Globe to Globe Hamlet Kickstarter Appeal.

In a bid to pull together more funding for the Globe to Globe tour, The Globe has begun a Kickstarter. Here's the widget:



They're trying to raise £200k. Click through for the pledge video which is worth watching anyway to offer some idea of the logistics of what's being attempted.  Two Hamlets, three Polonius's.

The Space live streaming The Globe’s open-air battlefield performance of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays.

I think it's worth a big long title. I've been sent this email/press release:

We thought you might be interested to know that The Space will be live streaming The Globe’s open-air battlefield performance of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays from Monken Hadley Common, near Barnet, between midday and 10pm on Saturday 24 August, 2013.

The Space will present the live event from multiple different viewpoints and aerial cameras will also capture the stage, audience and landscape from above. The live stream will be complemented with an innovative digital programme which will give audiences access to all the information available to the playgoer. After the live broadcast, edited films will become available.

Tune in to http://thespace.org on Saturday - and we would be very grateful if you could tell your followers and readers about this. We will be posting more information on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I’ve attached the press release for more information but let me know if you need anything else.
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/files/2013/08/final_h6_barnet_filming_release.pdf

I've emailed to ask how long the edited versions will be on the website.

Globe to Globe Hamlet.

Shakespeare's Globe is taking a production of Hamlet, a version of this production perhaps, to every country in the world:

"Shakespeare’s Globe said it aims to perform in some 205 countries and territories, some of which have never seen a Shakespeare production before, and will get around by automobile, boat, train and plane. The Twitter feed @WorldHamlet will track the show’s whereabouts."

It doesn't leave until next April, but the official website is already up here. How exciting. The Guardian has quotes from director Dominic Dromgoole:

"I think having a lunatic idea is a very good thing, it's a great way to keep everybody focused and dazzled and delighted by the ambition and energy of the company," said the artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. "If we're going to do every country in the world it has to be every country, we're not going to leave anyone out. All the 'Stans, South and North Korea – we're very keen to get into North Korea. Antarctica? Fuck yes."

The Twitter feed offers some background on the nature of the production:

Just 8 actors play over two dozen roles on a stripped-down booth stage, directed by @the_Globe's artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. #G2G
— GlobetoGlobe Hamlet (@WorldHamlet) July 16, 2013

All very In The Bleak Midwinter. Or Shakespeare Wallah. No news if it's the same eighth actors, because that would be remarkable. Can I come?

Shakespeare's Globe's A Summer Hamlet.

Fun trailer for a documentary about the Globe's touring production in 2011:

"A Summer Hamlet follows the company and their director, Dominic Dromgoole (Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe) as they tour the production from opening night at the Theatre Royal, Margate to their final performance at Hamlet's own home of Elsinore Castle, Denmark. Remaining backstage with the cast for every performance, this first feature by director Helen Lawson offers a rare insight behind the scenes of the production. We glimpse into rehearsal room mayhem, pre-show high jinx and backstage nerves as the team battle with the elements and a temperamental Ford Escort."

Of course, what I'd really like to see is a recording of the production...

Globe to Globe festival's Hamlet now available at The Space

Now posted to The Space, finally, is Meno Fortas's production of Hamlet, as performed as part of the recent Globe to Globe festival at Shakespeare's Globe.

There's not much more to say than that. Other than I will review it when I have access to a viable web connection and that I previous wrote about it here.

Shakespeare Uncovered: David Tennant on Hamlet

The story so far: Shakespeare Uncovered is a series of six introductions to plays introduced by leading actors and directors produced in association with the Globe theatre. The highlights have included Joely Richardson magically covered in snow during her first visit to the recreation of Shakespeare’s playhouse and discovering during Trevor Nunn’s exposition on The Tempest that there’s a recreation of Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia. Less appealing is Sir Derek Jacobi’s ten minute detor into authorship madness during an otherwise informative introduction to Richard II and Ethan Hawke subtly damaging a First Folio by stroking his finger across a page and knocking out an existing burn mark leaving a hole, the text on the next page now clearly visible.

