Do audiences today have a difficulty with Tragedy—or at least the idea of classical Tragedy?

The word has been somewhat generalised (some would say debased) and too thoughtlessly applied in ways that could be considered hyperbolic. For example, two die in boating tragedy, or even tragedy strikes essendon: mccann twists ankle. In the former case, those two deaths may affect grieving families, but it’s not tragedy in generally accepted dramatic terms. Why not? Because dramatic Tragedy involves something more significant than a boating accident. It is widely understood to depict the corruption and destruction of an individual or group of people through some inherent fault or act of malice. The individual or group of people involved are usually notable for their eminent social position or their integrity or self-awareness, thus making their suffering horrible and pitiable to behold. In watching their downfall we are forced to contemplate the fragile nature of human happiness and success, the frailties we have in common with the protagonist, the ways in which various characters cope with grief, treachery or the blows of fortune, and to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we may very possibly undergo similar trials and tribulations during our life’s brief span. Just as Comedy celebrates the joys of youth, sex and good fortune, Tragedy alerts us to the darker side of life’s possibilities.

In Greek tragedies, protagonists were often the victims of fate or a spiteful deity. Aphrodite might afflict you with unquenchable desire because you had failed to sacrifice to her. Or else some indifferent fate might permit you to kill your own father and marry your mother through ignorance and misunderstanding. To the Greeks, the gods who presided over their lives were capricious, indifferent, malicious or partial. If they took a set against you, you were doomed.

Shakespeare’s tragic figures have little truck with gods or fate. They carry the seeds of their own destruction. In some cases (Macbeth, Othello) these flaws are played upon by malign external forces. In others (Lear, Coriolanus, Caesar) an inherent blind arrogance invites retribution. And others, like Richard II, Hamlet and Antony, possess personal traits that disable them when faced with particular scenarios.

Gods and fate may occasionally be invoked or blamed:

My fate cries out . . .

. . . O, cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right.

But Shakespeare’s Tragedies take place in a godless universe. At best, if there are any gods, they are as indifferent or malicious as their Greek counterparts—‘they kill us for their sport’.

Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are all set in specifically Christian locations. Religious imagery, metaphor and allusion pervade all of them. Macbeth and Othello are fully cognisant of hellfire and damnation. Hamlet wrestles with the dichotomy between the old Catholic faith of Denmark and the Protestant doctrines of Wittenberg. Romeo and Juliet seek the solace and advice of their family confessor.

Yet despite the heavy Church presence, the protagonists display little regard for its dictates. Even the conventional boy next door Laertes can abuse a priest and yell, ‘I dare damnation!’ And despite his acute consciousness that Duncan’s virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against

The deep damnation of his taking off,

Macbeth proceeds to murder him, then Banquo, and sets out to destroy the family of Macduff.

His dying act is not one of repentance but defiance:

. . . Lay on, Macduff;

And damn’d be he that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’

Othello, the Moor turned Christian convert, is fully aware that by lying to cover up for him, the dying Desdemona is ‘like a liar gone to burning hell’. He then commits suicide, damning himself as well.

Hamlet, so steeped in moral philosophy and the religious debates of his time, so conscious of ‘the dread of something after death’, is quite prepared to murder his uncle once he has sufficient proof of his guilt. Meanwhile he passes the time in knocking off Polonius and Laertes as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (but first making sure their souls will go straight to hell by having them executed with ‘no shriving time allowed’). He contemplates a similar eternity of hell for Claudius by waiting for an opportunity to

trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

and that his soul may be as damn’d and black

As hell whereto it goes.

Having effected all this mayhem and slaughter, the ‘sweet prince’ is farewelled by the faithful Horatio with the directive: ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ An unlikely outcome. Just as unlikely is the heavenly rest of the world’s favourite young lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Having killed Tybalt and the hapless Paris, Romeo joins Juliet in a suicide pact. No salvation for them, according to Christian orthodoxy!

