o my offence is rank...
the tragedy of hamlet,
prince of denmark
by william shakespeare
Tuesday 19 February -
Wednesday 13 March 2002
Zeal, 51 Victoria Street, Wellington
Melancholy varsity student wears black, breaks up with his
girlfriend, says "To be or not to be" and meets his father's
ghost...you know the rest.
cast:
Carey Smith (Hamlet),
Eve Middleton (Gertrude),
James Stewart (Ghost of King Hamlet, First Player, Gravedigger),
Tina Helm (Ophelia),
John Porter (Claudius),
Mark Cleary (Polonius, Gravedigger's Companion, English Ambassador),
Alex Greig (Laertes, Second Player),
Erica Lowe (Horatio),
Kate Soper (Francisco, Cornelius, Rosencrantz),
Hilary Willard (Voltemand, Guildenstern, Osric),
Kristin Smith (Barnardo, Reynaldo),
Adam McMahon (Marcellus, Third Player, Fortinbras)
Production Manager Eve Middleton;
Stage Manager Mark Cleary;
Video sequences edited by Robert Gordon & Mark Cleary;
Super-8 sequence cameramen Carey Smith & James Stewart;
Super-8 sequence edited by Ian Freer & James Stewart;
Posters Ian Freer & James Stewart;
Photography David Lawrence & Sar Ruddenklau;
Fliers James Stewart;
Danish Crest designed by Sar Ruddenklau;
Recording engineer Carey Smith;
Music David Lawrence & George Harrison;
Fight Choreography by Geoff Pinfield;
Directed by David Lawrence
When I thought I was going to be an actor, I always dreamed of playing
Hamlet. It was going to be my greatest triumph, the end result of years
of research and planning, mental and physical preparation. Even the
first time I read the play, I learnt little phrases and kept them in my
mind. I often used "O what a rogue and peasant slave" as an audition
piece and got to perform it for an ENGL208 lecture in a staging of the
latter half of the second act, in which I Played The Dane. I became
obsessed with the play at university and spent a week of one study break
in the video suite at the theatre & film department watching all the
films - Olivier, Zefarelli, Kozintsev, Jacobi in the BBC television
version. One of the very earliest theatre reference books I had, given
to me when I was about 7, was
The Facts About A Theatre Company,
a book
dealing specifically with the Prospect touring production in which Jacobi
Played The Dane. I now have a pile of books dealing with the play and
the role and I've read most of them from cover to cover again and again.
I particularly loved Kenneth Branagh's accounts of his encounters with
the play in his autobiography,
Beginning, and when his four-hour
film version finally reached NZ, I spent each consecutive Tuesday
afternoon that freezing Wellington winter huddled in the Embassy, where
tickets were $6 before 5pm, sitting through the epic.
I was 15 when I first read Hamlet.
I had a girlfriend who was
obsessed with Shakespeare and thought
Romeo and Juliet was the
greatest play ever written and insisted upon my reading it and loving
it. I tried and tried but could never quite get into the spirit of it,
but one depressed evening that awful year I shut myself away from all
the other merry party-goers on one of those dreadful teenage evenings
and, instead of Romeo and Juliet,
I opened her copy of
Hamlet,
if for no other reason than that the skull on the cover
artwork seemed to fit my morbidity that night. My father died suddenly
a few weeks after my 15th birthday and I spent much of the following
twelve months in a very strange state of mind. That night that I
read The Tragedy of Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark I experienced an
epiphany of sorts - this play was speaking to me on a level that none
of my family, friends, teachers, guidance counsellors were able to;
here, for the first time, was someone who knew exactly what I was
going through and was able to offer me some solace. The notion of a
man who goes crazy because his father dies was not a far-fetched one
to me, and that has always been my first point of reference with
Hamlet. I was surprised
to discover that a character who
seemed so quintessentially teenage would turn out to be 30 years
old.
I first thought about directing the play at the start of my last year
of university. I imagined staging a few of the scenes in the round,
jotted down some ideas, thought about where I might make cuts. That
year a fellow student and I directed the course production for DRAM301,
an adaptation of Tony Harrison's version of
The Mysteries,
staged at Studio 77. It was a promenade production - partly as homage
to the medieval notion of pageant-wagons as performance platforms, and
partly to make the distinction between each of the three segments of
the show as clear as possible. The audience viewed The Creation in a
proscenium arch set-up, were then shifted into a tight traverse in the
main space for The Passion, and then left to wander through an empty
space for Doomsday. I loved the possibilities of promenade and the
effect that it had on the audience's enjoyment of the show. I always
intended that when I did
Hamlet it would be in a space big
enough to set up all the different layers of society within the world
of the play. The space I was really keen on was Wellington Repertory
Theatre's home on Dixon St, which that very year was renamed the
Phoenix and opened up as a general performance venue. As well as a
traditional proscenium arch space they had a great long narrow room
on the top floor, a covered carpark and other areas that I thought
would suit my purposes well. Oddly enough, the first great success
the venue had as the Phoenix was, lo and behold, a promenade
production - not of Hamlet,
but doing a similar-enough thing
that it made the idea of me doing the play there unfeasible.
