Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor
I have heard that guilty creatures at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul …
… the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Helping this group of people contain or outgrow their violent impulses is a complex affair. Most of them are people whose moral and emotional growth has been stunted. By their own accounts, this was to a great extent because they were not loved as children. Much of the damage cannot be undone. Nothing will bring back the people some of them killed. Nothing will remove the physical or psychological scars left on those they attacked or raped. And for themselves, nothing will wipe out the childhood rejection, followed by society’s rejection after their crimes, or the fact that so much of their lives has been spent in confinement.
But some of the stunted psychological growth may be possible to revive. The stunted parts include empathy and sympathy, as well as the ability to move from shallowness to depth. There is a need, for instance, to develop the respect for other people that goes beyond letting women through the door first and other conventional politeness. They also need help with building up a coherent moral identity, a sense of who they are that will enable them to live outside in the world and to live at peace with themselves.
Some of these kinds of growth are linked, if it is true that “other people not being very real to them” is bound up with “not being very real to themselves.” Perhaps empathy, sympathy, and respect for others would have been learned in childhood through reciprocation: through having, themselves, been shown empathy, sympathy, and respect. And being shown these same things may be important for the growth of a sense of moral identity and the related move from shallowness to something deeper.
These conjectures suggest two approaches. One is to try to draw out deeper emotional responses, which also may stimulate them to reflect on themselves and on their values. Part of this may be encouraging them to look at their defensive wall and what lies behind it. It also means reaching deep inside them. (There may be a question about whether this justifies the possible distress involved.) The second, related strategy is to help them engage in relationships that draw out reciprocal emotional responses and mutual respect. All this may need something different from professional detachment.
This would be an effort at trying to revive their emotional growth, because success may be quite limited. Perhaps capacities atrophy when sensitive periods for their development are missed? Young children can pick up a new language with a perfect accent that adults usually find very hard or impossible. Are there similar key early periods for parts of emotional and moral development? If there are, then perhaps it is too late to make good all that has been lost. But just as adults can still learn languages, emotional late starters might do some catching up. The only way to find out is to try.
What is involved in helping them move toward deeper emotional responses and engage in relationships? Who would give this help? How would they set about it, and in what context? Would they be “paid friends,” with the manipulation and lack of genuineness that implies? This doubt is not marginal, and perhaps no strategy or technique will completely get around it. But experimenting with various different “nonstandard” psychiatric approaches may indicate how far each succeeds or fails. Here we will start with the defensive wall.
Some approaches, once nonstandard, such as art therapy and drama therapy, are now a visible part of the mainstream. Even if there is an element of the paid friend about the drama therapist, there can still be real benefits. Peter Brook, in The Empty Space, laments that for many people the theater and other arts are not a necessity but an optional extra. He contrasts this with the ability of drama therapy to sometimes meet the needs of psychiatric in-patients. Themes suggested by the patients, dramatized with the help of the therapist, can draw both those who act and those who watch into discussing issues they all share. Taking no view about whether this helps treat mental disorder, Brook says the shared experience slightly changes how they get on with each other. “When they leave the room, they are not quite the same as when they entered. If what has happened has been shatteringly uncomfortable, they are invigorated to the same degree as if there had been great outbursts of laughter … simply, some participants are temporarily, slightly, more alive.”1
Drama therapy can sometimes give physical embodiment to metaphors that are more important in people’s lives than they may understand. The people I interviewed in Broadmoor had various metaphors for their defenses against others. “It’s always been there … I’ve hidden it, shall we say.” “I was in a shell and would not come out.” “You build up this defensive wall and you don’t let no one or nothing into it.” Ted Hughes used the metaphor of armor, with the child behind, peering through the slits. Of a family of related metaphors, the mask lends itself most to theater.
The Geese Theatre works with offenders and people at risk of offending. They use masks to help participants reflect on what they are hiding, and how and why they are doing so (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). When the theater group returns later to a prison where they have led drama therapy, the inmates remember the masks more than anything else.2
Audiences are encouraged to request of a character, “Lift your mask.” This is a literal request but also a call to say what he or she is thinking and feeling behind the mask. The audience quickly understands the vulnerabilities and insecurities often revealed. Comments quoted on the Geese Theatre website suggest that the experience can go deep.
The masks really played on my mind a lot. In a very good way … Especially with lifting the mask. It is something I’ll take with me for the rest of my life. (Participant, H.M. Prison Morton Hall.)
I even saw a couple of so-called “hard men” letting their masks down. (Prisoner, HMP Leeds)
Figure 5.1: Masks at the Geese Theatre Company. Copyright © Geese Theatre Company.