This deliberate paganism on Shakespeare’s part is striking because in real life even the blackest villain was exhorted to make a repentant speech on the scaffold. And most of them did, thus turning a bloodthirsty public execution into an edifying as well as entertaining spectacle. No such edification in Shakespeare. His ‘Christian’ heroes, as well as his pagan ones (Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleopatra, Lear, Titus and Timon), all face death without a hint of repentance or thought of eternity.

This element of existential humanism may be one of the things that still connects us to Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Those of a religious inclination can claim to find some element of ‘redemption’ in them, although I must say I cannot. To my mind the protagonists struggle, suffer and die in what is essentially an absurd and meaningless universe

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause;

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fallen on the inventor’s heads.

That sort of universe, described in Hamlet, makes sense to me; I can believe in it. As far as I am concerned, the only thing that gives our universe meaning is human endeavour—through art, science, philosophy, law, kindness, family and love.

We must do our best to do great and glorious things in the knowledge that one day we will melt into air, into thin air, and—in words from The Tempest—

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And . . . Leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; And our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

In watching a tragic hero’s fall, Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were watching something very close to everyday life. They had seen two wives of Henry VIII, Queens of England, go to the execution block, along with Lord Chancellor Thomas More and Lord Great Chamberlain Thomas Cromwell. They had witnessed the rash career and untimely downfall of Elizabeth’s brilliant favourite, the Earl of Essex. They had seen the beheading of the great courtier, explorer and poet Sir Walter Raleigh and heard dozens of courtiers, statesmen and martyrs make stirring orations on the scaffold before laying their heads on the block or being disembowelled and chopped into pieces. Tragedy was a tangible and familiar spectacle.

A couple of hundred years later, the character of Tragedy had changed. The nineteenth century, with its Romantic movement, endorsed the idea of Tragedy being something grand and ennobling, its heroes and heroines larger than life. This was the great age of the individual—explorers, empire builders, generals and missionaries pitting themselves against formidable obstacles. This was the age of the Romantic hero in fact and fiction: Don Juan, Egmont, Manfred, and the recognition of literary giants like Goethe, Byron, Tolstoy, Hugo and Dostoyevsky. It was the age of grand operas with powerful, ear-splitting tenors and sopranos moving the multitudes through the emotive music and heart-rending travails of Tosca, Rigoletto, Tristan and Isolde, Violetta. It was the age of huge theatres, elaborate spectacles with enormous casts. This kind of theatre called for big acting, ‘the grand manner’, actors who could hold their own and not be swamped by the scenery. At its best this kind of acting was hailed as sublime, at its worst it was bombastic, earning Tragedy a bad name.

There had been a big shift in public sentiment as well. Victorian sentiment began to demand that art should be edifying and should reflect (or at least not offend) the tastes and values of a Christian society. And since Shakespeare had become enshrined as ‘a classic’—the cornerstone of British culture, the spokesman for all that was best about British values—the impolite, subversive or negative elements in his plays were ignored or edited out and his characters imbued with a ‘nobility’ that sometimes is at odds with the writing.

It’s hard to imagine a Hamlet of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries relishing smutty jokes with his mates and bawdy chat with Ophelia. There is a coarse grain in Shakespeare which makes his characters not just lifelike, but life-size, bringing them down off their lofty pedestals and placing them among us.

However, by the middle of the twentieth century both the grand manner of acting and the ennobling nature of Tragedy were being seriously challenged. For one thing, theatres became smaller and more intimate for live drama. Acting needed to be scaled down accordingly. The increased popularity of movies and television also radically changed the public perception as to what constituted good acting. Masters of modernity like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro demonstrated the power of understatement and subtly disguised technique. Anything larger than life was dismissed as hammy, over the top, invalid.

The twentieth century also continued the push to democratise Tragedy. Whereas the Tragedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dealt almost exclusively with kings, queens, the nobility and military heroes, the nineteenth century made Tragedy mostly a middle-class affair—Hedda Gabler, John Gabriel Borkman, Helen Alving, Uncle Vanya and Konstantin Trepliov. In the hands of writers like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller the downward social spiral continued until it could embrace everyman—and woman: Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski and Willy Loman, people to whom ‘attention must be paid’.

