taking Hamlet around the world
Twelve actors from Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in Britain spent almost two years attempting to visit every country in the world, and performing everywhere ( including in refugee camps), travelling under armed guard sometimes and struggling through the occ
BAGGAGE check in the Caribbean, and something shows up on a security guard’s screen. He signals to a colleague, who pulls the offending rucksack to one side, opens it and holds up what seems to be a human skull.
Understandably, he wants an explanation. His English isn’t great. A young woman steps forward. She puts on a deep voice and adopts a familiar pose. “To be, or not to be,” she booms. The security guard smiles. He gets it: Hamlet.
Eighteen months later and 8,000- odd miles away, actor Tom Lawrence steps to the front of a stage in Qatar.
“Assalamualaikum,” he shouts above the music, “and welcome to the world tour of Hamlet by Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s almost two years since we left London on a journey that will take us to every country on Earth – and you, Qatar, are country number 160.”
By the time they get back to Britain this month, for two final shows at the replica Elizabethan playhouse on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, it will be nearer 200. The 12 actors, four stage managers and their two prop skulls will have covered 180,000 miles each.
Back in the spring of 2012, Shakespeare’s Globe welcomed the world. Over the course of a month, its Globe to Globe Festival invited 37 different companies from all over the planet to perform one of Shakespeare’s plays in their own language. Julius Caesar came from Italy; The Merchant Of Venice from Israel. King Lear spoke Belarusian; Macbeth Polish. Shakespeare’s words blossomed into Swahili and Maori, French and Hindi, Greek and Korean.
Each show had its own flavour and drew its own crowd, pulling in new audiences from all over London and beyond.
“That opened up the world to us in all sorts of exciting ways,” says the theatre’s outgoing artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. And it begged the question: what next? The answer came, as the best ideas do, around a pub table. Pitched jokingly, the idea of a world tour was, as Dromgoole puts it, “simple and stupid enough to make sense”. The more the team talked about it, the more doable it seemed. It had to be Hamlet: iconic, yes, but with enough in it to find local resonance and, crucially, to keep a cast interested.
“If you did Romeo And Juliet, they’d be killing each other after six months. Hamlet’s elusive enough that you’re always chasing after it.” All the way round the world, if needs be. All this is a huge, unprecedented undertaking; one which executive producer Tom Bird calls “the biggest logistical challenge imaginable”. Armed with The Globe’s contacts and a directory of ambassadors and British Council officials, he hatched a plan: they would do longer tours in countries that might turn a profit ( the United States, Brazil, Hong Kong), propping up the rest.
Fundraising went into overdrive. Total cost: £ 2mil ( RM11mil). “As with everything we do, it has to wash its face.”
It’s more than the money. Every single leg means travel, visas, accommodation, a stage of some sort, permission to perform and, of course, an audience that needed press and marketing. Some required security, some needed flexibility. The company has ridden through Haiti with an armed guard and avoided anywhere with an Ebola outbreak, though they may still sneak into Guinea and Sierra Leone before the tour ends.
Other countries, however, are complete
no- go zones, such as Syria, Libya, North Korea. They considered playing embassies as a work- around, but instead chose to perform in refugee camps elsewhere – because playing to people is more important than playing on the soil.
After Qatar, the company heads on to Djibouti, 1,600km south on the East African coast, to a desert camp for displaced Yemenis. Two days later, they perform to a crowd of hundreds of children sat in a half- circle on the sand.
In Qatar, they have the luxury of a proper auditorium: the Al Rayyan Theatre in Doha. Microphones hang down from the ceiling. Red velvet seats fan out around the stage. “It’s like The Olivier at the National,” purrs actor Beruce Khan before the show. “This is going to be fun.”
A job like this takes a certain type of person. For starters, you can’t be tied down by family, career plans or anything else – but it’s more than that. It needs curiosity and a cando approach. They’re ambassadors as much as they are actors.
“Dominic described it as ‘ like picking an astronaut’,” laughs Bird. By the time they finish, the oldest cast member will be 65; the youngest was 22 at the start. Two are on their first job after drama school.