When The Bacchanals did Othello
and the trilogy of Renaissance
plays we borrowed chairs from Zeal, a building on Victoria Street that
had just started operating as an under-age venue for teenagers. Eve
knew the folk running the place, which was how we'd organized the
chair deal. I'd seen a Fringe play in there but not even really been
aware of the whole building until the last night of
Othello -
Eve and I waited in Zeal between truck-loads when we were returning
the chairs in the middle of the night, and with only the briefest
look-around the space I knew I had found the perfect space for my
Hamlet. A big downstairs
space, an upstairs mezzanine for a
traverse space, smaller rooms for the closet scene and gantries and
ladders running around the fire exits and alleyway outside. I don't
know that I said anything that night, but from there on in
Hamlet
joined the list in my head of upcoming Bacchanals projects. On the
second-to-last night of
Wealth and Hellbeing, Carey, James,
Eve, Tina and I had drinks outside the Pit at Bats. The trilogy was
about to begin itself - that night I showed them the first potential
casting charts - and that same night I outlined my battleplan for The
Bacchanals for the next year and a half, and it included a promenade
Hamlet at Zeal in the 2002
Fringe, with Carey playing the title
role. During the trilogy Eve and I had preliminary talks with the Zeal
people, who were very keen, and
Hamlet became a topic of
discussion most nights as we boozed after the trilogy plays.
It's difficult to know where to even begin with a play like
Hamlet.
When I've taught this play in classes it's seemed to me that even if I
had 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year, I couldn't cover all
the things there are to say about what must be Shakespeare's very best
play. There is almost too much in it to ever be able to do it real
justice. In my theatregoing I've always come out of
Hamlet
saying "Well, they didn't really touch on that element...or they
ignored that aspect..." but I found rehearsing our production that
it is so complex and overwhelming that you eventually have to make
the decision to abandon some facets in order to concentrate more on
others. I came to the conclusion that no production of
Hamlet
could ever really encompass everything going on in the play; it's just
too big.
With Hamlet being The
Bacchanals' third Shakespeare, we were
facing a Catch-22 in the way we did things. To apply a directorial
concept would have been at the risk of disappointing those who commended
the simplicity of the way we usually did things, but to the same extent
there'd be those who saw Othello
and Titus Andronicus
saying "Oh god, not another
plain clothes, no set, fast moving/speaking Shakespeare..." With
Othello I had a specific agenda
on accent and verse-speaking
rather than any take on the play. With
Titus I believed that,
as a play few theatregoers would be familiar with, we had a responsibility
to deliver it in as straightforward a manner as possible - directorial
concepts are for plays people are already well-acquainted with. It would
be a cheat to do Hamlet with
no plan in mind.
I had a few things I was keen to get across. Firstly, I wanted it to be a
play where every character was important, not just Hamlet. I wanted to
be able to come away from it remembering which character was Rosencrantz
and which one was Guildenstern. I developed a 'concept' that seemed to
work for me and for the feel I wanted - that Hamlet, like me, is an adult
who never leaves university. At the start of the play he's come back to
Denmark from university in Wittenberg and when Claudius says "For your
intent on going back to school in Wittenberg, it is most retrograde to
our desire" and begs him not to leave, Hamlet's bags are packed and he's
on his way to the railway station. Horatio - who if we take the text
literally, must be a man in his 50s (he obviously has nothing better to
do if he can spend months waiting around in Denmark - the action of the
play, after all, takes several months to play out - and he says in IV.vi
"I do not know from what part of the world I should be greeted if not
from Hamlet" - so he has no family or dependants elsewhere) - leaves
Wittenberg the moment he hears of the remarriage. At the start of the
play when the sentinels welcome Horatio, they're welcoming him to
Denmark, not the watch - the idea being that Horatio has virtually
just stepped off the plane and been picked up at the airport by
Marcellus, who tells him about the ghost. How do Hamlet and Horatio
know Marcellus, Barnardo and the like? Because they too are current
or ex-Wittenberg students ("friends, scholars and soldiers") - in our
version of the play, the threat of terrorist action from Fortinbras
means Claudius has everyone doing the equivalent of National Service.
Semester ends and the King calls for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
come out on their study break. And rather than being like the RSC
or some touring company, I'd always seen the Players as being Hamlet's
friends from varsity who study theatre & film and do shows at Bats -
it's no chance event that the Players come to Elsinore - Hamlet
invites them. When he
asks the First Player "Can you play
The Murder of Gonzago?" he's
saying "Well? Did you get my message?" The kind of Elsinore we were
imagining was a place where students hang out in their holidays - rather
than Hamlet being the outsider, the likes of Claudius and Polonius and
Gertrude are the only adults in a town full of students, trying to run
the kind of government or monarchy that none of these students care
about. A big part of this too was the whole Fortinbras thing - the
reason Hamlet and Fortinbras speak highly of each other is because
they know each other.
In the world of our production, Wittenberg
was the university that all the royals and prime ministers sent
their children to. Fortinbras turns up at the end at Hamlet's
request - he's asked him for help. Regardless of how much of it
came across or even ended up being used in the show, these were the
premises we worked from to make the story clear in our heads. And
what was amazing for us as a group is that motive, psychology etc
was all unlocked by developing such a complex back-story for ourselves.
Hamlet is not
procrastinating in the two months' gap between Acts I
and II; he's waiting for the Players to turn up, because this is the
chief part of his plan to prove the King's guilt.
I had several possible options when it came to casting the play but
from the outset it was clear that Carey would play Hamlet and Eve the
Queen. Alex, who'd worked so hard under less-than-ideal circumstances
in Othello and the
Trilogy, more than deserved the opportunity
to show how good he really is with Laertes. I'd wanted Tina to play
Horatio - for some reason I'd always been keen on the idea of Horatio
played by a woman, just to make Hamlet and Horatio's friendship a little
more ambiguous - but she had her heart set on Ophelia, so I swapped her
and Erica in my planned casting charts. I could see different virtues
in John, Mark or James as Polonius and in Mark or John as the King. All
three of them wanted to play the Ghost, however (and John tried to argue
that he should be allowed to double the King and the Ghost, thus taking
two good roles!). Mark
didn't care who he was, provided he got to play the English Ambassador
(because he wanted to be the one to say "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are dead"!) and I even toyed with the idea of playing the Ghost myself.