Now we reach David Tennant on Hamlet and although I’m biased the best of the episodes. Focusing on Hamlet’s struggle with his mission and his own mortality, David gallops through the story from the ramparts to “the rest is silence” aided by a number of fellow actors, academics and as he wanders about in the bridging cutaways the architecture of Stratford-upon-Avon and the Southbank, struggling with the question of why the play is still considered the pinnacle of English literature, the one secular text which continues to enthral and inform us as much as holy texts if not more so. But again, I would say that, I’m biased. Yet as Ben Whishaw notes for six months after playing Hamlet in 2004 he found himself applying all of life’s big questions and presumably some of the small ones to the play, recalling the text over and over. I do that too.

Utilising a synopsis of the play as a spine for observation is a fairly typical approach (cf, Imagine ... Being Hamlet and Playing the Dane, the inspiration for this blog), questioning the action at key points, with contributors providing their experiences of playing the part or analysing them. Because Hamlet is so thematically rich the producers have had to make similar decisions to a company producing the play so the focus is very much on the domestic elements, with little to nothing on the politics of Elsinore and Denmark, the succession.  Fortinbras is cut. Lost too are Rosencrantz and Guidenstern other than the fact of their existence so nothing on the implications of their murder. “England” is generally glossed over. This is all about Hamlet’s personal j-word and those who’ve chosen to follow him.

All of which is perfectly understandable actually since entire books have been written about all of them, and there’s just an hour to play about with. It’s natural that you’d want to concentrate on the icons, whilst hinting at what lies beyond, the feigned madness, the implications of the willow scene that sort of thing. That’s especially true of the section shot at the Novell Theatre in which Michael Dobson offers a potted history of the closet scene which glanced towards Freud and also explains how Hamlet’s sometimes inappropriate attitude to his mother developed. Some productions almost treat the action in two discrete sections but as David notes there’s something very uneasy about Hamlet being so obsessed with Gertrude’s sex life with Polonius’s cadaver close by.

There are some unexpected inclusions. As with some of the other episodes, David was given the opportunity to see original copies of the text, in this case at the British Library and crucially all three versions including their copy of Q1 (one of only two in the world), comparing and contrasting the different versions of the big speeches and stage directions, discussing with curator of Early British Literature, Tim Pye the source of this earlier version. It’s worth noting that one of the potential weaknesses of the documentary is when David rhetorically asks who created this extraordinary character and where he came, we're not told about the Ur-Hamlet or Saxo Grammaticus but (admittedly touchingly) Shakespeare’s family and the death of Hamnet, which was also an influence on Twelfth Night in a very similar sequence in the Joely Richardson episode, one of the few occasions when the original source of a piece hasn’t been expounded upon.

Indeed, David has an impressively full participation, the episode’s presentation echoing his earlier presenter led episode of Doctor Who Confidential, “Do You Remember the First Time?” in which like this, he shared his affection for a much loved character whilst wearing a brown jacket. Then he visited the hallowed ground of Studio 8 of television centre, here it’s King Edwards Grammar Schoo, Shakespeare's school. Then he interviewed fellow fans like Steven Moffat and here we see him joshing over old reviews with David Warner and comparing approaches to the character with Jude Law.  At least in terms of the language of television, my favourite interview might be with Simon Russell Beale who (like Whishaw) has appeared in nearly all of the episodes in interviews clearly shot all together and so it seems here until David asks a follow up question and camera whip-pans in his direction. Beale himself almost startled to suddenly have his fellow actor sitting there.

Like that Confidential, this features dozens of illustrative clips though interestingly limited to Olivier directing himself, Zeffirelli directing Gibson and understandably Doran directing Tennant. An early trip through the RSC shop with David indicates other versions are available, but these three are interesting choices in that they’re not traditional renderings of the text, Olivier adding some, Zeffirelli deleting practically everything and Doran shuffling the order of the scenes. Odd that we should have the Warner interview but not the clips of his RSC appearance seen elsewhere. As with the other episodes, the emphasis instead is on newly filmed sections performed by the Globe’s cast with Jack Farthing (pictured below) cutting a youthful, lonely figure in a near empty theatre during “To Be Or Not To Be..” and Tom Lawrence later a teary Horatio as his prince dies.