But the greatest blows to the Romantic concept of Tragedy were dealt by key historical events of the twentieth century—two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Communist revolution and the Holocaust. In the wake of these events it became impossible to regard Tragedy as a pious and edifying spectacle. Henceforth a degree of ironic detachment was called for. One playwright who heralded this new approach was Bertolt Brecht. His Mother Courage is a true tragic heroine but one without a trace of nobility—a tough and cynical survivor battling against the flood tide of historical disasters.

In the light of this new scrutiny, Romantic attitudes to Tragedy were stripped away, but the great dramatic Tragedies of the past shone with a new clarity and relevance. The expansive vision and fatalism of the Greeks, the brutality, passion and realpolitik of Shakespeare’s world, took on new meaning for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The job of theatre-makers today is to continue that quest begun by Brecht and his contemporaries—to reassess the great Tragedies of the past in the light of our own recent experience, to reveal the truth and beauty they contain, to expand our theatrical language in order to accommodate them and enrich our lives, immeasurably, in the process.

It’s not easy. We have to convince a public suspicious of lofty sentiment and big emotional statements, familiar as they are with television naturalism. Some of the best cinema succeeds with sparse, understated dialogue reinforced with subtle close-up shots that speak volumes of subtext.

Worse still, there is a widespread suspicion of the exalted nature of Tragedy. A modern phrase that seeks to undermine this status is ‘the banality of evil’. The phrase is easy to comprehend when applied to mediocre men who happen to be mass murderers, like Adolf Hitler, and even more so to small-scale criminals and racketeers. Brecht warns us of the dangers of glorifying these people, of romanticising gangsters and hoodlums. He would apply the same strictures against Napoleon, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. The fact that they toppled empires and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people should earn them eternal odium, not admiration.

But to apply the same reductionism to Macbeth or Shakespeare’s other tragic villains is to miss the point. Shakespeare is not asking us to admire or excuse Macbeth, Edmund, Iago or Richard III. He is inviting us to be appalled by their actions and their self-destruction. Iago stands outside any moral universe. He is the embodiment of pitiless and pointless malice. Macbeth is a man of huge imagination trapped in a waking nightmare; there is no escape. If we reduce Macbeth, Iago, Richard or Shylock to the Brechtian level of common crook, we risk turning Tragedy to melodrama.

This is the challenge facing the contemporary director and Tragic actor: how to bring these great vehicles into focus, to somehow reflect a world we know and believe in with acting that is credible and lifelike, but still takes us beyond the banal, the everyday experience, and leaves us feeling awestruck by having witnessed a timeless universal vision of human folly and suffering.

Shakespeare looked deeply into the seeds of things. He tried to understand life, to see whether it had a meaning or not, at the same time refusing the consolations afforded by traditional religion. His is the most articulate voice from a time when the deity of the western world was first unthroned, when the certainties of the godhead became the doubts of ordinary men and women.

René Weis, Shakespeare Revealed—A Biography

Hamlet

I first encountered Hamlet when I was eight, the year Olivier’s film came out. My mother took me to see it at the now-demolished Lyric cinema in Newcastle. The event had such an impact on me that I can still remember the heat of the footpath outside the cinema, the feeling of going down the dark stairs, a general sense of the film’s moodiness and haunting music, a thrilling sword fight and moments of such luminosity that I believed for years afterwards that the black and white screen had burst into colour. I was deeply moved by the vocal cadences of Olivier and the enigma of this strange, melancholic, ironic and somewhat androgynous hero/anti-hero.

So when the textbooks were handed around in the classroom some seven years later, I was ready for it. At the age of fifteen I felt I had got Hamlet in one, understood the whole thing, and on one level I had. What transported me then was the Gothic, primitive yet complex world of intrigue, and a visceral response to treachery and the supernatural. I found the play thrilling, disturbing and a huge release from the workaday drudgery of school and domesticity.

