relief was palpable, and in Amsterdam and in Ystad they rose in exhilaration at the end.
We repaired to our Spartan hotel, which we filled with Hellenistic delirium. It was early in the tour, and the company were all cautiously careful about each other’s boundaries. There were no such worries between the company and the theatre staff, and boundaries were merrily crashed through. The scream of ‘Jacuzzi!’ went up, and everyone crowded into the one room with a functioning Jacuzzi and then all dived in. I didn’t because I was tiring rapidly, and because younger actors have the most absurd bodies and comparisons are odious, so sloped off to pass out. The next morning offered the pleasure of watching extreme hangovers meeting a Nordic breakfast. Gherkins, pickles and coleslaws have a disorienting effect on delicate stomachs.
* * *
It was a determination of mine from the moment I arrived on Bankside that we would revive the first Globe’s practice of going on the road. It was time for the Globe to spread the word beyond the polygonal enclosure of its own walls. We travelled first on a circuit around the United Kingdom, then reached out to Europe, then to the USA, and now, with Hamlet, were covering as much of the planet as we could.
Why did we risk the dignity of a loved institution with this new endeavour? First, we were filling a hole. Touring Shakespeare had been a continuous tradition since the plays were written. These plays were made for walking, not for sitting at home, but when we began our touring, the tradition was withering on the vine. Companies that had toured for decades had decided to dump that tradition and ditch their audiences, without leaving so much as a note on the kitchen table. The holes we were filling were not just cement municipal theatres that have to be filled with product; they were holes in the stomachs of people who had grown up with an appetite for the unique food Shakespeare provides.
Shakespeare wrote for the rough and simultaneously sophisticated instrument of the Globe, and towards the end of his life with an eye to the indoor theatres and the new storytelling and technological advantages they offered. But he also had a constant memory of the melodramatic pulse of the older forms of storytelling. The rough magic of touring companies was hard-wired into his understanding of theatre. He wanted to adapt and grow those energies, but he did not want to extinguish them. Shakespeare was never crudely dismissive of these forms. His affection for the hard-nosed pros who drift through Hamlet is palpable, as it is for the rude mechanicals in Dream, and for the absurdly pretentious presentation of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s. Nor, though an artist, was he as po-faced about being an artist as many of those who have reinterpreted him. He made his art out of mud and laughter.
There’s a fashion in theatre now for creative elements to dub themselves theatre-makers. ‘I’m not an interpreter of plays; I’m a theatre-maker,’ they tell you rather shrilly. Fundamentally, this seems to mean they tell other people what to do, while they furrow their brows earnestly behind fashionable spectacles and practise some happening hand movements. Give them something to actually make – to sew, to clip together, to lift, to light, to attach – and they will break down in tears. Our touring shows had to be mountable and demountable within a couple of hours. Some of my sweetest moments in my time at the Globe were helping in that process. Then, when our stage management told me to go away because I was not helping, there was a similar pleasure in watching the economy of effort, the dexterity of hand and the skill of mind with which they completed their task. On beaches, in piazzas, in grand auditoria, in scruffy ones, they made a theatre each time. The simplicity of that, the purity in process, the truth in endless motion, is what our touring aimed to preserve.
Touring kept us honest. Our small-scale tours were the antidote to the institutional self-importance which being static can encase. If you are putting out chairs in a mud-sludged field, if you are improvising tickets for an insta-box-office from a book of raffle tickets, if you are dismantling a set as the rain pours down, it is hard to take yourself too seriously. However much you might try. We come into the theatre for the simple pleasure of giving joy and sharpening insight and honouring truth. It is easy to get diverted from that. We went on the road not only to risk our dignity, but actually to lose it. If you can’t risk your dignity, you are lost as an artistic institution, and if you can’t happily give it away, then you’re lost as a theatre. There was something about doing this barebones, back-of-a-van, booth Shakespeare, at that moment and onwards, that served as a two-fingered salute to those who would build a moat around his work.
There is still a gatekeeper mentality in much of the Shakespeare world. Gestures, extravagant ones often, are made towards accessibility and openness and internationalism. When faced with the reality of that openness – a reality presented by the Globe with its twenty years of tickets at £5 catering to many millions – the high priests of the Shakespeare industry often run screaming back to their closed-shop conferences, burbling angrily about tourists and schoolchildren and the uneducated. Taking Shakespeare on the road was our best way of flying far from such exclusion. Taking Hamlet to the world was for us both a fact and a gesture: actually going to every country and metaphorically saying these plays were built for everyone.
The hares that Shakespeare set running 400 years ago still run, and, year on year, run further and wilder.
* * *
Four hundred years after Gdańsk opened its first theatre in the old fencing school, an enterprising group of visionaries, led by an ebullient academic, Jerzy Limon, built a new theatre on the same site. It was an impressive and expensive endeavour, and we were accorded the honour of being the first company to play the theatre with our Hamlet. A spectacular edifice on the edge of a beautiful town, it lacked the festivity one associates with a theatre. Built entirely of a forbidding and sombre black brick, and entirely featureless on the outside, undisturbed by signs or colour, it looked more like a holocaust memorial than a palace of fun. The inside was brighter, filled with startlingly blond wood. A cursory inspection revealed that no actors had been involved with its creation. From the stage, it was impossible to see almost a third of the seats, let alone be seen by them. There was a retractable roof, like Wimbledon – a brilliant idea – though there seemed to be an embargo on opening the roof if there had been any trace of wind over the preceding four months.
There was an opening ceremony the day before the first performance, attended by the President, the Prime Minister and a clutch of other dignitaries from Poland and abroad. Jerzy, who is one of the most charming and sweetest men in Europe, had come up with the lovely idea of our company presenting a petition to the Mayor of Gdańsk, as the Comedians of England had done 400 years before. We confected a speech from many of the ones we still have, with a few contemporary additions. Everyone was excited before the ceremony began. It didn’t last.
The ceremony seemed to have been designed by committee, which was just about plausible, but appeared to be also executed by committee, which really wasn’t. Speech followed long speech, and the sound system failed on a regular basis, so the audience, a large proportion of whom were not able to see what was happening, were treated to prolonged muttering by dignitaries. Video was as troubled as audio, and flickered to life uncertainly. Prince Charles appeared on a screen, though sadly unaccompanied by sound, mouthing noiselessly his goodwill to the project. Various exotic acts appeared unsupported by much in the way of technology or knowledge of how the stage worked. Temporary relief was called when there was a bomb scare and everyone had to quit the theatre for an hour or so.
However, return was inevitable, and we were all shepherded back in. Our company were preparing to go on and present their petition when they noticed the stage filling up with smoke. They were reassured this was an effect and told to carry on. The stage was soon so full of dry ice that they quickly became uncertain as to where the audience was, or, more alarmingly, the edge of the stage. One of them nearly fell off and had to be held by a colleague. The dry ice had now spread to engulf much of the audience. It was hard to know how to start, but, no matter, they groped around in the smoke to find each other, and once able to present a united front, started shouting out their petition into a primordial fog.