As well as David greeting Andrei Tchaikovsky's skull again (pictured) the most poignant section for me is right at the very end, when he’s pondering what the part means to him and startling it resonates with comments he made when he left Doctor Who. Indeed just for a moment (thanks to a reference to filming), I wondered which role he’s actually talking about:

"In the end, there’s just no other character like him. […] I remember on the last day of filming thinking, “I’m so proud to have done that. I’m so pleased that’s something I got to do. And now I will never go there again.” And there was a huge relief to that. It was like having a weight lifted off your shoulders. And then, where are we now? Three years on… I do find myself, I catch myself, slightly fantasising about doing it again, going back there and seeing what that would feel like. But … that way madness quite literally lies.”

Fiftieth anniversary next year then.

[Assuming I haven't spoiled it too much for you, David Tennant on Hamlet is available on the iPlayer until 26th July.]

Globe to Globe festival's Hamlet.

The Hamlet portion of the Globe to Globe festival at Shakespeare's Globe is from Lithuania. Andrius Mamontovas, one of the country's great rock stars was asked to play Hamlet in 1996 and although he lacked any prior knowledge of the play or its playwright he saw it as an excellent way of smuggling in messages and music which were banned under Soviet control, the play itself having been banned by Stalin before his death.

 He's been playing the part ever since.  In the video embedded with this article, the BBC art correspondent David Sillito meets Mamontovas on his home turf and in an entertaining walk and talk along a local street, Mamontovas describes what the play means to him, the conversation interspersed with moments from the closet scene with his Hamlet attempting to shoo the ghost of his father away with a spade.

But the play is resonant throughout that part of the world, it seems.  As Tom Bird, festival director explains, "the most famous footballer in Armenia is Henrikh Mkhitaryan and his middle name is Hamlet. And no, Hamlet isn't Armenian for Hamish; it's Hamlet, the Dane. It's incredible it's seeped in to everything."

Love's Labour's Lost (Shakespeare's Globe production presented by Opus Arte)

Not being able to visit London often, let alone Shakespeare’s Globe, even though I was lucky enough to see their production of As You Like It last year, I assumed that as usual I would be missing everything else. Now, thanks to a collaboration with Opus Arte, best known for their live recordings of music, opera and ballet, a number of the plays are being recorded on hi-definition for broadcasting in cinema and the lucrative secondary market of dvd and blu-ray. The first wave includes As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet and the revived production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, originally conceived in 2007 but added to last year’s Young Hearts season.

It’s quite easy to fixate on the climax of Love’s Labour’s Lost which doesn’t quite fit the pattern of most of Shakespeare’s comedies. At the moment when the bard seems ready to complete the coupling up of royals and friends, instead the Princess of France gains word of the death of her father and that she must take the throne, their potential significant others entering exile until the winds of change have blown over. The critical assumption is that this cliffhanger was meant to be resolved in the now missing Love’s Labour’s Won, a grand experiment in comedy across two parts.

Dominic Dromgoole’s Globe production, by emphasising the shift in tone from the messy hijinks of courtly romance to the sudden melancholy of the Princess taking office, suggests another option – that Shakespeare was cheekily dramatising the moment when Elizabeth replaced her father on the throne and the shift from the frivolity of youth to ruling the known world. The arc of Michelle Terry’s authoritative performance, perhaps the strongest of the souls on stage, even resolves itself in the moment when grief and recognition combine.

Until then, what a Carry-On! There are essentially two possible approaches to Love Labour’s Lost's complex maze of word play and allusions; emphasise the text in the hopes the audience will be attentive enough to go with it or cut as many of the obscure passages as possible and replace them with slapstick (or songs if you’re Kenneth Branagh). Dromgoole seeks a middle ground. No innuendo goes unemphasised and the director also relies heavily on the bawdy abilities of his cast for a winning combination.

It’s fair to say that even if not all of the senses of Shakespeare’s words are communicated, the humour certainly is, in Fergal McElherron’s Chaplinesque antics as Costard and in the manic desperation between the students not to reveal their amorous ambitions having agreed to put learning before love. Because of the venue, these are not subtle performances, which helps poor Don Armado, one of the least funniest of Shakespeare’s clowns who here is gifted a Borat-like accent by Paul Ready and a heavy dose of pathos which means that for once the play within a play doesn’t drag.

