In Praise of… Hamlet

Okay, so as established, that Shakespeare dude knows his stuff.  In fact, as a writer, while there’s a lot of praise for him, it is intensely irritating to sit there listening to so many bloody good lines being churned out casually by this guy with the sad thought going round and round your head that whoops, that’s another brilliant idea that someone else has already done.

(Incidentally, for anyone wondering, Pericles was, from a lighting point of view, tonnes of fun, better than expected and I deny all and any knowledge of the (minor) focus hole DSL.  And I hate Strand 520s.  I mean, for any future employers out there, I can use them – hell, I have got chase effects down! – but seriously, snottiness about the ETC Ion aside, it really is a wonderful bit of kit.  But other than that, Pericles went very well!  Nerdy moment over.)

Anyway, point is, Hamlet was on TV this Christmas, with Mr David Tennant examining the skull et. al., as I’m sure many, many people spotted, and yes, I watched it, spiritually munching popcorn all the way, and yes, it was pretty bloody stonking.  Which I should have kinda expected, really, because (entirely by accident, honest) I’d seen it before.

I am not what you’d call a neurotic theatre-goer – I ought to be, considering my chosen profession – but I don’t have enough money and don’t have enough time considering that RADA likes to work us six days a week until silly o’clock and to be honest, I’m not a queing-from-3-a.m. kinda girl.  But!  The RSC does, praise be unto it, do £5 tickets for the under 25s, and I did, by accident, have a friend studying at Warwick University when Hamlet opened in Stratford and was invited to come watch a football match with her that weekend and one thing led to another… and before I really knew what was happening, it was 7 a.m. outside the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon and we were doing penguin impressions to keep warm.  And playing cheat – you would not believe the ruthlessness the cheat can produce from otherwise perfectly civilized people!  My god!

Anyway.  Stratford Upon Avon is, in many ways, a Very Silly Place.  For a start, you have to take a train from Marylebone and, I kid you not, I was delayed forty minutes because there was a cow on the line.  This may not seem a particularly radical thing, but as someone who grew up in Hackney, I only ever really see cows on the side of milk bottles, and even then struggle to find the connection.  On arrival in the station you step out into the typical car park designed to destroy any optimism, walk up to a road of fairly standard houses that could be anywhere in the world, turn right for cheap B&B land and left for Yea Olde Historicale Centre.  And yes, before you know it, you’re sitting outside the Shakespeare Arms drinking coffee from a mug adorned with a porcelain ruff and being offered a souvenir quill.  Walking round the town, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that this is a place made economically viable by only two things – Shakespeare and swans.  And let’s not under-rate the swans!  The swans are not just numerous and impressive, but they know their market and have an almost cat-like appreciation of humanoids.  (Towit; they appreciate our usefulness but fail to fully grasp or care what we get from the relationship.)  When I was still of that special age when you had that special haircut known as Mum-Did-My-Fringe, I had an aunt who lived in nearby Banbury, and whenever we visited we would go to Stratford to ride the waterways and look for kingfishers and dragonflies.  Let’s not underestimate the swans.

However, remove the swans and Shakespeare, and this canal town would quickly, I suspect, lose its economic rationale.  But if ever the Royal Shakespeare Company justified its presence in Stratford, it did it with Hamlet.  Commercially and for sheer stonking theatrical value.  I was, I admit, a bit weary of seeing it, not least because of the sheer mass of publicity surrounding the fact that David Tennant was playing the lead part.  There’d been so much speculation that actually, in the midst of almost too much information, I kinda felt I knew nothing at all.  My expectation was both increased and dented by the fact that by 11 a.m. on the day we got our tickets, there was a queue stretching around the block behind us, and the thought just kept on sneaking into the back of the mind that at least some of these people might be willing to commit unlawful acts with sharpened sticks to get their hands on my ticket.  Getting my ticket, by the by, was almost KGB-esque in its enforcement – it turns out that the under-25 Shakespeare crowd have quite a history of duplicity on their side.

Anyway, we got it, and while waiting for the play to begin sat, in the mild drizzle, eating fish and chips and looking at the swans as, we felt, was our purpose.  (And if any of you are wondering about the football match, the blue team from the Shakespeare Institute beat the red team hands down.  Tragically.)  While this was happening, I discovered the other reason why me and the countryside have never really got on; I am allergic to it.  People think I jest when I say this – I really don’t.  Take me away from the exhaust fumes of any major city and I become asthma attack ground zero.  I just can’t cope with all that oxygen, it’s like suddenly trying to force-feed a starved pirahna.

Which leads me, entirely irrelevantly, to another sideways rant – what idiot, what total git, decided to make asthma patients pay for their medications on the grounds that it’s a ‘controllable condition’?  Sure, it’s controllable – so long as I don’t walk faster than four miles an hour, do any strenuous physical activity, laugh too heartily, or enter any environment to which my body is not already perfectly adapted.  It’s controllable, in much the same way clothes only need washing if you wear them.  Anyway – end of rant.

By the time we got into the theatre – many pictures of many people looking dramatically fraught on many walls – massive quantities of drugs had brought my respiratory system under some kind of control.  We did the regular trawl of the souvenir shop, failed to buy wooden swords, maps of Yea Olde Englande or teaclothes stitched with the face of Mr Shakespeare himself wearing a smile almost worthy of the Mona Lisa for its ambiguity.  When the bell went we were bundled inside, and every seat in the theatre was pretty much packed even before we’d worked out where the student seats were kept.  I couldn’t see a spare.  I kept on wheezing a bit.  The lights went down.  The play kicked off.

First impression was sympathy for the lighting designer.  The director of Hamlet was clearly a man who believed in practical on-stage lighting and had thus armed all of Act 1 Scene 1 with torches that they could point this way or that rather than using any actual rigged lamps.  Which worked brilliantly!  But must have been rather boring for the lighting designer to plot.  Then lights up and in trot the cast and off they go and it was all warming up nicely right up to the moment when everyone buggers off and Hamlet goes centre stage, takes a deep breath…

… and collapses.  I mean, we all know that Hamlet isn’t going to end well, it goes from bad to worse and then some.  But there was that moment, when suddenly out of no where there was bundle of pure grief curled up centre stage, that I forgot I was in a theatre, forgot I was having asthma troubles, forgot that my socks were soggy and the seats were really a bit too  close together and was just a gonner, completely caught up in the play and everything that happened.  I’ve seen some brilliant stuff in my time, and a lot of merely very good stuff, but the thing that separates the brilliant from the very good is that I don’t remember the brilliant stuff as if it was in a theatre.  I don’t remember the crowds or the queues or the interval drinks or the lighting or anything like that; I just remember feelings and images that have stuck with me to this day.

Hamlet may be the greatest play ever written – I dunno, I don’t know how you’d go about judging.  There are bits, let’s face it, which could do with the blue pencil.  But there are bits of everything that could, and even the blue pencil bits are more about bladder control than actual textual content.  And even the best play ever written can be ballsed up by a rubbish production.  (And arguably the worst play in the world cannot be saved by a brilliant production.)  I’m sure there are plenty of people who left the theatre – and turned off their TV on boxing day – feeling that their day had not been brightened and their heartbeat had not reached triple figures, or that a stage play for TV is something that will never be as alive as the real thing.  And there were differences; of course there were, and that is to be expected and probably, looked for.  But for those who found themselves sitting on the edge of their seats, trying very hard to remember to breathe, I hope that you and I both were part of a large crowd, tempted to feel indefinable things that we might never have felt before, or feel again.