Apart from the two Hamlets, Ladi Emeruwa and Naeem Hayat, each actor knows several parts; an insurance policy in case of illness or injury, but also a way of mixing things up. By Djibouti, with two actors out of action, John Dougall ends up playing four parts: Claudius, Polonius, the ghost and the gravedigger. Casting swaps mean they still occasionally mix up Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ( Rule of thumb: Rosencrantz stands on the right.) Whatever state they’re in, the players know they’ve got to give it their best.
As Emeruwa explains, “Sometimes you’re tired, because you’ve been on a bus travelling for 14 hours, and then you have to give the only performance of the show that particular country will get the chance to see – and you are desperate to make sure that it is your best work.” With only one performance in each place, every night really is a first night.
So it is in Qatar, in front of an audience of locals, expats and diplomats – around 300 in total. Local critics look for blank pages in their notebooks, as do a group of female English literature students, dressed in black hijabs. Many families have brought their children. It’s a rare chance to see Shakespeare first- hand.
Onstage are a few tarpaulins, some flight cases and a clothesline. Wooden planks make Elsinore Castle’s ramparts. A curtain stands in for the castle walls. The ghost is announced with a crash of cymbals. This is theatre at its purest – a matter of make- believe and pretence – but played at pace, with plenty of knockabout humour, the audience gets swept up in the story.
The simplicity has pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. The show needs transporting, of course, but it also must fit all sorts of stages, from China’s national theatre to a football field in Benin in West Africa or a Cameroonian street corner. ( On several occasions, they’ve lost everything in transit, playing in plain clothes with sticks for swords and a rock for poor Yorick.)
It also has to be comprehensible to audiences from every culture, whether or not they understand English. Characters become archetypes: crowns for Claudius and his queen, a gown for scholarly Polonius. Emeruwa’s Hamlet is in black jeans and a jerkin.
“At its core, it’s a very simple family story,” says Hayat, the other Hamlet, who is more overtly philosophical than Emeruwa’s action man. “It’s about a mother and her son; a father and a stepfather; friendships, good and bad. The more we’ve travelled, the more universal it seems.”
Yet in each country, it finds its own particular resonance. Eastern Europe saw a suspicious surveillance state; African audiences fixate on Hamlet’s mother and her right to remarry.
Post- show in Qatar, one student tells me that it’s about an ambitious monarchy. It changes every time: Hamlet means one thing on the eve of elections in Ukraine, with President Petro Poroshenko in the audience, and another on the site of a killing ground in Rwanda. “We have a very definite idea of Hamlet and the skull,” says Hayat. “In that moment, it was a very real thing: a human skull in another man’s hand. People had seen that for themselves.”
Humour shifts, too: Caribbean crowds laughed at death; the Sudanese at sex, and kids everywhere lose it when Hamlet jumps out of a curtain and shouts “Boo!”. Qatar chuckles when Hamlet winds up Polonius: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s in the shape of a camel?” Nothing like a bit of local colour. The standing ovation, when it erupts at the end, feels like cheering on marathon runners, pushing the team on to the end.
You think you’ve got this thing down on paper – one play, two years, 190- odd countries – but the reality of it, the actual lived experience, is something else entirely. It’s not just two years away from home, it’s two years of constant travel and new places, rarely spending more than two days in the same spot.
It’s going from fancy hotels to makeshift tents, from the world’s richest country to one of its very poorest. It’s two years of new sights, new smells, new flavours, new faces – senses working overtime. Doha is a drive through the cluster of skyscrapers and walk through a souk full of caged birds. It’s shisha smoke and karak, a sweet, milky tea that tastes like rice pudding. To be a tourist is to take everything in.
When it’s all new, you can’t filter the everyday from the extraordinary. It’s exhausting. As actor Jennifer Leong puts it, “This is my normal now”.
The company has a shorthand for this: “Extreme Tourism”. They have become experts at encapsulating a place in a single afternoon. They whizzed round the pyramids of Giza on camels in less than three hours and stopped by the Great Wall of China, Victoria Falls and Mayan temples. They’ve snorkelled with dolphins, seen rhinos up close and succumbed to bad zebra meat. Barely 12 hours after curtain down in Qatar, we’re out in the desert at Khor Al Adaid, driving down sand dunes in four- byfours and gazing out at the inland sea as the sun sinks into the horizon.
“The world seems smaller now,” says one of the actors as the light starts to fade. Shakespeare, meanwhile, seems that much bigger. – British Airways High Life Magazine