In the end I opted for John as the King, Mark as Polonius and James in
roles that would be completely different to anything he'd done before -
the Ghost, the First Player and the Gravedigger. I wanted a strong
double act as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - a pair with the presence
of Taika and Jemaine (which would have been a fantastic piece of casting,
especially opposite Carey). It became apparent that the roles would be
played by women - not a bad option given the university backstory we'd
developed. Kate Soper, who'd been such a welcome and amazing presence
during the Trilogy, had auditioned for drama school but been declined -
in fact, when asked by the audition panel, "What will you do if you
don't get in?" she said "If I don't get in, that'll be great, because
then I can be in Hamlet!" I
cast Kate as Rosencrantz and
initially offered Jocelyn and then Judith the chance to play Guildenstern.
Both passed...but the perfect option was under my nose the whole time.
In 1995 when Carey and I first met, working on
BodyPlay (a
university drama club show directed and conceived by Duncan Sarkies),
one of the cast members was an American exchange student called Hilary
Willard. Carey and Hilary became a couple during the run of the show
and lived together until she returned to the US at the end of that year.
Carey was utterly miserable without her and literally spent years pining
for her. Even when, towards the end of 1997, he declared "I've finally
resigned myself to the fact that she's never coming back and I've got
to get on with my life" he still never really got over it and was unable
to give subsequent girlfriends what they felt they deserved. "It's
nothing to do with you personally," I told more than one broken-hearted
woman between 1995 and 2001, "it's just that you're not Hilary, and
for Carey no one will live up to the standards Hilary set." Amazingly,
Hilary turned up in New Zealand on holiday the week that the Trilogy
opened. Within weeks the Carey I had known six years earlier had
suddenly returned, and in what seemed like a whirlwind period of time,
Carey and Hilary were a couple again and set a date for their wedding
(which took place in May 2002, two months after the last performance
of Hamlet). I had
thought from the outset that Hilary would be
great in Hamlet but was
not sure how she and Carey would feel
about working together - or indeed how Hilary would feel, having not
acted in years. But it was Carey who suggested to me "Maybe Hilary
could be in the show?" at exactly the point that I was thinking what
a great idea it would be...and she and Kate made a fantastic team as
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Hilary also wanted to play Osric as a
Texan oil merchant - a far better idea than my original one of Osric
being the Norwegian spy who lets Fortinbras' army in through the back
door.
I'd worked out that we needed 14 actors to do the full text but we made
do with 12. Adam McMahon worked at Rialto with James, Erica and some of
Eve's flatmates. When he'd come to see
Titus Andronicus during
the Trilogy, his mobile phone rang twice during the performance and we
always had him on about it. We rehearsed
Hamlet before Christmas
2001 with ten actors, intending to pick up four 'spear carriers' in January.
On New Years' Eve at Boston Terrace, Adam offered to do absolutely
anything he could to help out with the show - so I decided to cast him
as Marcellus. Kristin Smith was the younger sister of an old school
friend of mine and Mark's - eight years old when the Wellington High
School Shakespeare Society (where I directed my first show aged 17) was
founded in 1992, in 2001 Kristin played Rosalind in
As You Like It
for the Society's tenth year. Kristin had seen our shows and was thrilled
to be able to play any part when it was mentioned that we needed spear
carriers.
Hamlet was easily the
happiest rehearsal experience of all The
Bacchanals' shows, and not just because we were able to be in the venue
for three full weeks before the show opened, planning exactly how every
facet of things would work. Gone were the egos and troublemakers of the
Trilogy - the thirteen of us had a ball in each other's company, there
were no moments of difficulty or disagreement, and I spent pretty much
all day every day with an inane grin, thinking "I'm rehearsing a
production of Hamlet!!" We'd
get to Hamlet's "What a piece of
work is a man" exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and I'd start
laughing for no reason. The actors would stop and say "What is it?"
and I'd have to respond, "Nothing, really...it's just that I can't
believe I'm actually rehearsing this play!!" On the day of the
preview I ran into someone in town who commented, "You do
not look
like a man whose Hamlet is
opening tomorrow!" I was in a
constant state of calmness, relaxation and excitement because I was
so happy with the way the show was going - and for the first time I
didn't care what people/audiences/reviewers thought of it - which was
probably just as well. I knew on opening night that the reviews weren't
going to be great - and the opening night was not a good show - but I
did not care.
The poster for the show was a great source of inspiring confidence.
Carey had suggested jokingly, given the 'student' backstory we'd
developed, that a poster parodying
Scarfies but with Denmark
colours rather than Otago University's might be eye-catching and witty.
Furthermore, we rationalized that it would make us look a bit less anal
as well - after all, Hamlet is
about as high-art as theatre gets,
so we wanted something that suggested it wouldn't be all doom and gloom
(in the same way that Simon Bennett's production of the play at Bats
years and years ago had called it
Hamlet! with the exclamation
mark to emphasize that it was a play full of action and excitement).
The poster looked magnificent and was also the first to feature the
'official' Bacchanals logo - an illustration from a kylix eye krater
of Dionysus at sea having transformed attacking pirates into dolphins.
We wanted an appropriate but funny Latin motto. Mark was keen on
Non compos mentus (or
something like that, meaning "Not mentally
competent") but we settled on
Hic et ubique, Hamlet's exclamation
when the Ghost is swearing under the stage in I.v. Even though it was
nonsense - "Here and everywhere?" - we were able to see a funny logic
to it, given that we were doing a show in which the audience shifted 17
times. Eve and I picked the posters up from the printers' on our way
back to a rehearsal and they lifted the general spirits of all in the
show, they looked so magnificent and
red. They stood out a
mile away and over the six weeks they were about, people would phone to
say "They were interviewing someone on the 6pm news tonight and you
could see Hamlet posters
over the road from the person!" and
similar comments. Even people who didn't get the
Scarfies
parody loved the eye-catching posters. Two days out from the end of
the season, I was crossing the street in town and saw Duncan Sarkies -
Scarfies' screenplay writer -
opposite me at the intersection.