I felt emotionally drained afterwards and I can’t stop thinking about it. The masks were excellent—I’ve worn all of them in my time. (Prisoner, HMP Maidstone)
Above all we address ourselves to the deadened organ, the imagination. It’s like the doctor’s art, or the courtesan’s. The doctor can’t love every patient, the courtesan can’t love every client. It’s common humanity that keeps you going. In this sense, every actor has signed an unwritten Hippocratic Oath.
—Simon Callow, Being an Actor
Figure 5.2: Masks at the Geese Theatre Company. Copyright © Geese Theatre Company.
The approach now to be described gave patients a chance to see powerfully acted plays that go deeply into things that have darkened their own lives. More than a decade before the interviews in Broadmoor described in this book, the hospital hosted a remarkable series of theatrical performances. Between 1989 and 1991, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and other groups took to Broadmoor some of Shakespeare’s tragedies: King Lear, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Romeo and Juliet. Because so many of those confined in Broadmoor stay there a long time, it is likely that some of the people I interviewed were in the audiences. Even if not, the audiences will have included people similar to those whose values and history I have tried to sketch. These performances, and their reception, suggest some unconventional approaches to nurturing moral and emotional growth.
This chapter’s title is borrowed from the title of Murray Cox’s striking book Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor. (In this chapter I draw hugely on that book, as well as on another of his books, Shakespeare as Prompter.)3 Murray Cox was a consultant psychotherapist at Broadmoor. He had retired some years before I went there for the interviews, but people working there still sometimes lit up at the mention of his name.
Mark Rylance, then playing Hamlet, met Murray Cox at a symposium in Stratford. Over coffee he suggested, “It would be good if we could bring Hamlet to Broadmoor.” So Hamlet became the first in the series of plays performed at the hospital. Nearly a quarter of the patients applied to attend. Despite the decision not to risk psychological damage to patients who might be too vulnerable, none of those who applied were excluded. The audience also included some of the nurses and other staff. After the performance the cast and the audience mingled and talked together. A few months after Hamlet came Romeo and Juliet, to be followed by Measure for Measure and finally King Lear. After the final performance some of the audience chose to stay on for a workshop in which they shared their experiences with the cast.
GERTRUDE: Thou turns’t my eyes into my very soul.
Both psychiatrists and actors testify to the way the plays sometimes reached deep inside the patients.
Rob Ferris, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, said that the psychiatric attempt to help the patients gain insight into their violent acts often fails. In contrast, he said, “What strikes me is the power of the theatre, the power of the performance to get them, to approach them, to communicate with them.” He said that years of therapy sometimes have little obvious benefit, “yet in a single afternoon I can feel the power of that performance to reach them, and their capacity to respond.”
The actors were sometimes aware of the special emotional charge given to the occasion simply by its being in Broadmoor. Brian Cox, who played King Lear, expressed this: “Lear was a rough production from the word go, and its life depended on its audience. If it was a dead audience, it was a dead performance, because we couldn’t resuscitate something that wasn’t there. We couldn’t give life to something that wasn’t there. In Broadmoor you didn’t have that problem because the whole event is theatrical. To play to a bunch of psychiatric patients is a theatrical thing to do.”
The actors’ own feeling for what is there in the plays sometimes gave them ideas of what their performance might bring to the patients. Brian Cox reflected on King Lear: “It’s about death, it’s about accepting your end, accepting that in my beginning is my end; that you reap what you sow, unless you make amends quickly and make amends in terms of yourself. Actually it’s about finding our own peace, which it must be for those tragic people at Broadmoor.”
One patient had a response that came very close to this hope: “When Lear died I felt an overwhelming sense of loss, and tears riding down my cheeks. I desperately wanted to go over and hug Lear’s corpse. I felt the sense of union in death between Lear and his daughters. Also the sense of peace and wholeness in the deaths …”
The plays did reverberate with the patients’ awareness of their situation and of their own history. Brian Cox noted some responses to Lear: “When I said, ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ one little girl sadly shook her head from side to side in a very painful manner.” “In the mad scene: the audience laughed, with a particular quality to it which was quite thrilling. It was the line which begins, ‘What! Ar’t mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes … None does offend, none I say, none.’ And it was extraordinary when I said that line.” “When I said, ‘Oh let me not be mad,’ the way the phrase reverberated round the room was extraordinary.”
The patients themselves spoke of the links they made with their own lives: “Hamlet, the person could also have been my mother, brother, sister and even just a friend—and how they felt at learning that I, their brother, had done what I had done—so it did have a lot of meaning … I hope you understand this.”
