created an atmosphere of parity and of generosity which made them a team. No one was leading the show, everyone was sharing, and all had to look out for each other. This set them up for the challenges ahead. It was also exhilarating to watch. Always the same, and always different, just as every rehearsal should be.
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What sort of production was it to be? Hamlet is one of the most misconceived plays in performance history, its original intentions now obscured by the barnacles of 400 years of theory and presumption. How do you clean off all these misconceptions and try to return it to its original colours? When the Sistine Chapel was cleaned and revealed its primary freshness, many were upset that those nice faded colours, saturated in the smoke and dirt of history, had been lost. They found the renewed work disturbingly vibrant. Part of the Globe’s remit was to reveal Shakespeare’s plays with their original vitality, and for that it was always running into the conservatism of those who like a screen of history between themselves and a classic – just as they liked the musty grime on the Sistine Chapel.
The best way to avoid a misconception is to have no conception at all. There is such a glut of ideas about how to present particular plays, it is sometimes most radical to have no idea. This is hard for many to negotiate, since without a concept, or an argument, they have nothing to talk of afterwards but the play itself, a nudity which they find embarrassing to look at. Our job at the Globe was always to tell the story cleanly, to judge the relationships impartially, and to let the language do the work. To keep true to the modesty of nature. This approach requires oceans of technique and discipline and rigour, where most conceptual work requires puddles. Yet because the work is invisible – it chooses to be – most do not notice it. We ask hard questions about the relationships, about the world and about the language, and then we work our thoughts in discreetly, always ensuring that story and language is bright and clear.
Before becoming technical about language and the verse, it is vital to remember that this is a series of scenes that present life. Without dipping into naturalism, it is important to keep in front of us Shakespeare’s particular realism. This is not a realism based on scenery, on sofas or drinks cabinets or kitchen sinks. It is a realism based on actors coming out and establishing their own reality. They believe that this is a cold rampart of a castle in Denmark, so we can believe it too. The actor playing Hamlet has to believe he is Hamlet so we can join him in the illusion. It is bare-bones realism and has to be presented with absolute conviction. With nothing to back you up, you have to look behind you and say ‘this is a castle’, and look out beyond the audience and say ‘that is Norway’, and believe that both are true. If you can do that, and grind the everyday truth of it into yourself, you can convince an audience. Fingunt simul creduntque, said Tacitus – as soon as they imagine, they believe. This is the bedrock of Shakespeare’s theatre – believe it, say it, and with the participation of the audience it starts to come true.
The advantage here is that the scenes are written with a deft but tungsten-strength verismo. Whether it is that first scene on the battlements with its quick jerky questions and answers; or the torrid swirls of give and take between mother and son in the closet scene; or the awkwardness of the reluctant cleric officiating over Ophelia’s funeral; or the strained goodwill of the Players as they are told how to act by an amateur – in each of these moments and others, Shakespeare sketches a couple of quick lines and there is life: this is his great art. These moments are mysterious and unknowable as life is: they have all its meandering rhythms and peculiar upbeats. Like a breathing still life or an artful photograph, these scenes have that sense of life contained, of impermanence briefly held. This requires truthful acting, alive to each moment as it comes, not trying to force it into a scheme. Actors can be eager for patterns to help decipher plays, and audiences as well. It takes discipline to resist the inclination to fall into the seductive falsehood of patterns, and to stay true to the wonderful inconsequentiality of life. But when every detail is animated, then we start to warrant that life – not speeches, or ideas, or patterns – is at the heart of the mystery of each play.
Our actors were up for this, and relished the responsibility. The extra challenge was not just embodying the feeling of the scene, but expressing it with nothing to help as a visual signifier. Without scenery, their bodies had to do rampart, or throne room, or closet, or graveyard. Each of them expressed with a different physical energy: Ladi was a boxer briefly, and has some of that watchfulness; Rawiri is all buffo comedy and prop-forward, bull-like energy; Miranda has a proscenium grace; Jen is a slip of a thing and looks like a delicate blossom. It was impossible to force them all to be the same, or to adopt a unified movement scheme, without bleeding the democracy and humanity out of the event. Each in their own way learnt how to occupy the empty space and fill it with their own imagination. And thus, with theatre’s natural complicity, ours.
As well as the life of a play, it is important to seek out its wit. This is not a matter of looking for laughs; it is finding the irony and the comic sense of each particular play and releasing it. When you get to know a new friend, you spend a little time winkling out their humour, finding out what sparks the twinkle in their eye (if you find nothing, then walk away); in the same way, you look for what curls the smile of a play. There was not far to look with Hamlet. No clown appears until the arrival of the Gravediggers, but up to that point an abundance of humour has spilt from the Prince himself. To a degree, he is the fool who is missing from his own play.
His very first line, ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’, is a thousand things, but it is also a serviceable gag. It is clear from his first engagements with Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that their friendships are based on sparring wit and competitive funnies. Hamlet himself is a bright generous wit, throwaway pearls spilling out of him. Compare him with any of the other major tragic figures. A night of Live at the Apollo with a bill of Lear, Othello, Anthony, Coriolanus and Macbeth would be big on heckles and short on laughs. But Hamlet could hold his own. Especially if his wit is played as giveaway and involuntary as it should be. If it settles into mordancy or sarcasm, then you’ve got someone telling you he’s the most intelligent person in the room, and we can all go home.
Humour ripples through the play. Polonius is a comic creation whose speeches have a not-entirely-under-the-character’s-control Shavian irony. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern travel a darkly comic journey from two enthusiastic boobies on a free holiday, to the heart of a corroding state, and on to their eventual deaths. Hamlet gives some of the best comic advice ever delivered to the Players, so he is clearly not only fun in himself, but a student of comedy. The play within the play, or at least the lines that Hamlet has written with some clumsy moral lessons for his mother, are so eye-wateringly bad, their intention must be humorous.
When the clowns do arrive in the form of the Gravediggers, they have deliverable material and a deadpan vaudeville exchange with Hamlet worthy of a partnership that has worked long years round the provinces. When Hamlet is brought face to face with death, it is with the skull of a comedian. It is the death of laughter that he registers as the most switching irony:
Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now. . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
It is a vivid and abiding image – a boy shrieking with laughter charging around on the back of a clown. It is a laughter that has gone now, but we know it was once there.
Even after this episode, the humour has not gone from the play, since right at the death Shakespeare throws on the campest and most ludicrous colour in the play, the flamboyant and futile Osric. This is not an inexorable tonal drift towards death; this is a sudden firework display of character comedy. At exactly the wrong moment. Shakespeare doesn’t just pull the rug of expectation away, he exposes the bottomless pit beneath it – the Chekhovian existential pit that always opens up when you get stuck