As he came towards me I was dreading threats of law-suits for
plagiarism/mockery etc...instead he beamed a huge grin and said "You
have to give me copies
of that poster, it's so funny!"
Hamlet opened with a
film sequence shot on Super-8 and parodying
the wonderful opening of Orson Welles' film of
Othello, which
starts with the funerals of Desdemona and Othello and their coffins
being carried along the Cyprus battlements. It's the best bit of the
film. We shot our black & white 8mm funeral of King Hamlet, followed
by a funeral procession carrying his corpse through the deserted
streets of Wellington, in the early hours of the morning so as to
get a completely empty city. The idea was that you'd see Gertrude,
Claudius, and the rest of the funeral party begin up at Parliament
or the city cathedral and march through Lambton Quay, along the
waterfront, through Civic Square, down Victoria Street, through the
back fire exit of Zeal and suddenly appear onstage. We encountered
a few obstacles - one was that, because we had not obtained clearances,
we were removed from parliament by security guards before we'd got any
footage. We'd known this would probably happen, even at 7am, so we
started on the steps of St Paul's instead. The greater obstacle was
the development process for Super-8 - the day we were expecting both
films back, we found that Kodak hadn't even sent them out of the
country and that they'd been sitting on a shelf in Auckland for two
weeks. James did some emergency package-couriering and made toll
calls to Melbourne, and fingers crossed, the black and white film
would be back in NZ a few days before opening night. The colour
film on the other hand...sure enough, the black & white film
arrived with days to spare and, miracle of miracles, all the major
shots we needed were on it. Unfortunately, while it looked great,
we had none of the Civic Square or approach to Zeal footage, so the
transition as the actors walked off screen and onto stage never had
the impact I'd hoped it might.
Nor did the music I wrote to go with the funeral, which needed a
dozen strong voices to carry it off - but with Carey not part of
the procession, James operating the projector and then clattering
upstairs to position himself as the Ghost and me not actually in
the production, we were lacking in some of our stronger male singers
and the piece never sounded as impressive and scary as the Gregorian
chant we opened and closed
Titus Andronicus with. We
tried to
introduce the promenade thing right from the outset and made the
audience join the funeral procession as it made its way upstairs into
the traverse space for the first scene. The sentinels had giant long
martial arts-killing sticks Adam had borrowed for us, whereas James had
borrowed body armour and a helmet and cape. I wanted a big scary ghost -
to contrast with the very human ghost in I.v - but we probably needed
bigger special effects to pull it off. What was funny about the Zeal
space was that due to the nature and placement of the technical
equipment, any lighting or sound effects upstairs had to be cued by
hand signals to whoever was downstairs at the lighting/sound desks.
The show's most sudden lighting change, when the Ghost entered the
Closet scene (III.iv) had Kate in the doorway signalling Hilary at the
top of the staircase signalling Adam halfway down the staircase
signalling Alex at the bottom of the staircase signalling Kristin in
the doorway to the main space signalling Tina on the lighting desk. In
the first scene, the sound of a crowing cock to cue the Ghost to leave
was often late because, even posted on the stairs, the actors doing
the signalling could not always hear the lines clearly. One night
the squawking noise sounded a lot nearer than normal and, sitting in
the audience, I thought, "That wasn't the cd, was it?" Sure enough,
Hilary had given the hand-signal but when no noise was forthcoming and
James was stuck on stage, she'd made the crowing noise herself!
While the first scene took place upstairs, downstairs everyone else
was silently setting out the 80-or-so seats so that when the audience
came back down for I.ii and I.iii, the space was completely transformed
to what it had been when the show started. Until Act IV all the
downstairs scenes were in the round. Air raid sirens told them when
to move. I always thought the actors' story-telling skills in this
early part of the play were extraordinary - I used to hang off every
word of the Hamlet and Horatio scene at the end of I.ii, which I
thought was great. The same with the Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia -
I.iii - which was one of my favourites. I was determined we would not
have a buffoon Polonius so Mark and I deliberately came up with a
reading on Polonius that we thought removed the doddery old man
clichés but still allowed the character to get laughs. Mark was
so understated with most of Polonius' famous 'advice' to Laertes that I
often used to have a wee tear in my eye when he got to "This above all -
to thine own self be true" because it sounded so natural and
human. And then he'd
turn all that tenderness on its head when he interrogated Ophelia about
her relationship with Hamlet. Mark would underplay it so that the
audience were relaxed, then it gradually became more serious and
menacing and finally he'd snap and scream, "Ay, springes to catch
woodcocks!" slamming a pile of folders down on the boardroom table.
If you put this scene in slow motion on the video recording, you see
the spray of spit flying again and again, dousing poor Tina.
The audience shifted back upstairs for I.iv and then into the tiny
upstairs space for I.v. What we found early on was that many scenes
or sequences ended with lines like "Come, let us go in together",
"Let's follow, I pray", "O, come away" etc - lines that could easily
become actors instructing the audience rather than characters interacting.
My favourite transition would be watching, on a good night, the way the
audience responded to Erica and Adam's impassioned end to I.iv - Adam
would yell "Nay, let's follow him!" as they both gestured to the
audience. Some nights the audience would leap to their feet in urgency
to follow Adam and Erica into the next space as quickly as they could.
