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. The Mayor of Gdańsk, for a reason unexplained, was being played by an English actor, Julian Glover, rather than by the Mayor of Gdańsk, who would seem to have had a better claim on the role. No matter; Julian made his way out of the audience, not without some difficulty through the smoke, to accept our company’s petition.
Shortly thereafter came the much-heralded banquet: a chance for people to enjoy food and wine and celebrate the new theatre. They still wanted to show off some of their new technology, so the hydraulic system became a dumb waiter. Traps were pulled away magically, engines whirred into motion, and from below the stage appeared tables laden with tucker. To everyone’s surprise, in the middle of the tables there was a naked lady painted gold. She was posed in what in yogic terms is described, I think, as the downward dog, and was wearing an impressive headdress. This we were told was Nefertiti come to bless the feast. She was surrounded by sandwiches, and sandwiches which had been made several hours before. The sight of a naked Nefertiti surrounded by sarnies, curling slightly at the edges, was too much for some of our company, who started to get a little hysterical.
The next day, our performance was something of a lost cause. The actors were game as ever, but the theatre felt like a new car, the sightlines were beyond hopeless for many, and the audience was full of people from the UK whom we do our best to avoid in London, let alone Gdańsk. They sat there with a sour incomprehension, wondering when something so simple was going to stop being so simple. Happily sitting on one end of the front row was Andrzei Wajda, the great Polish film director, and a personal hero, now sadly deceased. An impish 88-year-old, he beamed and gasped and chuckled his delight, and was full of a straightforward and acute appreciation afterwards. ‘Shakespeare as it was, Shakespeare as it should be,’ he said. We settled for that.
| 27 Iceland, Reykjavík Harpa | 23 July 2014 |
| 28 USA, Washington Folger Shakespeare Library | 25–26 July |
| USA, Chicago Chicago Shakespeare Theater | 28–30 July |
| USA, New York UN Building | 4 August |
| 29 Canada, Prescott St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival | 2 August |
| 30 Bahamas, Nassau Dundas Centre for Performing Arts | 5 August |
| 31 Cuba, Havana Teatro Mella | 7 August |
| 32 Mexico, Mérida Explanada de la Catedral de Yucatán | 9 August |
| 33 Belize, Belize City Bliss Centre for Performing Arts | 12 August |
| 34 Guatemala, Antigua Guatemala Santo Domingo del Cerro Cultural Park | 14 August |
| 35 Honduras, Copán Copán Ruins | 16 August |
| 36 El Salvador, San Salvador Teatro Nacional de El Salvador | 19 August |
| 37 Nicaragua, Managua Teatro Nacional Rubén Darío | 21 August |
4
WORDS AND WALLS IN MITTELEUROPA
POLONIUS What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET Words, words, words.
Act 2, Scene 2
PRAGUE, AND THE NIGHT WAS chilling fast, amply threatened by bulging storm clouds rolling towards us across the central European plain. We were in a misshapen courtyard, cobbled together by history, a medieval turret in one corner, a dull communist block of concrete in another, a chic cafe beneath a spreading oak in a third. Seven hundred Czechs and a few British expats were waiting in excitement on plastic garden furniture, wrapped in blankets and polythene sheets. We had found our way there through curving byways, up and down the vertiginous slopes of Prague Castle, shaded by the baroque excess of St Vitus Cathedral. Everyone gazed towards a viciously overlit wall.
Having sloped and slipped through the fairy-tale