these things in rehearsal, delighting in the comic invention and observation the actors brought to the room, was not playing it for laughs, it was observing what is there, and allowing it to breathe. It oxygenated the room and allowed us to understand more of the play. It released the relationships and hence some of the pain at its centre. It ran counter to an imposed orthodoxy about how tragedies should be remorselessly tragic, but the Globe, I’m glad to say, had always bucked that orthodoxy. Happily, it had always been at war with all that Victorian crapola about suffering being allied to virtue, seriousness being good for you, and joy bad.
A year or so later, I was completely lost in Addis Ababa, a town of swirling complexity which defies conventional map-reading. I ended up walking along a motorway for a while, then speared off into what I took to be a park. Somehow I found myself in the presidential compound. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by dogs and men with guns, all shouting and barking with enthusiasm at the shambling foreigner. They saw me off. The compound, a sprawl of manicured acres, sat high on a hill looking out over a wide vista of tin slums, wooden sheds and half-built/half-broken blocks. Starving figures sat propped against the railings on the other side of the road. There was something obscene and desperate about the contrast. ‘You have to laugh,’ I thought aimlessly to myself, a bit of Somerset wisdom which has never left me. Just as I thought it, I looked up to see a roadside billboard garishly advertising ‘The First Indigenous Laughter School in Africa’. It was presided over by the World Laughter Master, Belachew Girma, a man who has broken all known records for continuous laughter. Research revealed that he holds regular classes to teach people how to laugh continuously for hours on end. Ethiopia’s very own Yorrick. I have thought of him every time since, whenever I encounter the po-faced sternness of those who say that tragedies must be tragedies and laughter can never walk through them.
The attitude is not just about laughter; it is more about spirit. Listen to the energy in that ‘Speak the speech’ exhortation. This is not a moany boy; it is an exhilarated fire of breathless anticipation falling out of a hot-wired brain. It is an instruction for acting generally, but also for this play in particular. It is a call for wit and brio – the French cavalry cry of ‘À l’attaque!’ In a 1960’s arts programme, an unashamedly old-fashioned bit of television, Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole discuss Hamlet, quaffing whisky and chain-smoking cigarettes with sixties cool. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the principal fact about Hamlet is that he is a ‘genius’. Where Othello’s central characteristic is that he is a black man in a white man’s world, King Lear’s that he is a tyrant and a bad father, Anthony’s an old soldier, Hamlet’s is that he is a bona fide genius. A Mozartian prodigy of thought and feeling, out of step with his own world, who cannot help spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, but a true one, and a significant instruction for the whole play.
Central to the playing is the way we handle the verse. Much has been written, much spoken and much argued over in relation to how best to treat Shakespeare’s verse. On the one hand there are the iambic fundamentalists, who believe passionately that every foot (two syllables) should be stressed the same way with a clean de-dum stress on the second syllable at all times, and that the end of every line should be given a light pause. At the other end of the spectrum are those who don’t give a toss, and who mutter, shout and maul the verse in any way they like. Both are criminal, the latter deserving of a longer sentence. In the middle is our resident guru at the Globe, Giles Block, who believes that the stresses are flexible, that there is a form in the verse, and that observing that form, and its hidden music, is the best way to understand the intentions behind the thought.
A year later, and a long way from the Globe, I was sitting in a nomadic tent in Hargeisa, being taught the many forms of Somali verse. The highest literary poetry, as exemplified by their leading poet Hadrawi, is called Gabri, with a sophisticated metrical system and definite rules of scansion. There is another form for warriors on horses, a form that follows the movement of the horse; a poetry for putting up a house; one for women for weaving; another for taking camels to water; even a specific form for milking goats. Each form you can recite for hours on end to entertain and entrance yourself while you sink into the rhythm of words and work together. Some experts say of Shakespeare’s iambic verse that it relates to footfall, and to our natural pace of walking; some that it has an intimate relationship with the heartbeat; and others with the pace at which we breathe. Whichever, what is plainly apparent, and made clear in the variety of Somali forms, is that there is a physiological relationship between verse and our bodies. It does not live only in our heads; it relates to how we move and how we live.
There are Somali forms for courtship, where potential lovers meet and recite to each other. They compete with rival lovers for who is the best within that verse form. They test companionship of soul and sex with potential partners through how well rhythms and inventiveness commingle. It was thrilling to hear these examples from a culture that is still genuinely oral, just as it was in Shakespeare’s day. President Obama himself talked of the similarities between Shakespeare and rap, and how the new Broadway hit Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda is Shakespearean in its verbal inventiveness and in its scope. Rap is a great indicator for Shakespeare in the freedom it affords. It has a matrix of musical rules, which are there not to inhibit, but to release. Rhyming in rap, as in Shakespeare, is there not to make people freeze, but to delight in language and its possibilities.
As far as possible, I remain a verse agnostic, not adhering to any particular system. What matters is that there is clarity and wholeness in the saying of the verse. That the energy is the sound of something flying swift and bright past you, fast as a kingfisher on a bright summer’s day, that makes you want to follow it, join it and buckle yourself to it. The complexity in the language is something to be relished – it is forged from brightness and excitement.
Actors get that or they don’t. Some can hear the pitch and the music of a play, almost as if they have a mystic sense, some clue to the red shift in the life of the writer which occasioned the particular music of the play. As if they can hear that event, whatever it was, and understand how energy is still rippling out from it. It is impossible to teach; it is something innate in the stomach of the actor. They can hear it from each other and imitate it as they would learn a song, but it can’t be taught. John Dougall, whom I have worked with often, is an actor of this sort. I have usually cast him in the early scenes of a play, so that throughout rehearsals, at the read-through, when people first stand up, when they first do runs, at the dress and on the first night, he has hit the right groove and, like a tuning fork, set a tone and a pitch for others to follow.
I have a physical allergy to attending workshops of any kind, and almost go into anaphylactic shock at the prospect of running one. However, about halfway through the tour, I was bullied into doing one in Ethiopia at their National Theatre. I sat in a shabby room with broken windows with a group of actors, someone banging together wooden scaffolding outside and someone else plaiting together strings of red onions in a corner. The actors told me of their theatre, its history and traditions. I asked them to recite a little of their traditional verse. It was a joy to hear, exhaling a coffee richness in their mouths. The mode of delivery was one of separation from self and from each other. They went outside themselves to recite, looking at the floor or above people’s heads. In the time available there was little to do, but they wanted to speak some Shakespeare, and they wanted to speak it in English. I gave them the briefest of talks on the iambic rhythm, and then we went through just two lines: ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer. . .’
It was hard at first to get them to slough off the effect of having watched too many movies, and they clung to a casual modern idiom. I encouraged them not to force individual words too hard, nor to run words together with an affected casualness, but to find the gently propulsive forward-walking rhythm of each thought, and to express it from their mouths into the room. To observe and relish that steady path into a thought. Their thrill at handling the language was immediate, and the simplicity of those essential six syllables translated swiftly. I encouraged them to say it looking