Did making these links stimulate reflection on themselves? A consultant told Brian Cox that more than one patient of hers said things along the lines of, “I did so envy the ability of Cordelia and her father to have a farewell … it made me think about my own situation, particularly before I murdered my parents.”
Some comments showed thoughts deeper and more serious than the shallow conventionality audible in some of the “Socratic” interviews: “One of the knife scenes reminded me of an incident when I threatened an ex-girlfriend, and it brought home to me the fear she felt … simply because I felt afraid watching the same. It also brought home to me how we compound our miseries through our own destructive feelings of bitterness and vengeance … If only we could learn not to act on impulsive urges of revenge we would so lessen the amount of tragedies in this society.”
To play to a large and sympathetic audience is like singing in a room with perfect acoustics. The audience constitutes the spiritual acoustics for us. They give back what they receive from us as living, human emotions.
—Constantin Stanislavski: An Actor Prepares
A relationship started to develop between actors and audience. Things happened when they were just mingling before or after the play. Georgia Slowe (who played Juliet) saw what happened when a patient offered Jenny, who was playing the Nurse, a cup of coffee: “She turned absent mindedly and stroked him on the arm: ‘No thank you, darling.’ I was behind watching the man, and it was his expression that struck me, when this lovely maternal woman stroked him and called him ‘darling’ in an absent minded way; it was just a wonderful expression. In that moment it struck me that had he had Jenny as his mother, he might never have been in there; his whole life might have been very different.”
After one performance Ron Daniels, who directed Hamlet, was told by a patient that this was not how Shakespeare was normally done. “ ‘No, I know it’s not,’ I said, ‘but it’s based on a central idea of one of my family who had schizophrenia and who killed himself at the age of 23.’ This patient, this man put his arms around me and hugged me and said ‘it will be all right.’ He was looking after my pain and I thought what was happening here wasn’t just us giving, it was us receiving as well.”
But mainly the relationship came from sharing the experience of the plays that resonated so strongly with the patients. Brian Cox found playing Lear easier in Broadmoor than anywhere else: “It was the most releasing performance that I have ever had, because it suddenly had a point to it. Because I suddenly felt that I was doing it to a bunch of people that actually understood what Lear’s pain was about … They knew, because their imaginations were so acute.”
The performances gave the patients the rare chance of reciprocity, to give something back to the actors, which the actors in turn appreciated. Clare Higgins, who played Gertrude, noticed, “The audience were responding in a way that I long for audiences to respond—in a feeling way and in a very open way. As we came towards the end of the play, I picked up feelings from that audience that I never usually pick up in the theatre. They simply seemed willing to cross the stage line, and to be part of the play: there was a lot of grief in the room, and sorrow and regret, and they seemed to be pushing the play to its conclusion with us. I found it extraordinary, because I don’t think many people in that room were intimate with the play, or knew how it was going to end. But they seemed just to roll with it, with us, to the end. It was a beautiful feeling. I have never had that with an audience before—that all of us together were seeing the play through.”
Mark Rylance talked about his own response to an interjection during Ophelia’s funeral, a response in which actor and Hamlet are merged: “There was an amazing moment when I said to Laertes, ‘I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum.’ And one of the patients stood forward and said, ‘I believe you.’ My heart really choked up and tears flooded into my eyes, and I thought—Oh I really needed someone to say that … I didn’t realize how much I needed to be believed … I felt yes, only someone like you would understand. Perhaps that is part of why I wanted to go—or Hamlet in me wanted to go; a feeling that people would understand.”
As well as this giving back, there was also some mutual respect. Mark Rylance hoped that the very fact that the actors had come might send a signal: “I imagine it was something in itself just to feel that we came and gave that performance to them. If I was somewhere like that and someone came and did that for me, I would feel that perhaps there was something good in people or that they thought I was worth it.”
One patient said the shared experience led to friendship: “Actors and actresses came here as unknown people and leave firm friends. The reason … is that we share an intimacy and oneness that can never be experienced elsewhere. Having killed and abused ourselves, we are able to understand the madness and violence … in Shakespeare’s tragedies because it is close to our heart. We don’t have to guess what it [is] like to kill, maim, and feel absolute despair. Most of us have been there ourselves.”
What about the “paid friends” issue? Is there something manipulative or inauthentic about deliberately using a performance of a Shakespeare play to reach things deep inside the patients? The emotional reciprocity and mutual respect that started to grow out of the sharing of deep experience count against this.