Olivier’s screen performance no doubt had a lot to do with it; a combination of effete narcissism and violent derring-do, it was understandably appealing to an adolescent. There are other points of contact too: the violent mood swings, the desire to be alone and indulge in introspection, sexual possessiveness of the mother and jealousy of the parents’ relationship, cheeking authority, contempt for one’s elders (in this case Polonius), a fondness for philosophising on the Big Questions, an ineptness in handling one’s first sexual relationship (Ophelia) and the need for a buddy (Horatio), sibling rivalry (Laertes) and a shallow cynicism about things outside one’s experience. What does Hamlet know of the insolence of office or the law’s delays?

In the fifty-odd years since that first experience, I have encountered many Hamlets, played him twice, directed the play three times (so far), and boned up on all the latest theory as it relentlessly churns off the presses. I feel that my first response to the play and its hero has in no way been diminished. My mind now contains a hefty portfolio of alternative actors and interpretations, but they are all fruit off the same tree.

By the time I had finished high school and studied Hamlet intensively for twelve months for my final exams, I not only knew the play by heart but it was part of me. At university I studied the play more fully and from a number of different angles prompted by the professors. So by the time I graduated at the age of twenty-two, my head was pumped full of so many conflicting schools of thought that I was as incapacitated as Hamlet himself when it came to deciding on a course of action. Picture then my dilemma and my heart-stopping excitement when I was offered the role only a few months later.

I graduated from university at a fortuitous moment. A new full-time professional theatre company had just been established and was about to launch its first season. This was the Old Tote, so called because of its headquarters in the old totalisator building of Randwick racecourse. The abandoned relic now stood within the grounds of the University of New South Wales, and was currently occupied by students of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Across the cobbled courtyard under the shade of ancient Moreton Bay figs was a picturesque weatherboard two-storey house, formerly the jockeys’ change room, now the offices of NIDA. And nearby stood the tin shed with a hundred seats and modest foyer that was to be our theatre (It’s at present called the Fig Tree Theatre).

The company was headed by Professor Robert Quentin along with John Clark, Tom Brown and Joe McCallum, who were tutors at NIDA and on the university payroll.

I was offered juicy roles in the first two plays of the season—Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard and Eisenring in Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers. One day during Cherry Orchard rehearsals Tom Brown casually remarked, ‘We’ve got Hamlet coming up. Are you any good at sword fighting?’

My heart skipped several beats and I thought in wild excitement, ‘My God! They’re going to offer me Laertes!’ I confidently proclaimed my excellence in fencing (having taken two or three lessons in the university fencing club).

‘Okay then,’ he answered. ‘How’d you like to play Hamlet?’

By the time I’d picked myself up off the ground he’d vanished.

I became Hamlet-obsessed, even to the point of neglecting to learn my lines for the next gig, The Fire Raisers, which I was playing at night while rehearsing Hamlet by day.

Tom Brown’s production was very ‘traditional’, which suited me fine at the time. The set consisted of a couple of ‘Gothic’ columns and a black backdrop. The costumes were velvet and satin ‘Elizabethan’. Claudius had a red cloak and a crown, Hamlet was dressed in black with a white Peter Pan collar, and the Ghost, in armour, had a greenish spotlight. Just as you’d expect.

It was only a hundred-seat theatre but I acted like I was playing the Colosseum. In the cramped dressing room I sat next to my Horatio, Neil Fitzpatrick. He watched me etching my face with wrinkles. ‘How old are you trying to look?’ he queried. ‘Thirty!’ I replied, desperately applying the makeup pencil. I was a very angst-ridden Hamlet (as you’d expect at twenty-two), shitty with my mother, shitty with my lover, shitty with the world. The only time I lightened up was with Horatio, the players and the gravedigger.

