World tour … Keith Bartlett as Polonius in Hamlet, performed at the Jungle refugee camp, Calais, in February 2016.
On 23 April 2014, 16 actors and technicians left the Globe theatre in London on a tall ship bound for Amsterdam. It was only the briefest of stopovers: they were on the first leg of a journey to take Hamlet to every country in the world. Ambassadors had been schmoozed, visas and flights booked, money raised (some money, at least). The plan was to visit nearly 200 nations in time for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death two years later. What could possibly go wrong?
According to the man who came up with the idea, former Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, rather a lot. Severe food poisoning came close to ending things in Mexico City, and Wahhabist prohibitions on men and women sharing a stage nearly did for them in Saudi Arabia. Due to the unfolding Ebola crisis, a chunk of west Africa proved too risky. There were challenges closer to home, too, when the Globe came under fire for announcing they would perform in North Korea. Shakespeare, that canniest of courtiers, might have enjoyed the diplomatic irony that followed: Kim Jong-un’s regime then refused to allow them in.
Part diary, part travelogue, part meditation on the play, Hamlet, Globe to Globe is Dromgoole’s account of what he cheerfully admits was a “daft” idea carried out with courageous, Fortinbras-like efficiency. Barbados, Suriname, Ukraine, Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan: the company played them all and 185 more countries, often with barely enough time to rig their spartan set and pack it in their flight cases again.
Some performances left geopolitical shockwaves, notably a trip to the UN’s Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan in 2015 to play for Syrian refugees, which generated headlines around the world. Elsewhere, it seems to have been as much as the troupe could do to muster a crowd. Dromgoole ruefully notes that a show in Wittenberg, the town of Hamlet’s education, was “rather disappointing”. Another in Gdańsk in Poland – and I can testify to this, having been there that day – resulted in many spectators leaving at the interval. (Dromgoole blames teething troubles with the theatre.)
For all its excitements, the journey must have been a slog, and the book has something of that feel, too. Dromgoole joined the travellers only intermittently, and his descriptions, while atmospheric, often have a scrambled, straight-off-the-plane quality, with every after-show drink or impromptu chat ransacked for significance. We get most of a chapter on the machinations of an elegantly mysterious stranger in Djibouti who claims to be the British consul but is apparently French (a kind of Polonius, though the point feels strained). A section on the Farc and Colombian politics is also lacking in bite.
The book delivers sharp insights into a play Dromgoole has spent a lifetime turning over in his mind
Dromgoole is at his best on home turf, roaming around the vastnesses of Shakespeare’s longest script. There’s good nitty-gritty on the practicalities of staging, and some battle-hardened textual insights. I liked his description of the “eruptive energy and dislocated music” of early punctuation (up there with David Mamet or Caryl Churchill, he thinks), likewise his doughty defence of the so-called “bad” 1603 first quarto, which although it contains such off-colour gems as “to be or not to be, ay, there’s the point” almost certainly captures a version of the play actually staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Dromgoole’s own prose occasionally has an attack of the Osrics, as when he describes one soliloquy as “an explosion of sewage, erupting on to the streets of himself from the gurgling catacombs beneath” – an image that lingers for the ickiest of reasons. But equally often it delivers sharp insights into a play he has spent a lifetime turning over in his mind. An analysis of the hero’s psychological troubles feels nakedly personal; and he astutely observes that Shakespeare finds for his sweet Prince a tone of “troubled consciousness” that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else.
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Less appealing is his zeal for settling old scores. “Time-servers” at British Council HQ get it in the neck for suggesting that the project doesn’t offer enough “dialogue”. Amnesty is attacked for criticising the North Korea visit. (Did the Globe ask their views first? No detail is offered.) A BBC journalist dares to ask a question on the same topic, and is derided for her “smug scepticism”. An encounter with critical academics in another BBC studio (Dromgoole candidly admits he turned up the worse for wear) drifts on for five wounded, self-justifying pages. Satisfying as these moments of drive-by payback might be for the author, it’s tempting to offer some Gravedigger-like advice: if the hole is deep enough, stop digging.
Strangely, too, for a book that spans the Shakespearean globe, there is conspicuously little about Shakespeare done in ways other than by the Globe’s own players. If Dromgoole takes the opportunity to see work by other companies en route, he doesn’t let on, and he betrays a lack of curiosity about how other cultures understand this most globally translated and reinterpreted playwright. The Belgian director Ivo van Hove, whose astonishing Dutch-language Roman tragedies cycle recently visited London for the second time, is gruffly praised as “relentlessly experimental”, but there’s a none-too-subtle hint that audiences in Amsterdam prefer the no-frills Globe approach. Most directors would probably keep stumm about not having seen Thomas Ostermeier’s ripped-up, retooled German Hamlet (2008), which – whatever one thinks of it – is probably the most widely influential live staging of recent times. For Dromgoole, who meets Ostermeier and engages in a “cock-off” over whose production has visited more countries, avoiding the show is apparently a point of pride.
That Shakespeare might already inhabit these places in a multiplicity of languages and forms, is largely ignored
There is no doubting their courage, but why are his actors visiting all these countries? As with so many questions in Hamlet, this one doesn’t really find an answer. “Why not?” is a reply proffered near the end of the book, but Dromgoole’s next suggestion, that the Globe was engaging in its own “nuttily” aggrandising version of the 60s space programme, seems more telling – figuring these “actor-astronauts” as heroic voyagers into deep, uncharted territory. That this territory might not be so uncharted, that Shakespeare might already inhabit these places in a multiplicity of languages and forms, is largely ignored.
Ladi Emeruwa as Prince Hamlet, in the Zataari refugee camp, Jordan, in October 2015. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
Likewise, Dromgoole scoffs at suggestions that sending a British company on a world tour with the British empire’s favoured playwright might come across as a touch neocolonial – especially given they play in Jacobethan English, usually without surtitles, and don’t collaborate with local companies. But then he fails to come up with a convincing reply, revealing almost nothing about how non-Anglophone audiences engaged with the text, or what kind of cross-cultural conversation the experiment provoked (I’d love to know). This is “dialogue” as actors and directors all too often understand the term: something to be handled by professionals while audiences stand obediently by. Perhaps the British Council had a point.
No doubt saying all this places me squarely among the hand-wringers, cavillers and time-servers. I wasn’t in Wittenberg, so can’t report on why the audience was so disappointing there – but perhaps the Germans already have enough Hamlets of their own?
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