In advance some of the actors did worry about being manipulative or patronizing. Mark Rylance expressed this: “I was very frightened that I would be patronizing them … You know—they would think, well, who are these actors coming here pretending to be mad or pretending to murder or to rape and to get into that place where I have actually been and where I have actually suffered all this pain because of being there. I suddenly got very frightened about what I was doing. What right had I to come here and portray things like this to people who had perhaps experienced these things in their lives?”
But this awareness itself made for authenticity: “That feeling is like a fire that burnt away any excess of ego and all the tricks you would rely on, and I just felt I have to be absolutely honest here. The Hamlet must be absolutely acid, honest … It was one of those wonderful moments which I chase after all the time, when you feel you are a conductor and something is coming through you, rather than you are doing anything. And I didn’t feel that I had played the part at all. I felt they played it. Something collective came through me, through the words. There was very little ‘doing’; the ‘doing’ got burnt away and there was more being.”
At one point he spoke the words “Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes”: “I said this line to a man who I didn’t know, but who had looked at me with such clarity, with nothing but an absolutely straight gaze. It just felt immediately as if there was a very sensitive group of people there, that one had to tread very carefully and not abuse, not take advantage, just give them it as simply as one could.”
Much the same thought inspired Rebecca Saire’s playing of Ophelia: “Usually a part of me stands to one side, judging myself and the audience’s response to what I am doing. At Broadmoor, I found that observer’s part of me sucked back in. Confronted with so much truth in respect of the people we were performing in front of, subconsciously I realized I needed 100 percent of my own truth to answer them. It was as if I was playing Ophelia for the first time.”
The voices quoted here are only a few from an audience containing nearly a quarter of Broadmoor’s around 240 patients. It’s likely there were some who responded less. There must be a whole psychology of why some who have done terrible things are more reachable than others. In his autobiography Beside Myself, Antony Sher describes talking to two murderers, released after prison, as part of preparing for playing Macbeth. “Mark” had been a gambling addict and killed his best friend rather than admit he had gambled away the money for the electricity bill. He was sensitive in a way that suggested “no outer layer of skin”—raw, trembling, nervy, haunted by his crime—and he saw himself afterward as “Alone. Naked in the world. Always.” “Jimmy” was “a Glaswegian hard man, brought up on crime.” He had killed a suspected informer. “If Jimmy hadn’t been caught, you sense he wouldn’t have given it a second thought.” He hardly remembers his crime but resents everything about prison. Mark and Jimmy both came to see Macbeth. Mark did not like it and wished Macbeth himself had been more heroic. Jimmy walked out after the play saying nothing. Antony Sher wrote, “I fear the worst again. Then I get a letter. In stumbling phrases [Jimmy] says repeatedly how moved he was.”4 It might seem strange that the play reached, not the raw sensitive man with no outer skin, but the hard man. Perhaps hardness is the defensive wall, and Shakespeare’s tragedies may reach the vulnerable person peering through the slits?
The varied responsive voices after the Broadmoor performances show that patients could “give back what they receive from us as living human emotions.” It is hard not to see signs of revived emotional growth in the way the plays reached inside them to evoke feelings and reflections, and in what the audience gave back to the actors.
The project was a new model of how to help people whose world was glimpsed in the “Socratic” interviews. That world is confining. They are locked into a narrow and rigid morality of retribution, convention, and authority. Prominent features in their world are emotional rejection, lack of recognition, blinkers, and the defensive wall. The Shakespeare performances may have reached “the deadened organ, the imagination,” making the confinement a bit less oppressive.
The model has limitations. Not every psychiatric hospital can call on actors, certainly not of this quality. What happens when they have gone? It would be rare for four plays to turn someone’s life round, even when the plays are by Shakespeare and are acted at this level. The project is particularly impressive, but it is not a magic wand.
There is a need for many nonstandard approaches to reviving moral and emotional growth. Few will have all the aspects that made the Shakespeare project succeed. But it is worth mentioning some key features. The actors showed respect for the patients by performing for them. Actors and audience discussed on equal terms, creating reciprocity. Not everything was organized. Contact in loose bits of unplanned time led to some of the best moments: the actor saying “No thank you, darling” as she stroked the patient’s arm, and the patient’s hug when Ron Daniels mentioned his son. (Erving Goffman, in Asylums, said that “our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.”)5
Perhaps two things counted most. Choosing Shakespeare’s tragedies, not lighter or less relevant plays, meant going deep. And the patients had the chance to give something back. Some of this can be generalized. Other projects go deep, such as the Geese Theatre’s work on masks. And reciprocity should be possible too. Ted Hughes says most of us peer through the slits of our armor. Perhaps people with and without “antisocial personality disorder” can help each other take off the armor and smash holes in the defensive walls.