In other words, Hamlet was the perfect vehicle for getting your rocks off and tilting at all your favourite windmills. I think the role retains something of that no matter what age you are when you play it, but as you get older other things intrude and the circle of concentration widens to take in more than just your own ego.

I played Hamlet again nine years later at the Nimrod. This was another small venue of just over a hundred seats but in a more intimate wrap-around configuration. The stage space was tiny, but along with my co-director, Richard Wherrett, we made the space seem bigger by surrounding it with panels of mirrors that reflected the audience as well as the actors. My Hamlet was pretty intense this time too, but I hope a little more outward-looking and compassionate. I think you ought to play Hamlet every ten years as a barometer of where you’re at in your personal life and relationships.

The role has been successfully played by young actors (some freakishly young, like the child prodigy Master Betty), who make Hamlet’s tender years the rationale for his erratic behaviour, cruelty and self-obsession. Youth gives the role credibility but can deprive it of gravitas. I remember a patron at my initial Bell Shakespeare production of Hamlet in 1991 saying of John Polson’s grotty adolescent prince, ‘I just wanted to give him a good spanking!’ But of course younger audiences loved it.

For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Hamlet was played by classical actors in their maturity—that is, in their late thirties to mid-forties. Johnston Forbes-Robertson played it when he was sixty. Age certainly adds weight to the philosophical speculation of the soliloquies: here’s a man who does know something about the law’s delays, the insolence of office and the pangs of despised love—not just from speculation but from bitter experience. When he ponders, ‘What a piece of work is man,’ or marvels at armies dying for a useless plot of ground, you’re inclined to give more credence to his ideas than those of a university dropout.

On the other hand, you can get very cross with a mature-age Hamlet abusing his mother, sneering at his uncle, trashing his girlfriend and tying himself into knots of inactivity; the excuse of youth is gone. You feel inclined to yell, ‘Grow up!’

So what age should Hamlet be? The role was written for a young man. Richard Burbage was about thirty when he first played it. He was renowned for the truthfulness of his acting, his dexterity of mind and robust physicality—on stage and off. We have to imagine a very mercurial performance, confronting the audience with those astonishingly candid, revealing soliloquies as he strode about the Globe stage talking to them face to face—passionately, urgently. A far cry from the Victorian Hamlet in his vast Gothic set, brooding in a follow-spot and talking not to the audience but to himself, or to the ether.

We know that Shakespeare’s generation grew up faster than their modern counterparts and assumed responsibilities earlier, but at the beginning of the play a lot of emphasis is placed on Hamlet’s youth. He is referred to as ‘young Hamlet’ by Horatio in the first scene and by the gravedigger almost at the end. But in the interim Hamlet has grown up: ‘How long has thou been a grave-maker?’ he asks the gravedigger.

‘I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years,’ comes the reply. ‘It was that very day that young Hamlet was born’.

So Hamlet is thirty. Exactly thirty. At the end of the play . . . But is he thirty at the beginning? Surely not—maybe eighteen or twenty at most. So have ten years passed since Act I, Scene 1? Not at all. If you calculate the action of the play day by day, hour by hour, it’s a couple of months at most.

It’s Shakespeare up to one of his favourite tricks—a double time scheme that keeps the action moving at breakneck pace, yet gives the impression of time passing and characters evolving. In the space of four days Romeo and Juliet grow from innocent teenagers to adults of remarkable resolution and profound feelings.

In Julius Caesar, the month between the Lupercalia and the Ides of March is squeezed into one stormy night. The real Macbeth reigned for about eleven years; in Shakespeare’s version his reign is a couple of weeks, but in that time he changes from a mature warrior to a shrunken middle-aged has-been whose life has grown into ‘the sear, the yellow leaf’.

