Kiev Mystetskyi Arsenal
3
SETTING OUT THROUGH THE BALTICS
HAMLET What players are they?
ROSENCRANTZ Even those you were wont to take delight in, the tragedians of the city.
Act 2, Scene 2
STANDING ON AN OLD WOODEN jetty washed grey-green by the sea in Ystad, in the south-eastern corner of Sweden. Murmurs burble from a nearby restaurant sitting on rotting stilts above the water, and small-town noises trickle towards the shore from the miniature metropolis. The quiet of the Baltic in front and the hills behind, as the sun goes down beyond them, is softly forceful. It is broken by the rude throat-clearing of a ferry’s foghorn as it sweeps into the harbour. Another ferry emerging from the port answers. They croak at each other cacophonously for a while. Sweden to Poland, and Poland to Sweden. The passage cuts a line across the Baltic Sea and the Hanseatic world, a stretch of water long used for trade, for war, and for travelling actors. It is easy to imagine from centuries past swifter and lighter vessels carrying a cargo of new stories from the London stage.
A short walk behind me is a beautiful late nineteenth-century theatre, built in tidy proportion for the single-room plays of Ibsen and Strindberg. On first sight earlier that morning, I had thought it too domestic a space for the open expanse of our play, but the focus is so clean and the acoustic so simple, it proves a claustrophobic thrill to play, forcing up to the surface all the family poison, like an Ibsen three-acter. We are giving our fiercest and tightest performances thus far. Members of my office have flown out for the occasion. The logic behind this is sound: to stay connected with the company and to reward colleagues for their hard work. The result is hen/stag-night mayhem. I’ve stepped out for a little quiet, being not quite in mayhem mood, yet.
The sea and the ships remind me of the first stage of our Hamlet journey. Shortly after the premiere, the company left London on a suitable mode of transport. Gathering just beneath Tower Bridge on the Thames, surrounded by a couple of hundred well-wishers, the company boarded a small tall-boat and set off for Amsterdam. It was manned and helmed by taciturn Danish Captain Haddock lookie-likies. There was champagne and waving and hugging. A laconic Northern actor disconnected us from the jetty, threw the rope off and uttered a drily minimal ‘Bye’. A boat bearing two television crews sped alongside for a while and then tailed off. Then there was silence. The high spirits gave way to a settled calm as the boat navigated its way down the Thames and out into the North Sea.
We awoke the next morning to a calm sea and moved forward wrapped in a caul of mist. People sat quiet and still on deckchairs, they lounged together in the netting, they climbed one by one up to the crow’s nest as if it was an act of anointing. Later that afternoon, we found the coast of Holland and spent four hours negotiating our way through the broad Dutch canals and rivers, lulled by a North Sea quiet broken only by the putter of the ship’s engine. In the evening, we pulled in behind the train station in Amsterdam. The expectation may have been of a 24-hour party, a sea-borne bacchanal, but the opposite had happened. A peaceful journey, untroubled by wind or wave, stillness moving through stillness, had bonded the company together in a silence more profound than any amount of exuberance could achieve.
Throughout our journeys, and in planning them, we talked of their correspondence to the first journeys that Shakespeare’s plays had made as they sailed from London to take their chance in the world, carried in the memory of actors. The most celebrated instance of this early promulgation by water involves Hamlet and is problematic. It was the iconic performance of Hamlet on board the Red Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608. According to the notebooks of their captain William Keeling, they performed Hamlet twice in the course of their journey around the globe between 1607 and 1610. The crew, many of whom had no doubt seen the show at the Globe, used the mnemonic capacity of their age and stitched a show together for a group of visiting dignitaries from the African mainland. The exoticism of this – at such a distance from home, and so soon after its premiere – leads many, including us, to blazon it as proof of the speed at which Hamlet moved into the world. We accept the internationalism of Shakespeare as a commonplace, but assume it’s a modern development; in fact, it’s as old as the plays themselves. Yet a historical shadow falls across the performance. The Red Dragon was one of the first ships of the East India Company. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare, the most pervasive soft-power influence of all time, with the great-great-grandfather of all psychopathic corporations is an uneasy one.
Many make much of the historical ripples set running by this incident. It throws up a slew of questions about whether Shakespeare is only the innocent fellow-traveller riding along beside the spreading blush of British pink colouring the world’s map. But such thoughts rarely account for the parallel historical movement, which is the freedom with which these plays travelled elsewhere beyond the English Channel. Had Shakespeare’s plays travelled only where the English language travelled, it might be justifiable to raise an eyebrow. But, in fact, Hamlet was quite quickly all over northern Europe. It was carried by actors.
Known collectively as the Comedians of England, these performers were a late sixteenth/early seventeenth-century phenomenon, with as many as 200 employed across the Continent. What drove them to seek pastures new? Sometimes they were simply told to – the Earl of Leicester’s Men accompanied their patron on his progress through Utrecht, Leyden and The Hague in 1585, when