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 into each other’s eyes, and to enjoy the bold ease of that. Again there were inhibitions. If you are not looking directly at someone, it is acting; if you are, it can feel like lying. They got over the other side of this and enjoyed the direct address, the clear engagement and the simple talking. There was a warm, happy energy in the room, and I noticed for the first time what lurks within the iambic rhythm – a hidden hope. As each gentle upturned stress occurred and passed from person to person, it pulsed a discreet energy into the speaker and listener, and beyond into the room. It gave a lift. I left the room in Addis Ababa with a better understanding of the nature of verse than I had achieved before. It is talking with invention, and with energy, and with a steady hope.
Just as each actor found their own way to make the scenes come alive, so they arrived at their own understanding of how to handle the verse. The seniors Keith, John and Miranda all had long years of Shakespeare with the RSC and others under their belts. The music was safely contained within them, so they could modulate delicately and freely within that music. Rawiri had much experience too, but a more declaratory style, which, together with his openness of face and heart, has a massive charm. Most of the young ones were finely tuned drama-school graduates who had an appetite for Shakespeare which was its own enchantment. There was a spectrum within their approach: Tommy has an easy conversational naturalness; Phoebe began as presenting a little more; Jen tended to the demure and the shy, and being the least experienced with the verse had the most to learn. But like any proper team of actors they lifted each other up. They watched each other and stole a little of this from him and copied a little of that from her. The last thing we wanted was an absolute consistency. A group of actors is not supposed to be a faceless unit; it is supposed to be a team of individuals, and by the end of rehearsals (thank the lord), a squad is what we had.
They needed to be. The conditions in which they made the play work over the next two years would have torn a fragile group to shreds and patches. I watched it in front of 200 ambassadors sitting at large desks in the UN; in front of a reluctant audience in Djibouti, with the waves of the Red Sea crashing loudly behind; to 2,000 restless students in an acoustic horror house in Phnom Penh; in a hotel ballroom in Hargeisa; in a tin shed in a Syrian refugee camp; and in a Roman amphitheatre in Amman. Everywhere they went, no matter the conditions, they tried to make the play come to life in front of whoever was watching. There were more extraordinary places I missed: 4,000 people crammed into a square outside a cathedral in Mérida, Yucatán; a roundabout in the rain in Bucharest; a bar in a Cameroon refugee camp; in a rock stadium before the crashing Pacific in Chile. Wherever they were, however impossible the conditions, or however speedy the set-up, they had each other, and they had the gentle support of each line of verse, its embedded rhythm tenderly placing a supporting palm on the base of their spines, the place where fear and exhaustion resides, and with the lightest touch it kept them upright and somehow kept them moving forward, into the story and towards the audience.
At one of the most difficult moments of the journey – one actor very ill, another about to lose a close relation, another nursing a great friend towards a young death, a stage manager having lost his mother-in-law, Paris having just suffered the Bataclan massacre which made everyone nervous about home, and with everyone blitzed by exhaustion – the tour for a moment looked threadbare and fragile. Everyone was finding ways of coping, but it was clear that we were not flying on full tanks. I wrote to them:
These are tough times. The play can help, your astonishing generosity to each other can help, the knowledge that you are doing something very special can help, the fact that beside all these personal heartbutts, and these more public tragedies, a lot of people are investing hope in what you are doing, that can help as well, but above all. . .
Be kind to each other, and keep putting one foot in front of another.
That is what Shakespeare’s plays teach us to do.
| 11 Belarus, Minsk Janka Kupala National Academic Theatre | 22 May 2014 |