy to put life on hold for a couple of years.
All these old allies had hard questions about the working of the tour, about the pay and the conditions and the security and the time off, which we answered. But given the length of the commitment, and the hole it would punch in their lives, the amount they took on trust was affirming. They knew it was an adventure, they trusted us, we tipped our hat to them, and they came on board. There was something magical in their leap into the dark, something close to the heart of being in the theatre. Running away to join the circus is a cliché, but it has an application beyond Pinocchio – freedom, movement and independence are its essence.
We had three more members of the squad to find – a further young actress, Jennifer Leong, who came recommended by a brilliant Cantonese company we had worked with from Hong Kong. And our two Hamlets. We explored a number of options in our heads for who to go after, but finally resolved that discovery would be the best route, to find young and new actors. Unknown quantities who would bring the excitement at being there and the openness that was at the heart of the show. We met a few, and were beginning to worry, when Ladi Emeruwa, an actor recently out of drama school, sent in a tape of himself doing a speech of Brutus. It was clear, and it was eloquent, and he was alive within the thought. He was soon on board. Naeem Hayat had played at the Globe in our Sam Wanamaker Festival, with a short chunk of Richard III. There was something indefinably compelling about him – he seemed to be able to sit in the middle of the maelstrom of the role and to be at the same time on a mountain looking down on it. We met him, he read beautifully, and he was in. The fact that both our Hamlets were not white, the fact that half the company were non-white, occasioned some comment but for us was as natural as walking into a brighter room.
All groups that set out on any journey in the cause of Shakespeare live in the shadow of one set of names. In the First Folio, in a loving act of remembering and claiming, one of the early pages is headed The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes. An act of remembering, because many of these actors had died by the time the Folio went to press, including the author, Shakespeare, and the company’s brightest star, Burbage. An act of claiming, because the Folio was put together by two of that company, Heminges and Condell. Their loyalty for their old muckers breathes through the list. Those names – solid, yeoman English names, sturdy as the oak of the Globe – are: William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, William Kempe, Thomas Pope (unfortunately spelt Poope for posterity), George Bryan, Henry Condell, William Sly, Richard Cowly, John Lowin, Samuel Cross, Alexander Cook, William Ostler, Samuel Gilbourne, Robert Armin, Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Robert Gough, Richard Robinson, John Shanke, John Rice. A different England talks through that list – fields and woods and cooks and tailors and early churches and market crosses – and through those tough Anglo-Saxon consonants. These are not names from the upper classes either; these are from trade and from soil. The names that have adorned playbills and programmes ever since are many and various, but we were happy that our list of names reflected a modern and a changed England. In no particular order, they were Amanda Wilkin, Becky Austin, Beruce Khan, Keith Bartlett, Rawiri Paratene, John Dougall, Adam Moore, Ladi Emeruwa, Carrie Burnham, Jennifer Leong, Tommy Lawrence, Phoebe Fildes, Naeem Hayat, Dave McEvoy, Miranda Foster and Matt Romain. A different world, and worthy names to send out into it.
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The meet-and-greet before the first day of rehearsals was aglow with excitement, the company and the Globe staff giddy with the future. With many of these large ideas, no one ever quite believes it is going to take place until you gather together in a large room and it becomes intimidatingly actual. The feeling of jumping off the cliff into the unknown promotes a sort of hysteria, like a children’s birthday party after the lemonade has been guzzled. I do my bit with the world map and say some words. After most of the staff have gone, I invoke the old Russian habit of a moment of silence before a long journey. We sit in a circle, quiet in our thoughts and starting to register the size of what is ahead of us. Nothing particularly magical happens, but it is a sound way of expelling some of the hysteria and settling people back into themselves before rehearsals begin.
Five weeks later, and only five weeks to rehearse a host of different versions of the casting, plus a lot of music, plus a dumb-show and a jig, five weeks and we were ready to do our first performances at the Middle Temple. This ancient building, in the heart of legal London, was the room where the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place in 1602. We thought it a propitious place to preview the show before starting in the Globe. It proved tougher than we would have hoped. The room has a gravy brown-ness which makes it feel like acting in soup, the acoustic is rough, and we had to play in a very odd traverse shape, which made it hard to know where to pitch the play. The response from the audience was a bit ho-hum. This disheartened some of the company, who I think had assumed the quality of the show would automatically mirror the ambition of the endeavour. The one doesn’t necessarily follow the other. However, I was heartened. The show was there, the story was told, and it had a gracious modesty in the world. Too great an immediate success would have induced a grandiosity, which would have been a nightmare to tour. ‘See, see how great we are’ is not an attitude to take on the road – it’s not an attitude for anything really. We wouldn’t want to, in that acerbic Dublin phrase, ‘Give ourselves a big welcome’. The tread of the show along the road needed to be gentle and hopeful.
The next week we opened at the Globe, and the first performance on 23 April went through the roof. The first show of a Globe season always has a giddiness, and with the prospect of the journey beyond, it went into overdrive. Hysterical laughter, rounds of applause and a huge shout-out at the end. In truth, the show was still rocky, and the actors didn’t quite know how to handle the enthusiasm sweeping the room. They played three more at the Globe and were able to wrestle it into shape. They were also able to store within themselves the nuclear-strength goodwill that the Globe is able to generate, a radioactive glow that would keep them warm for months ahead. The show was not perfect, but it worked. It told the story, it carried the language and delivered it, and it presented the life within the story. This is not always what people mean by theatre these