Something similar happens to Hamlet. In the space of three and a bit hours of theatre time he experiences more (and expresses more) than most of us do in a lifetime. The actor playing the role must chart that progress and factor in the body blows that forge Hamlet’s transformation, particularly after his return from the aborted voyage to England. Shakespeare thoughtfully gives the actor a bit of a break before bringing him back for the great denouement. The audience starts to miss him, and when he does return he is a wiser and older Hamlet than the one who killed Polonius. He seems fatalistic and death-fixated—hence his dallying in the graveyard to interrogate the gravedigger about the finer points of decomposition. Death is no longer something abstract but a physical reality—the skulls, the bones, the dust that might be that of Caesar or Alexander, now used to plug a beer barrel or patch a hole in the wall. He finds some comfort in meditating on this ultimate reality. That comfort is cruelly shattered by the sudden appearance of Ophelia’s coffin. But this final outrage of fortune only hardens his resolve to embrace his fate whatever the outcome.

The biggest challenge facing the actor who would be Hamlet is to make the part your own. It’s good to have a knowledge and respect of tradition and to study the great actors of the past. It will remind you of what a great privilege it is to play a role like Hamlet and humble you to think of how many fine actors have excelled in it and thrilled audiences for the last four hundred years. But you must not get cowed by tradition or hung up on it. When your turn comes you have to put all that to one side and look at the role as if it’s never been played before and you have no idea of how it’s going to come out. You start with a clean slate and begin to identify with the role. But that doesn’t mean limiting it to your own personality and frame of reference. You can’t scale it down to fit your own comfort zone. Rather, you have to go out to it, stretch yourself wide, open yourself to all possibilities by applying the old what if exercise: What if I met my father’s ghost? What if I found out he’d been murdered? How would I feel if my mother hurriedly married my uncle, a man I despised? What would I do if I found out he’d murdered my father? How would I feel if my girlfriend, my lover, committed suicide? They are all very big what ifs and demand a huge stretch of your imagination and emotional response. You’ll find discrepancies between your own reaction and what Hamlet does. Your feelings about revenge, about the afterlife, about honour, may not accord with his. That’s where the acting comes in: to step into Hamlet’s shoes, see the world through his eyes, make his what ifs your own.

Most Hamlets don’t go far enough. I haven’t seen many who convinced me they’d seen a ghost. I haven’t seen many who convinced me they loved Ophelia. A lot of Hamlets flatten the role out, try to create a consistent ‘character’. But there is no ‘character’, just a series of situations, reactions, decisions, impulses that, when added up, give us a Hamlet. Forget about ‘consistency’, which is such an abstract notion. Play each scene, each situation for what it gives you. In this scene he’s loving, in this scene bloody-minded; in this one suicidal, in this one jokey and light-hearted. In this scene he is cruel, in this one kind. In this one sluggish, in the next hyperactive. Just as we are in life—inconsistent. In Hamlet’s case the inconsistencies are heightened by his superior brain and the extreme situations he finds himself in.

Harold Bloom argues that Shakespeare invented the idea of ‘personality’. Before Shakespeare, playwrights presented us with ‘types’ governed by one particular characteristic or ‘humour’, as Ben Jonson would have it. They were consistent and predictable.

In Hamlet we have the opposite—someone more resembling ourselves: inconsistent, unpredictable, changing, evolving. As much as we think we know ourselves, we can’t say for sure how we would react in certain situations, how true we’d be to our principles, how courageous, truthful or loyal. We can easily give a quick character sketch of someone we know, but it can never be the whole truth—there are corners we cannot see into.

Every notable Hamlet has tapped into his zeitgeist. While Burbage had the dash and flamboyance of a Jacobean courtier, the nineteenth century churned out a succession of Romantic Hamlets, some with a demonic and Byronic gloom, some with the gentle melancholy of a Keats or Shelley. This tradition persisted well into the twentieth century. Olivier had the melancholy in spades, along with a splash of Burbage reinvented as a Hollywood matinee idol.

Since the 1950s, we have had Hamlets responding to the theatrical revolution spearheaded by John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, the original Angry Young Man in Look Back in Anger. Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson and David Warner were among the first of the post-Romantic Hamlets, and since then Hamlet has been banished from his princely pedestal. He has become the universal dropout, the anti-establishment everyman, the rebel with a cause, a rallying point for dissent.