Now and again the text is allowed to zing not least in the barbed exchanges between the charismatic Trystan Gravelle returning as Berowne and Thomasin Rand, whose aristocratic face masks a tender wit. She’s no doubt a worthy replacement for the just out of RADA Gemma Arterton whose appearance in the original version was a spring-board for her film career. But as with the other Globe productions I’ve seen, there’s a genuine sense of comradeship, of the cast pulling together, making the most of the unexpected, when planes are flying over or some other unusual noise bleeding in from modern London, going about the business of living outside this historical bubble.

The on-screen audience laps all of this up, and indeed part of the enjoyment of watching the production is seeing the reaction of the groundlings. Recording in the Globe presents a special challenge; most filmed theatre shies away poking into the auditorium but in this venue, the audience are vital part of the show. Film director Ian Russell treats this as an event, and gives a genuine appreciation of what it’s like within the space, the atmosphere, though with enough close-ups for it not to look static on a television screen, illuminating the delicate details of designer Jonathan Fensom’s period costumes.

Love's Labour's Lost is available from Opus Arte on dvd and blu-ray. Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare's Globe

I spent last Tuesday in a very giddy mood. I didn’t think anything could be more exciting than taking part in Anthony Gormley's One & Other project but then I was finally standing in Shakespeare’s Globe (mark 3) looking up at the deep blue sky through the roof waiting for their latest production of As You Like It and realised that in fact, whilst it was fun to be part of Anthony Gormley’s art project, looking at that empty stage awaiting actors was as close as I’ll ever come to sitting on the touchline of the baseball diamond in Field of Dreams, or being a distant Liverpool fan visiting Anfield, a Beatles nut at the Cavern Club, an Elvis aficionado at Gracelands. I was teary at the Royal Shakespeare Company because I was submerged in theatrical history. The Globe is like actually stepping into history (albeit with a concrete flooring). It’s a dreamland.

I decided to dedicate my final day to the Globe, knowing that I'd want to take my time. For a change. If you do ever decide to visit, I’d certainly recommend you take the morning tour before the show. Over about three quarters of an hour the chronology of the theatre is explained, that the timbers were originally part of The Theatre theatre (yes, indeed) until problems with a lease agreement led them to be shipped across the Thames and turned into the first Globe in 1599. Which then burnt to the ground during the third performance of Henry VIII (misfiring cannon) in 1613. Rebuilt the following year it continued to be a going concern until the 1640s when the Puritans took a dislike to theatre I general and shut it down, that building falling to demolition in 1644. There’s plenty more to hear, that’s just the bare bones. Just enough time for photographs.



The present structure is a product of a twenty year campaign by Sam Wanamaker, who sadly died before it was completed and opened in 1997. During the tour, there is plenty of time to become acclimatised to the shape of the interior, and if like me you’re planning to become a groundling a chance to see the stage from other perspectives. The space is smaller than I was expecting, more intimate, though logically it has to be for the words of the actors to project and bounce of the roof and walls and back into the space. The other surprise was how sound from the edges could be isolated within their relate enclosures – the tours begin every fifteen minutes and at one point at least four different groups were at different stages of presentation but the voice of the guide was perfectly lucid. It's a beautiful building with its painting ceilings and fixtures, as colourful in its own way as Westminster Cathedral, the images just as symbol suggesting the stage teeters between heaven and hell.

A tour ticket also allows admittance to the education centre and exhibition, which adds extra detail to the information relayed on the tour using artefacts related to the original playhouse. One good choice is the recreation of other contemporary theatres in miniature, including Blackfriars, a space I’m not as familiar with as I’d like (perhaps someone will rebuild that too someday!) which underscores how plays were very much written to take advantages of the available spaces and how they have to be adapted to fill a proscenium arch, a television studio, a film soundstage. The exhibition also demonstrates that as well as being a historical recreation, the Globe is a living theatre with guides to the rehearsal process, musicians and costume making with examples from past productions and a rather sparkly recreation of Elizabeth I’s dress from the Armada Portrait which was worn by Jane Lapotaire at the Gala opening. What a night that must have been.



