Globe to Globe. It was a happy, simple and bold idea – to present within a six-week festival every one of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, each in a different language, each by a different company from overseas. We imagined that we would attract student companies and amateur groups, but as the idea spread, it captured the imagination in the way only stupid ideas can, and grew rapidly in scale. Everyone wanted to join in – apart from the French – and we were inundated with enthusiasm from all corners of the globe. We ended up with fifteen national theatre companies, shows from the most distinguished theatres in the world and some of its most distinctive artists. One country, South Sudan, formed a new national company to put on Cymbeline. The festival was all we could have hoped for, a generous eruption of humanity and art and dialogue.
Big ideas like that, once achieved, leave a vacuum. Having ridden in such a balloon of happiness and open perspective, it was hard to land on the ground again. So for a few months after the festival, we wandered around busy but with a listless sense of inactivity in the back of our minds.
We were on a two-day away day. The ostensible task was huge – to plan for a new theatre we were building, an indoor candlelit jewel to complement our outdoor citizens playhouse. It was due to open in twelve months’ time. Building it, programming it, managing it, staffing it – everything was up in the air and had to be settled over two days. Day one was Heston Blumenthal’s pub in Bray, followed by pints of gin in a shabby railway pub tucked in behind Paddington. Day two began pale and chastened, but settled into a very pleasant lunch in Scott’s of Mayfair, a fastidiously minty place that raised its eyebrows above its smoothed hairline at the caravan of bicyclists and mothers with babies and scruffy technicians who tumbled in. We planned well in there and then repaired to a nearby hotel for cocktails.
If all this sounds a trifle louche, it was. So before any Colonel Bufton Tuftons or Comrade Mumble Grumbles reach for the ‘how-dare-they-do-that-with-all-that-public-subsidy’ attitude, it’s probably worth mentioning that the Globe got no money from the government, nor from any major sponsors. We worked hard, and we earned all our own money. Although skating on thin financial ice led to a daunting level of high-wire tension, it also meant that, after much of the profit had been given to education, research and the building, we were free to spend the money that remained. Somewhere in that merry drinkathon, within a bleary mayhem of flirt and wind-up and raucous laughter, someone said, ‘We need another big idea, something like the festival.’ With barely a pause for thought, I said, ‘Let’s take Hamlet to every country in the world.’
Such ideas have a peculiar naturalness. They arrive as if they were already in the room. Because they need no explanation, people grab them quickly and enjoy elaborating on them. They’re fertile ground for the contributions of others. Soon everyone was riffing on the idea and starting to work out the mechanics and logistics. Then, almost as soon, everyone was off the subject and back to flirting and winding-up and laughter. But the idea had a simple force which meant that it would stick.
It travelled.
* * *
Hamlet is a unique play in the canon of world drama. Loose, baggy, sometimes unwieldy, constructed from a known story and a previous play, its many details improvised from the pained and beautiful stuff within Shakespeare’s soul, it ranges across a northern European landscape dominated by a gloomy castle and splashed by a cold sea crashing on rocks. It is a landscape struck by more flashes of lightning than any work of art could ever hope to be. Those flashes of lightning come from many directions – linguistic brilliance, psychological insight, political acuity, mythic resonance and simple family truth. Together they combine to create a statement about what it is to be human that has never been surpassed, both in the age it was written for and since.
It is hard to enumerate the number of directions from which it glances at you as you shift through life. The swirling mists of the Olivier film version were my first sustained contact. One of those television events from long ago when the nation sat together to share public culture. Quotes had been filling my ears from an early age. My parents were both Shakespeareans, my father in a public verse-quoting manner, my mother with greater privacy. There were profuse early readings, where bafflement would be disguised as mystic appreciation. As with many cultural artefacts we are dragged to at an early age, we feign excitement to satisfy the dragger, yet silently resent the difficulty. But buried in the experience, however resented it may be, some small kick of life, some small ignition in a part of ourselves we don’t fully know, tells us we must return to witness it again. A silent promise is made for the future.
At a certain age, the play started to sing. Studying it with a mind less petrified by respect revealed its energies, its defiance and its exuberance. Performances could be relished rather than escaped. Hamlet the character began to take shape, not as a repository of cultural significance and oddly expressed wisdom, but as a sweet-natured and brilliant young man negotiating his way through a domestic and political nightmare. The language started to live with its own punk energy rather than the sonorous authority the Academy stifles it with. Much of the verse became necessary as solace. Hamlet has thrived in the public world, but its continuing life in the human heart is what has guaranteed its longevity.
I didn’t understand the speech ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ when I first committed it to memory, and I’m not completely sure I understand it fully now. But it has lived in the larder of my memory for almost forty years, and can still be pulled from its musty recess to provide its familiar quantum of comfort. It offers no answers, nor any facile questions. It simply lets us know the same comforting message we offer our children when they cut themselves on the sharpness of the world. We tell them we suffered something similar at the same age. The fact we endured the same, a small act of sharing, washes away a little of the pain. In our worst despair, the fact that Hamlet has shared the like hurt or worse, and that his creator Shakespeare has expressed it with such a perfect dance of thought and word, tells us we are not alone in our sorrows.
Hamlet’s journey through the play is specific, but within its broad pattern, and in his detailed responses to its various events, we appreciate a convulsion of the spirit we all know. It is Sartre’s nausea and the juddering tears of the junkie begging on the street corner; it is the sobbing of the infant at the most basic injustice, and the articulate despair of the graduate shunted into a world which has neither plan for nor interest in them. It is the confusion we know at all ages – the manifest injustice of the world – that something capable of creating patterns of such beauty is so often inclined to moral ugliness. It is the state of perception we carry within us as a template for understanding our world, yet while grateful for its insights, we live in fear of its capacity, since if indulged it can overtake all other modes of understanding and plunge us into an enclosed state policed by the act of perception itself.
Overwhelmed by these thoughts in that scattered age between eighteen and twenty-five, it was then that Hamlet gripped me. Hungry for a path through that maze, Hamlet’s story offered a movement towards the light. Towards the play’s conclusion, as the young Prince walks towards a trap set by his stepfather, a trap he knows he will not survive, his friend Horatio advises him that he can walk away from his own fate. He replies:
Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
Within a play of complicated expression, this section is an oasis of simplicity. Beginning with the first, heavily accented ‘if’, there are forty-two monosyllabic words in a row, with only one exception – ‘readiness’. This extended baldness of expression is exceptional in Shakespeare. For me at that age, the simplicity of this language, allied with the calm at its spirit’s centre, its message of transcendent acceptance of all the world had to offer, the good and the bad, served as a mantra.
* * *
Translated into too many languages to count, and performed more times than Shakespeare ate hot dinners, and cold ones, or drew breath for that matter, Hamlet is one of those rare documents that can be said to have brought the world closer together. Audiences all over the planet have shared in its capacity to enlarge the spectator’s