I was determined in I.v to make the Ghost as human as possible, so he
got rid of his helmet. The idea was that Hamlet's been chasing the
Ghost all night before they finally reach the Ghost's 'cave' where the
Ghost finally talks to him. I wanted the Ghost to be able to physically
touch Hamlet and it worked out that the Ghost left his sword behind
for Hamlet to later try and kill the King with in III.iii. We set
up a couple of small pools of light and James sat in one, while Carey
stood in the other. They both stayed absolutely still while James
delivered the Ghost's wonderful lines and then, when describing the
actual murder, the Ghost acted it out - James would move towards
Carey and grab him by the head, demonstrating the poisoning. We
borrowed an idea from Campbell Scott's film of
Hamlet (in
which Michael Imperioli from my all-time favourite TV show,
The Sopranos, plays
Guildenstern...or is it Rosencrantz?) of
the Ghost's touch almost burning Hamlet's flesh, so that when James
touched Carey and gripped him hard, Carey would go into convulsions.
At the end, before leaving the scene, after saying "Adieu, adieu,
remember me," the Ghost reached out again, Hamlet flinched, fearing
a similar pain, but instead this time the Ghost would kiss him gently
on the forehead. For what was one of the most crucial scenes for me -
not just in terms of the play but also my own father-son angst - this
moment was so important and I don't know how many times I sat there
in the dark crying during this bit.
From thereon it was back out into the traverse space for the
swearing on the sword, then downstairs until the first interval.
The play seems to change gear a bit with the Reynaldo scene. With
the Hamlet-Ophelia relationship, we decided that they've grown up
together, always been good friends, spent many $2 pint nights at the
pub together during university talking politics and philosophy, and
things had always been ambiguous until King Hamlet's death, during
which time Hamlet had sought solace and comfort from Ophelia. But
the revelation of murder has screwed everything up for Hamlet and his
mother's remarriage means he feels he can't trust
anyone female - when he
says "We are arrant knaves all" in III.i, he's telling her, "Look, all
these crazy things I've found out (ghost, murder etc) are bigger than
anything else I can cope with, including our relationship." Mark's
absolute seriousness in II.ii used to get him some very good laughs.
Early on in rehearsals we decided it would be nasty to have Ophelia
onstage during the sequence where Polonius talks of Hamlet and
Ophelia's relationship and relates the letters Hamlet's sent his
daughter. Once the scene changed tone and became a lot funnier,
Ophelia's presence there became redundant but in rehearsal there
were some horrible, horrible moments with Polonius and Claudius
treating her like she was nothing. The epitome of this was always,
when she is devastated and crying at the end of III.i, Mark would
say "You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said, we heard it all,"
with a "Good girl!" tone and then pat her condescendingly on the head.
Hamlet's letter became, in our production, an answerphone message
Polonius played back to the King and Queen, with Hamlet singing and
playing his guitar over the phone to Ophelia. With smart audiences
we were able to get a cheap laugh when Hamlet on the answerphone says,
"Thine evermore dear lady, whilst this
machine is to him".
For Hamlet's
feigned madness, Carey wore a singlet and pyjamas (homage to Mark
Rylance's RSC Hamlet of the
late 80s), and also a blanket -
inspired by the homeless 'Blanket Man' well known to anyone who hangs
around Cuba Mall. What provided a moment of serious bizarreness during
the season was that Kate one day got talking to Blanket Man on the
street and invited him to come and see the show. During I.v that night
I was aware of the curtain rustling by the entrance to the Ghost's
'cave' and turned to see Blanket Man sitting in the corner. He stayed
for the whole show, sitting in the background rather than with the rest
of the audience.
II.ii is my favourite part of the play and if there was one scene
that was never ever flat or uninteresting, it was this one.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's arrival would always jumpstart
the play on nights where the first act had been slow or flat and
I loved their reunion with Hamlet. We played the whole discussion
of Fortune as though this were a well-known comic routine for them
all - we likened it to members of the Monty Python club meeting in
the university Quad and automatically quoting lines and scenes at
each other. Hilary's marvellous feigned hysterical laughter during
"What a piece of work is a man" always lightened a potentially
burdened moment - the "famous speech alert" I always used to note
in my copies of the plays when I was a teenager. I love the whole
arrival of the Players and their performance of the Pyrrhus speech.
I always hated seeing Hamlets who fumbled over the lines or didn't
know how the speech was supposed to go (witness Campbell Scott or
Kenneth Branagh) - if Hamlet is the great academic and eternal
student the text purports him to be, then it should be that - like
me with these plays - he knows every word by heart. It's like a
university lecturer with a visiting guest actor saying to the class,
"Here's how the speech begins...and now I'll let Mr Gielgud do the rest."
We went with an alternate reading of the 'To be or not to be' speech,
playing it to be about murder rather than suicide. Carey played it
with a rapier in hand to emphasize the point. I wanted as many
references to Hamlet's swordsmanship as possible, so that it didn't
seem like a complete surprise when he says "I have been in continual
practice" to Horatio in the final scene.
One of the major staging problems for me was finding a new way of
playing the "Where's your father?" moment in Hamlet and Ophelia's
scene together. It seemed like a cheat to just adopt the usual
business to convey that Hamlet knows they're being spied on - the
King or Polonius coughing, or Hamlet aware that there's someone on
the other side of the two way mirror. I was very pleased with
the piece of business I devised - initially it was intended as a
joke on the audience and then solved a major problem. I thought
it would be nice to have a cellphone ring in the audience during
II.ii to herald Polonius' entrance - I liked the thought that the
audience and onstage actors would all think someone hadn't turned
their mobile off, and then suddenly Polonius steps out from the
audience and you realize it's a gag. It used to get quite a good
laugh when Mark came onstage, phone to his ear, to announce "The
ambassadors from Norway, good my lord, have returned". As I was
plotting the gag out, it then occurred to me that we could repeat
the gag during the First Player's speech - have the cellphone ring
at the point where Polonius interrupts the Player. It meant "This
is too long!" was Polonius' petty defence when everyone glared
angrily at him for taking the call. It was actually as I was
explaining these two gags to Mark before a rehearsal that the crucial
one occurred to me - as I was saying "We ought to find a third place
to use it - maybe when the King wants to know where Hamlet's hidden
the body in IV.iii it could ring offstage?" I suddenly realized we
could have the phone ring in III.i while he and the King spy on Hamlet
and Ophelia, as the catalyst for Hamlet's "Where's your father?"
