Um Hamlet a Mais
A Manchester view in the Peninsular - or, an unexpected night at the TNSJ.
When I was quite young - let's say eight or nine - before we moved from the midlands to what I thought of then as the wasteland of Yorkshire, a well-meaning Aunt gave me for my birthday, Christmas, whatever, a copy of Hamlet. Not just the dry Shakespeare text, you understand, but a version "adapted for the toy theatre". Looking back, I suppose I should be thankful that this particular Aunt had no influence on the way I learned to swim, for she would surely have thrown me into the deepest part of the river and expected me to be grateful. In the austerity of post-war England at the beginning of the 1950's, this slim "sideways" book was an unusual, strange, monochrome thing, with its miniature figures of the dueling Hamlet and Laertes to cut out, and grey atmospheric stonework wings and backdrop for the castle ramparts and hall, and a heavily "abridged" dialog for a very small stage. Printed on reasonable quality paper for the time and, at half a crown, not too expensive for a present from a reasonably well-off Aunt (I believe it still exists, at least in part, in my loft somewhere), the whole thing must have represented a significant effort by the publisher - a fledgling Penguin. I think it came out at about the same time as the Olivier film version of Hamlet, but this was long before the days of major film company marketing or sponsorship. My mother thought it was a grim, grey, miserable thing - and so it was, but I dutifully cut out the figures and the scenery and at least once tried make some kind of a show with the aid of darkened room, curtains, battery powered torch-light, and kitchen cutlery for sound effects, in the table top theatre my father had labouriously crafted out of salvaged plywood. The effort was duly applauded, and dubbed "interesting", and so began that canon of literary works which I have "Always Meant to Read Properly But Never Quite Managed To" and there Hamlet remains, cut-outs missing, in the loft, to this day - never quite properly read.
How then can one presume to "review" something one doesn't understand even at the most basic level of intelligibility? One needs, of course, a Fencing Master. It was the duelling figures, the sword-play, that had stayed in my mind all these years, and so instantly I was caught, held and carried, along - back - away, into the world of formalised barbarity which is the same today as it was in Hamlet's Elsinore, in Wellington's Peninsular. The opening - the silence - was electric: full focus, hard edged attention. And from what I remember of the few fencing lessons I ever had, it needed to be - the sword play was fast and real - balletic, like the opening of "Checkmate" with the duel of Love and Death. One advantage of not having the language is that one can build ones own meaning and structures round the unfolding scene. Here the formality of the duels mirrored for me the "gentlemanliness" of the opposing Peninsular armies towards each other as against the background of their savagery towards the occupied people (is it different in Baghdad, in Basra, in Kosovo?). Political duels. The games powerful people play. Games need spectators, and the swords and fencing masks, returned to and ordered in their racks, become faces, watching, threatening, ambiguous, half veiled by the constantly changing backdrop. "Of course you know Hamlet", I was told, "but you should realise that this starts at the end, after Hamlet is dead" Did Hamlet die? I don't remember. But what about the plot? It didn't matter. I was already caught. The events, the soliloquy, the mad scene, were all there, just as I "remembered" - somehow, despite the language, the soliloquy, THE soliloquy, seemed to appear, like the ghost, an aberration or apparition, like "Get thee to a nunnery!" (why does "nunnery" sound so much more powerful than "convent"? - my non-conformist background, perhaps).
But Ophelia, Ophelia! Such hair! I have never seen hair used in such a remarkable way. Tactile. Tactile for me, at any rate, but not for the distant Hamlet. Pre-Raphaelite? Certainly (we have Maddox-Brown in the main Manchester Art Gallery) but more, much more with its colour. And the fencing suit. Never was a complete covering more suggestive - maybe I was straying too far into my own fantasy as the Velcro of the outer coat parted. Oh yes, the coats. The coats made giants. The coats made shadows. They changed and mutated with the camera angle, turning dark into light. Coats became sweeping trains for grand gestures, pillows for comfort: prisons. The coats created certainty, solidity. Only when they were not there was there ambiguity. Oh yes, never go anywhere without your long coat, not Elsinor and certainly not England! I want one! I also want a ten string guitar - or however many it was - but if I can't have that (and I certainly couldn't play it if I did get one) then a new piece of software to go with my Apple PowerBook to makes noises by waving your hands. How comforting it was to see a PowerBook in control of things, glowing gently in the gloom - the MusicMaker's daemon. On this occasion the daemon was more Queen than Pink Floyd, perhaps, but like the changing, shifting, pellucid set and the introspective camera, always commenting, probing. The apples, by the way, were the only time, I think, where I really wanted my own Babel Fish: whatever their real significance, there was no mistaking the difficulty eating an apple deliberately loudly in any language, not to mention being clearly heard at the same time.
Why, then, in the end, even consider going to a play in a language you don't understand? For much the same reasons, I suspect, that brought me see a Noh play during my last visit to Japan. And the similarities didn't just end with the language ("ohayo, gozaimasu, konichi-wa? Domo, domo arigato. Fala Inglês?") All the complexities and disciplines suddenly seemed to make sense in a Noh kind of way - even the fish (Japanese Koi). The circle was completed by the Balkanisation of the duel: precision strikes, video games, death.
Grim? Maybe. Morbid? No. Thought provoking? Certainly. Time well spent - time away from my real job? Undoubtedly. Recommend it? Without reservation to those who I would share my Peninsular thoughts with.
What else? Oh, yes, no Yorick, but then...
And of course now I shall go home and really read Hamlet.
