car with balloons on it. A car that works ferries people from A to Z, conveying them from where they begin to a different place, and along the way it shows them scenery, whether beautiful, sad or strange. A lot of theatre these days seems to be watching a car festooned with balloons explode, then bursting into applause and waiting for a blogger to deconstruct the event. Having been taken nowhere. Our show didn’t dazzle or explode, but it worked.
And it felt ready to wander.
* * *
The other question thrown up by those two words, ‘Who’s there?’, is of course one of identity. That felt more pertinent than ever as we headed out into the world of 2014. We were walking into a world of awkward and uneasy identity. In the West there was a blaze of issues and confusions around identity politics. These sometimes seem like the invention of a crisis by those who have too much time to invent crises, and sometimes seem like the freshest political thinking in the world. Beyond the West, it seemed that everywhere was re-inventing itself, that the spread of lifestyle and choice and ideologies promulgated by the internet was eroding old distinctions. Beyond the ambassadors appearing at our breakfast and exaggerating their own differences, it felt like the broader population were starting to melt theirs, to share and to collaborate in creating new personal choices. There are minorities who cling all the more fiercely to their distinctive identities, white supremacists and Islamic jihadists most noticeably, but they often seem to cling to anachronisms so fiercely because they can see the tide flowing so ineluctably in the opposite direction.
Stephen Greenblatt in his brilliant Renaissance Self-Fashioning discusses the cultural moment both before and during Shakespeare’s life when the idea of a ‘self’ began to be considered, and the modes within which it was influenced. While recognising that the Renaissance period experienced a change in social and psychological structures, he throws a spotlight on how structures of power worked to impose forms of control on people as they were attempting to forge their own identities. In his pursuit of how identities are formed, he asks to what degree we are autonomous in the fashioning of our selves, and to what degree we are in thrall to the social contexts which surround us. The writing of his book was informed by the pessimism of America as it recovered from the Vietnam War, from Watergate and from the overwhelming sense that government and the corporate powerful were attempting to control the nature of individuals’ selves. His conclusion was that no matter how much control we think we have, our identities are formed through culture, its hierarchies, its systems and ideologies. Autonomy is denied: ‘in all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity’.
How much more is this the case now? The internet, and particularly social media, often appears to be one big forum for bullying people into shapes. Personality itself sometimes seems to be little more than a fashion, an aggregation which changes daily of what it is to be cool and in the moment, an aggregation which changes with such swiftness that to swim within its swirling currents is a deadly business. The only law within this shifting norm is that you have to stay within it, however its styling may change from one moment to the next. And that anyone will be punished, and publicly, for stepping outside its crushing conformities. The speed with which the crowd punishes those who do not share those norms is terrifying, even though the very nature of self surely demands their rejection.
How positive it felt, then, to send Hamlet out into this environment, a young man, under pressure, frantically trying to forge a new identity in opposition to the context that surrounds him. To send him out into a world of queasily shifting identities, the hero of all heroes who worried most consistently over the ongoing creation of himself. Not to provide any answers but to keep asking the question, ‘Who’s there?’
| 2 Netherlands, Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg | 29–30 April 2014 |
| 3 Germany, Bremen Bremer Shakespeare Company Germany, Wittenberg Phönix Theaterwelt | 2 May 3 May |
| 4 Norway, Tromsø KulturHuset | 6 May |
| 5 Sweden, Ystad Ystads Teater | 8 May |
| 6 Finland, Turku Åbo Svenska Teater | 10 May |
| 7 Russia, Moscow Mayakovsky Theatre | 13–14 May |
| 8 Estonia, Tallinn Linnateater Estonia, Tartu Vanemuine | 16 May 17 May |
| 9 Latvia, Rīga Dailes Teātris | 19 May |
| 10 Lithuania, Vilnius Palace of the Grand Dukes | 20 May |
2
HONOURING THE UPBEAT
HAMLET Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. . .
Act 3, Scene 2
‘GOOD MORNING, MR PRESIDENT. WELCOME to the Globe!’ I say from the stage. From down in the yard, a confident, low and strong ‘Good morning!’ comes back at me. Having played to no shortage of prime ministers and presidents over two years of journeying, we have now landed the Big Kahuna. The least-disappointing man in the world, Barack Obama, stands in the yard of the Globe. He is on a quick visit to London, and to honour Shakespeare’s birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death he is paying us a visit. It is the end of our tour, and before we start a final weekend of performances we are giving a quick private turn. A security cordon has shut down the whole of Southwark, helicopters hover noisily above, and a liberal scattering of terrifying men with big guns sets no one at their ease. But in the theatre it is early spring and fresh, and the company are backing me with music as I say briefly who we are and what we do. Then Matt Romain tears into Hamlet’s advice to the Players, delivered straight to President Obama:
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. . . Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
The Hamlets have been instructed when they soliloquise to quash their fears and talk straight at the President, to give an impression of the Globe’s direct communication. After the performance, he joins us on stage – as relaxed, warm and direct as one might imagine – and talks Shakespeare. I ask him if he has ever acted, and he comes straight back with ‘Have I ever acted? I act every single day. Every time I go down to Congress, I’m acting. When I sit down with certain world leaders, I have to do a lot of acting.’ It’s done with laconic timing, and with a surprising frankness before a group of actors he has never met. I decide to test his humour.