The "remembrances" that Ophelia returned to Hamlet weren't letters;
they were all the books and cds he'd loaned or gifted her. We'd
decided that the songs she sings in IV.v when mad were 'their'
songs and in addition to Tina's live performances of snippets of
the tunes in IV.v, we made a full recording of "How should I your
true love know", with Kate's partner Jacob playing drums, his
friend Gareth on bass, me playing guitars and Tina singing, with
backing vocals from Eve and I. The idea was to have a
Portishead-sounding track, and we played it at the end of III.i,
the scene that heralded the first interval, while Ophelia sat alone
and dejected on stage.
After the first interval, we began III.ii in Zeal's foyer - the
Players would come out and set up in the foyer and start doing
their warm-ups (we wanted to deliberately take the piss out of
wanky warm-up processes - and amusingly the Players settled on a
similar piss-take, adopting a "Lion face! Lemon face!" routine
from the film
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
which was playing
at Rialto at the time). When the audiences' attention seemed suitably
refocused, Hamlet would enter and deliver the advice to the players
before leading the audience back into the main downstairs space for
the performance of
The Murder of Gonzago.
Keeping in the Dumb Show made the whole scene worthwhile - it was
so funny. In the proper
play, Adam as the Player Poisoner was dressed identically to John as
Claudius, so that the point was not missed. The audience were shifted
back into the foyer for III.iii - John performed "O my offence is rank"
on the metal staircase, with the audience gathered around him. Then it
was upstairs for the Closet Scene.
III.iv was the first scene we rehearsed and, like the scene between
Hamlet and the Ghost, was for me one of the lynchpins of the play.
This scene just got better and better, even though by the time the
show opened I thought it would have had nowhere new to go, we'd
thrashed it so much - and yet every night it was superb. The Ghost's
'cave' had been turned into Gertrude's closet. A nice multimedia
gimmick was the television set - we filmed footage which we edited
into a 60 Minutes-style piece
about the present political
situation in Denmark, showing snippets of Gertrude and Claudius'
wedding (in the Begonia House at the Botanic Gardens!), Claudius
addressing a press conference and then partaking in an in-depth
interview. The idea was that Gertrude was watching something like
Nightline when Hamlet
comes in, and it was devised solely so
that when Hamlet said, "Look here upon this picture, and on this" he
could contrast his prized photograph of King Hamlet with the television
footage of Claudius. When the Ghost entered, Mark (dead behind the
arras) was able to unplug the video at the wall so that suddenly the
television screen was covered in static. Because we never knew how
long it would take the audience to get upstairs and into the space,
5 minutes of a Judy Garland film was tacked onto the front as a
lead-in to the Nightline-style
show. On opening night the
amount of time needed was badly over-estimated and the whole gimmick
backfired - by the time the Ghost entered, the footage was only just
reaching the start of the specially recorded stuff, and Carey had to
bluff in absence of any actual image of the King.
Back out to the traverse set-up for the brief IV.ii, and then the
audience went downstairs for IV.iii, by which time the seating in
the main space had been rearranged into a proscenium arch set-up.
I liked the idea of Claudius turning nasty once he thought the
Queen was out of the way, so when Hamlet kept giving him
smart-arse answers, he ended up punching him. We rehearsed this
with just John and Carey and it was fantastic seeing the absolute
shock the other actors got the first time John and Carey incorporated
the punch into a full run-through.
I'd always intended to do something a bit different with IV.iv - firstly
that it would be set in an airport/ferry departure lounge, and secondly
that it would involve Hamlet working the Danish crowd at the
airport/harbour a bit. I liked the idea that "How all occasions do
inform against me!" should be delivered to all the surrounding people
so that Hamlet is basically telling everybody of the King's treachery
as he is herded off towards the plane/boat, the premise being that he
primes everyone for the return of Laertes, who then has to do hardly
any work to amass an army for his revolution. The other thing that
worked nicely in this scene, which was staged in the Zeal foyer, was
the CNN-style footage of
Fortinbras' army playing on the three
giant TVs that sat in the corner of the foyer. I made a cameo as a
BBC World newsreader
telling of the 20,000 troops massing on the
Danish border, which we accompanied with World War II footage of trucks
and tanks preparing for battle, and topped off with scratchy images of
Fortinbras, in front of a rock somewhere in the Middle East, saying
"Go captain, from me greet the Danish king!" down the barrel of the
camera. Hamlet emerged from the toilets and asked the other passengers
all the questions he asks the captain in the text. We had regular
tannoy announcements of "This is a final boarding call for all
passengers for the S.S. Mosca,
sailing from Elsinore, Denmark
to Southampton, England" to complete the atmosphere. At the end of
the scene, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dragged Hamlet out through
the main doors of Zeal and into the night as the second interval began.
For much of the last third of the play Carey was upstairs asleep while
the action carried on downstairs. In the main space the others held
the fort. IV.v was a surprisingly lovely scene to work on - I'm not
usually interested in Ophelia's madness but Tina reasoned it as the
only real option Ophelia had left. We likened it to the people who
suddenly go to pieces come exam-time - just a general stress explosion.