Having already been inside as part of the tour and enjoyed the first woosh through the doors into the space, I was surprised to find that I was still equally thrilled as I ran in, along with the other groundlings, just before the show, grabbing a space on the edge of the stage. Perhaps it was turning around and seeing a nearly full theatre, the stalls and floor as they should be, crowded to the rafters, a sea of grins. The multitude seemed to be a mix of tourists and locals, a range of accent and languages, splashing together. A Spanish family installed themselves behind me, the father giving his kids a running commentary throughout the first half and cracking jokes, presumably on the assumption that he was bettering anything the playwright was offering. But unlike most theatres, this is to be expected; no one stood to attention in Shakespeare’s day and that the atmosphere which is being engendered here. To work, the Globe has to be noisy.

And it was. How we laughed. As You Like It is (surprisingly) a play I’m not that familiar with. Jaques speech “All The World’s A Stage” was the first Shakespeare I studied at school, but somehow with the exception of the cob-webby Argo audio production (which I heard on vinyl in the early nineties) and the BBC Shakespeare production with Helen Mirren, this was my first proper visit to the forest of Arden. That was to the good, because instead of simply trying judge whether this was a good version of the play, I was more involved in trying to follow the plot which is exactly how to experience a play in the Globe, allowing the actors, so close and often speaking from the stage and stalls and back of the yard to talk directly to you, to become involved in their story because you’re hearing much of this language for the first time. During the tour, the guide said that during their last production of Hamlet, the prince would ask someone in the yard, directly "To be or not to be?" and sometimes they would answer.



So brilliant was the ensuing production that my feet, throbbing from walking about for two days, seemed to stop hurting, or perhaps it's that I just stopped caring. About the only fly in the ointment (phrase which I thought was Shakespeare but turns out to be Biblical) was the process of standing. After finding my speck, I took off my shoes and stood on my jump, but by the end I was in bare feet. Also, because I have the bowels of an Labrador puppy, I had to nip out some time during the first half, when you have to go, you have to go. And sadly I went during “All The World’s A Stage…” it seems, which didn’t stop me spending some of the ensuing time wondering if I’d missed it have long since forgotten I’d gone to the toilet. Always half a perfect world. As with most things in fact, attending alone can be difficult to navigate. Luckily I was next to some people who didn’t mind keeping an eye on my stuff whilst I nipped outside to buy that ice cream. Is this the Globe as theatrical Woodstuck, a temporary community watching out for one another.

The proximity of the players to the audience means that they’re speaking directly to us and reacting to sounds from the audience and the environment. Typically, the clown, on this occasion Dominic Rowan’s Touchstone, was best at this, reacting to odd murmurs and physically chiding the audience when they didn’t laugh at his jokes, a natural comedian. But at no time did this seem forced; we didn’t feel like we were laughing because we were meant to (which often happens) but because this was genuinely funny. In the Globe’s souvenir brochures, actors line up to talk about how they relish acting within the space because they have this connection with the audience, a connection which is lost in a typical theatre were the rest of the auditorium is hidden in darkness. Often the characters would plead with us for understanding, emotionally charged which must be electric during the major tragic soliloquies. That suspension of disbelief is continued in our acceptance that all this is occurring in a forest, even though the only evidence we have of that is the words of the actors and columns wrapped in brown material to suggest tree trunks.

The best moments are the careless love between the gender disguised Rosalind and Orlando, in which she’s testing his resolve by making him believe that he’s pretending to woe a man when in fact he’s wooing the very woman he’s in love with. As played by Sophie Duval and Jack Laskey, these has elements of screwball comedy as Duval threw Laskey’s oaths back in his face, the actor’s gregarious approaches suggesting that he come from the same mould as Ed Tudorpole, Callum Blue and David Tennant. Though the theatre was noisy in the first half, during these scenes the Globe fell silent and hung one every word; even my Spanish commentator stopped intoning. That’s the magic of the place. By making an expectation of noise, makes these moments even more remarkable, that our suspension of disbelief is so total that it could be just us and Laura Rogers’s adorable Cecilia witnessing and reacting to the unfolding scene. This is one of those occasions when I don’t simply have the memory of what I saw, but also of how I felt. There aren’t many theatre productions that I can say that about.