Hamlet: Globe to Globe. Dominic Dromgoole

was one of the most emphatic performances I have seen. A packed house had the decency not to laugh or throw things.

      That was the first night. This is the second and, amazingly, it promises to be even more disastrous. The sun is lowering a great anvil of heat over the city, the noise level is high and rising (tonight we’ve opted for float mics), and the actors are forming urgent queues for the two plastic Portaloos backstage. Unfortunately, the long and sweetly excited line of audience members that circles the theatre runs alongside the queues for the loos, separated only by a low fence. It’s difficult for any performer to maintain the necessary mystique while banging on a Portaloo demanding that the incumbent gets the fuck on with it.

      Nevertheless, the usual glorious surge of optimism that prefaces every performance the world over, from primary-school nativity play to the glitziest opera, kicks in just as the show is about to begin. We walk out with a residual thin gleam of hope that all will be well. Madness. I stand there, microphone in hand, my appointed translator beside me. The outer edges of fever have arrived – colours are acquiring a lurid neon glow, and connections are becoming more magical than logical. My translator looks like she wants to cry.

      ‘Good evening,’ I say. ‘Welcome to the Globe tour of Hamlet.’

      Confident translation follows and a roar of joy erupts. This is great, I think. I explain that we are an actor down, but that the show must go on. The translation elicits sympathy and support from the audience. I explain that I will be appearing to bridge the missing bits with storytelling, and everyone seems ready to relish the game. This is going to be great, I tell myself. So I start:

      ‘It was a cold, dark night in Denmark. . .’

      Not bad, I think, and turn to the acting company arrayed behind me while the words are being translated, expecting looks of approval. Claudius’s face has ‘What in the name of fuckity fuck are you doing?’ written all over it.

      This throws me slightly, but I press on.

      ‘And up high on the battlements. . .’

      ‘Qué?’ my translator mutters.

      ‘Up high on the battlements,’ I repeat forcefully.

      ‘Qué? What is bateelmence?’

      ‘Battlements. You know.’ My febrile confusion is starting to max out. ‘Battlements, edges of the castle, high edges of the castle.’

      ‘Qué? High edges of the castle?’

      ‘Yes, top bits, high margins of castle, where people walk about. . .’

      All this is being played out amplified in front of 600 now slightly confused audience members, eager to see the famous Globe theatre perform Shakespeare. I look despairingly at the audience, who start to volunteer suggestions for what battlements might be in Mexican Spanish. I look back at the company, who are all wearing the rictus grins of the crew who know the captain is sinking the ship but can’t admit it to the passengers. We eventually reach a consensus on the translation plebiscite with the audience, and I do the rest of my storytelling in the simplest English I can muster. I retreat from the stage throwing a ‘best of luck’ look at the company.

      The rest of the evening is a matter of precision timing, as the company, all now succumbing to convulsions, try to judge whether they will be able to get in and out of a scene in time to satisfy their greater needs in the khazi. Then they have to calculate whether they will be able to get in and out of the toilet in time to attend to stage business. These are difficult calculations, with only two conveniences available. Actors are now starting to throw up as well, so buckets are brought ever closer to the stage to facilitate a quick feinted exit, a deft hurl, and then a return to the stage without missing a beat. Organisers, promoters and producers, including myself, are wandering around with that hopeless look of active concern assumed by those in impotent authority presiding over an unavoidable catastrophe.

      As the venerable storyteller, my interruptions are becoming less and less frequent as my head starts to spin. And considerably less detailed. ‘Someone tells Hamlet about an army’ is my precis of the part of the Captain; ‘Horatio says that Hamlet has come back’, my pithy summation of the Fourth Act narrative pivot. The actors are possessed by a similar spirit of self-preserving censorship, excising chunks from scenes just so they can get to the end.

      It is all a little too much: the heat crushing us in its vice-like grip, the panic and chaos backstage, the excitement of the crowd still inexplicably beaming towards us, the increasing eccentricity of the make-believe, the capacity of the Zócalo to transform its own noise and chaos into essence of rage and wildness, the fact that around us Mexico City is decked out in full Day of the Dead splendour. Everything is starting to melt: the swags of plastic sheeting into the scaffolding, the actors into the audience, English into Mexican, the play into reality, the speeches into the noise that fights them, all blurring into the dark-blue air that weighs heavily on the city – one big Mexican soup, its ingredients bubbling away and rearranging themselves into something strange and new.

      * * *

      Much as the disorienting, deliquescent evening is a product of particular circumstances, it is also a product of the play itself. Hamlet takes place in queasy mental territory, the tectonic plates of sanity shifting from the first scene. Bedlam itself was a magnetic presence in Shakespeare’s world, sitting just outside the walls of the City of London, and drawing audiences to gawp at the behaviour of its patients. Many playwrights were lured by the spontaneous theatricality of the place, by its naked presentation of mental fragility, and the contingent nature of identity. The language of madness, set alongside the language of what purports to be sanity, undermines the security of an objective truth or value in words. Language, which can provide comfort as the source of healing, can also prove perilous as the gatekeeper to confusion. It can become the primary sponsor of madness, its endless strata and spirals driving both speakers and listeners from their senses.

      Shakespeare dealt with madness more discreetly, and yet more profoundly, than his colleagues. In Othello, we see the collapse of a fortressed identity as the hero is undermined by Iago’s facility with nuance and suggestion. In King Lear, we get a spectrum of different forms of madness: Edgar’s feigned lunacy, with its linguistic bravura; the Fool’s osmotic relationship with insanity, the thin membrane between sense and nonsense allowing just enough of the latter to pass into the former; and in Lear himself – Shakespeare’s most pathetic demonstration of the consequences of the mind’s slippage – memory, language, imagination, perception and passion are all at war with each other on a windswept battlefield devoid of familiar landmarks.