The songs worked very well. One critic claimed that in soft-singing
Tina robbed the songs of their 'shock value' but their purpose is to
make the audience cry, not to shock them. I remember one run of the
play a few weeks out from opening night. Tina was singing the final
song and I looked at the other onstage actors to see that Kate, Erica,
Kristin and Eve were all in tears, which set me off as well.
Our only tampering with the text in
Hamlet was IV.vi. I made
the decision - really to play a joke on people who knew the play - to
ignore the scene in the traditional text and go instead with the
equivalent scene in the First Quarto. The First Quarto of
Hamlet was an illegal
publication constructed from the memory
of the bit-part actor who played Marcellus - his are the only lines
that correspond closely with those in the 'authorized' text published
by Shakespeare's company. In the notorious First Quarto, Hamlet says
"To be or not to be - ay, there's the point", Polonius is called Corambis,
and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become Rossencraft and Gilderstone.
The plot is condensed but identical, with one exception: in place of
Horatio receiving a letter from Hamlet about the pirates that intercept
his voyage to England, the First Quarto features a scene in which
Horatio tells the Queen of Hamlet's return and the Queen confirms
that she knows Claudius murdered her first husband. I opted with
this scene partly for its novelty value but also because, while I
don't believe such a scene ever existed, what its inclusion in the
First Quarto suggests is that it was implicit in performance that
the Queen turned on Claudius after the closet scene. Eve, Erica and
I rehearsed the scene in secret and inserted it into the first full
run of the play - and none of the other actors even noticed, to my
dismay! Nor, I think, did most of the audiences.
After IV.vii, the audience went upstairs one final time for V.i. Mark
and James often took their ad-libbing a little too far, Mark in particular
openly ignoring Hamlet's advice to the Players - "Let those that play your
clowns speak no more than is set down for them"! But even I wouldn't have
been able to resist, the night where in the midst of the First Gravedigger's
word-trickery James' spade completely and unexpectedly fell apart, leaving
him holding just the handle, Mark's quick-as-lightning quip of "Dig with
that, you bastard!"
Finally it was downstairs for the final scene. Ever since first
conceiving of directing or performing a
Hamlet, I'd had the
idea that Hamlet & Horatio would be getting in some fencing practise
at the start of this scene - so that when Hamlet says to Osric, "It is
the breathing time of day for me" (meaning "I'm ready for some exercise")
he means it literally, as he's already masked up and been fighting a few
rounds. Geoff Pinfield, another ex-Wellington High School student, who'd
played Young Siward when I directed
Macbeth aged 17, and Caliban in
a production of The Tempest
I directed for an amateur group a few
years later, choreographed a great final fencing match between Laertes and
Hamlet. The finale of Hamlet
is a bizarre one when you consider
the other tragedies - wars, battles, murders,
fights-to-the-death...whereas
Hamlet ends with a gentlemanly
fencing match that goes wrong. Productions that use broadswords
(or even knives, as in one appalling production I saw in Sydney in
1997 that basically ripped off Steven Berkoff's production wholesale,
presumably thinking there wouldn't be many people about who'd read
his book) are wrong and completely miss the point of the ending - it
is a contest, a competition between Hamlet and Laertes, and Hamlet
doesn't enter into it thinking anything will come of it other than
the opportunity to make amends with Laertes. The irony is he's so
certain his death is nigh that he goes into the fencing match blindly
thinking "It'll pass the time until death catches me" and not even
aware of the potential danger.
On the nights when the series of events surrounding the poisoned cups
worked as precisely as they needed to, I was absolutely gripped by how
good this moment of the play can be, especially having sat through so
many productions where the audience roars with laughter when the King
says "It is the poisoned cup! It is too late!" To his credit, John
was only laughed at once during the whole season, and even then it was
only a giggle rather than the gales of laughter that can totally
deflate moments of potential tension (and did so some nights during
our Titus Andronicus).
The idea behind the King's death for
us was that the whole kingdom by that stage was aware of what was
going on - Hamlet delivering "How all occasions" to a crowd of
onlookers, Horatio telling Gertrude about the King's treachery in
the scene from the First Quarto, and similar events having a knock-on
effect so that by the last few scenes everyone knows what Claudius is
capable of - so when Hamlet stabs the King and then forces him to drink
the remainder of the poison all his servants and attendants stand by,
making no move to protect him. Some nights Horatio helped Hamlet hold
the King down while the poisoned wine was forced down his throat.
We were never able to crack the kind of ending I wanted with the
arrival of Fortinbras. The original idea of Osric being the spy who
lets the army in through the back door proved implausible, as did
the 'infiltrated Norwegian agents' idea we tried. The idea was that
when Hamlet says "What warlike noise is this?" Osric would announce
the arrival of Fortinbras as though it were the codeword for all
hidden agents to reveal themselves, and in unison everyone onstage
would draw weapons or something to indicate that they were all on
Fortinbras' side. We made everybody armbands with the Norwegian
flag on them, and originally at Osric's signal everyone whipped
off their coats to reveal the armbands. But we could never get
the moment to work properly and as opening night approached it
seemed like too important a moment - Hamlet's death - to throw in
such a big clanger. I don't quite remember if we changed it on or
after opening night, but what did eventually happen was that we
held the 'reveal' until after Fortinbras' entrance. After saying
"I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, which now to claim
my vantage doth invite me," Fortinbras would march up to the huge
Danish crest hanging at the back of the stage and rip it down from
the wall, and we eventually decided that this would be the best
moment to have the 'reveal'. I recall during the week we opened
wondering if we should just drop the whole idea - I was prompted
by a few peoples' comments on it on opening night, I think - but
the cast were surprised at me not having entire confidence in one
of my own ideas, and their surprise was enough for me to think
"Damn it, we'll keep it in, I don't care what anyone else thinks!"
Mark was very pleased to be able to play the English Ambassador but
there was much debate over his costume. Mark's mother owns a rather
spectacular silver and black kimono that Mark has often wanted to wear
onstage, and he hoped he'd have the opportunity to in
Hamlet.
I'd suggested that in II.i, as Polonius is 'relaxing at home' while
talking with Reynaldo (the scene is played in the middle of the night
in the Branagh film) Mark might wear the kimono then. About a week out
from opening night Mark tried wearing the kimono - but in I.iii, the
scene between Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia. Alex and Tina's eyes
widened visibly as Mark marched onstage in his glittering kimono and
then delivered Polonius' famous advice to Laertes, and when he got to
"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy -
rich, not gaudy, for the apparel oft beclaims the man" those of us in
the audience completely lost it. The next night, after being forbidden
to wear it as Polonius, he tried it for the English Ambassador. I was
already having to stifle my laughter at Fortinbras' Darth Vader-like
gas mask, but the sight of Mark at this moment of great tragedy in a
shiny kimono - as an ambassador from England - was too much for me.
Not just that, but the corpses of Laertes, Hamlet, the King and the
Queen were all on the ground convulsing. The first thing Mark said
at the first discussion he and I had about Malvolio for
Twelfth
Night was, "I'm wearing the kimono in the yellow stockings scene!"
Hamlet's body was carried out and as the lights faded to black, our
ending music for the show was the demo track of George Harrison singing
"All Things Must Pass" that appears on Volume 3 of The Beatles'
Anthology. I've always been a
huge Beatles fan -
if Shakespeare
is my theatrical obsession, then The Beatles are my musical one - and
George Harrison often popped up in our thoughts during
Hamlet -
we learnt he'd died the day we did the publicity photos for the show.
We had originally thought of something like "Ave Maria" for the end -
I wanted something choric or operatic but simple. Someone brought in a
recording but I hated it, and it was actually Carey who said "What about
a Beatles track?" (most Bacchanals know better than to indulge me when
it comes to The Beatles)
After a slow start, Hamlet
turned into the most successful season
we'd had since The Frogs.
Oddly for the show I was happiest with
at the time, many of the reviews seemed lukewarm compared with how the
previous shows had fared. The promenade gimmick polarised everyone, and
whether they loved or hated the show was dictated by the promenade.
Interestingly, while none of the reviewers liked the idea, most audience
members absolutely loved it and time and time again people claimed that
being able to get up and move so regularly meant they stayed attentive
and interested. I'm convinced that, had we staged the whole show in one
space, it would have just been too long to stop peoples' attention
drifting off.
Hamlet continued to have a
long life beyond the actual season.
We were most surprised to be nominated for two Fringe awards at the
end of the festival, especially as no one from the Fringe office had
seen the show nor given us any kind of support whatsoever (not that
we expected it - after all, like
The Frogs our major reliance
on the Fringe was the free publicity of having the show advertised in
their programme, and the convenience of using their ticketing system
rather than having to organize our own). We didn't win either award,
nor did we expect to, but with thirteen Bacchanals we consumed a lot
of the free booze and felt very pleased with ourselves and what we'd
achieved. Right at the other end of the year, we were actually
rehearsing Twelfth Night
when the phone rang with the news
that Erica had been nominated for a Chapman Tripp award for her
performance as Horatio. The rest of the rehearsal was a complete
write-off as a result, and it was a great victory for us that
despite all the other stuff Erica had done that year - including
playing the lead in Gravity
at Bats, a play up for several
awards - the nomination was for
Hamlet and not something
else. And at the crucial moment of that award ceremony I thought
"Of course she'll win!" and seconds later her name came out of the
envelope.
I was grumpy at how many of our ideas also appeared in Michael
Almerydia's very disappointing film of
Hamlet, shot in
2000 but never released in NZ. I finally saw the film on video
halfway through 2002 and had to ring Thurleigh Grove (the home of
John, James and Mark) during I.v to say "The Ghost has just
grabbed Hamlet by the head!" John, who answered the phone, said,
"Surely overlapping with someone else just means you've had as good
an idea as his?" He wasn't so dismissing when I rang them again
during IV.iii to say "The King just punched Hamlet on the same line
as you did!" John said, "Hopefully not many people will have seen
this film and our production..." Five minutes later I had to ring
them back to say "And now they're in an airport!!!" While John
roared with laughter, Mark called out, "Is Fortinbras on the telly?"
and I looked back at the film to say, "No...no...oh, hang on, he is
now..." I have to resign myself to the knowledge that no idea is
original, and that theatrical plagiarism is everywhere...
Hamlet was the
epitome of the ensemble ideals I'd wanted
The Bacchanals to fulfil and it felt like the culmination of all
the work we'd done to date. As I've said, it was an utterly happy
working experience and the happiest I've been with a show, even
though I know I've done much better work before and since.
Othello was probably a
better show, but Hamlet's
virtue was that the whole ensemble was strong, whereas
Othello,
as much as I'd loved it, rested entirely on star performances from
Taika and Carey and they carried the weaker members of the cast.
How strange then that Hamlet,
the play you'd expect to be
carried entirely by the actor Playing The Dane, revolved around a
tight group who were all of a high standard. It was a strange time
once the show opened, as I knew that it would be a long time before
we worked together as a large group again -
Crave was in the
pipeline and I knew would require only Carey, James, Eve and Tina.
And with Carey's departure from NZ scheduled for shortly after
Crave's finish date, I knew
things would never be the same
again and that the next Bacchanals production of a Shakespeare would
be a very different kind of show...
- David
Front (lr): Hilary, Carey, Adam, Tina, Eve, David
Back: Kate, Kristin, Erica, John, Mark
In the dark: Alex, James
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