During the Cold War era, when new drama was seriously curtailed in the Soviet Bloc and the classics were carefully scrutinised by censors for hidden subversive messages, audiences would watch intently to see what Hamlet was reading when he entered with his book, hoping for codified reassurance that the hero was on their side.

So if you’re playing Hamlet, it’s important to look not so much to the past as to the world around you. What’s your specific reference when you talk about the corruption of the state, the pointlessness of a war where men die for a patch of useless territory, the law’s delays, the insolence of office? Who are you speaking for and what response do you want from us?

The post-Romantic wave has given us a lot of Hamlets who are grotty and snotty: teenage rebels and political radicals or anarchists. We have seen boorish ranters and sneering cynics. Words like ‘noble’ or ‘regal’ are not to be countenanced. I have seen so many Hamlets content with being cool, tight-lipped and superior. And yet, to be a successful Hamlet, I think you have to touch the heart and elicit some empathy from your audience, otherwise they are going to ask themselves why they should bother spending three and a bit hours in your company or care what happens to you.

Like Lear, like Othello, Hamlet gives a lot of love and expects a lot in return. This is one of the things that make him both vulnerable and sympathetic. He loves his father in a painful, idealising and doting way. You could say much the same of the way he loves his mother, except this love is poisoned by the presence of sexual jealousy and possessiveness. His love for Ophelia is of the awkward, fragile adolescent kind, but it has to be intense and present, otherwise the agonising ‘nunnery’ scene is just a misogynist rant. His love for Horatio is almost taken for granted (by Hamlet) because it is so comfortable and familiar.

He is wryly amused by the fustiness of Polonius and is genuinely delighted by his conversations with the players and the gravedigger. He is more at home with common soldiers than with peacock courtiers like Osric, whom he treats with ironic contempt. It is this democratic and egalitarian streak in Hamlet that is part of his appeal. Lear has to learn it the painful way. Macbeth never has it. But it comes naturally to Hamlet. I suspect there is something of Shakespeare in this. He too seems to have been more at home with actors and writers than with courtiers.

So you tot up all Hamlet’s good qualities and his less endearing ones. You lay them out side by side and you don’t deny any of them. Then you play them as they come up, one by one, identifying each one as closely as possible with yourself, your own imagination, your own experiences, your own covert wishes and desires. You give us all of yourself, you tell the truth, you hold back nothing. Then an audience might say, ‘Yes, I know how you feel. I know why you’re doing this . . . I know you.’ And you’ve got your Hamlet.

Why was Shakespeare so interested in the Hamlet story and why does his treatment of it still grab us all these years later? The original is a pretty hoary and barbaric old yarn, well known in folklore and obviously dramatised at least once before the Shakespeare version we now have. As for why he kept reworking and revising it, well obviously it had great box-office potential, always a prime consideration with our playwright. Revenge plays had the sort of popular appeal Western movies once enjoyed and which cop/hospital/domestic sitcoms currently have on TV. We tend to think of Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre as a blanket term, forgetting that theatre was just as modish then as it is now, with certain genres coming in and out of fashion. One year historical chronicles would be all the rage, next year pastoral comedies or revenge tragedies or whatever. Shakespeare was adroit at tacking about and writing to satisfy each fad.

Some biographers have become very fanciful, linking the writing of Hamlet to the recent loss of his father and death of his son Hamnet. They point out, a little ghoulishly, that Shakespeare himself played the Ghost in the original performance, so here he was in the guise of the dead father communing with his dead son.

Even if that were the case, there is more to it than that. Shakespeare found in the person of this troubled procrastinator who feigns madness as a refuge from the world an emblem of the times: a protagonist who could hold the mirror up to Nature and show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image and the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.

I guess all of us come to feel at certain points in our lives that we are straddling the worlds of past and present; sometimes we feel stuck at an impasse. I work with young people today, eighteen- or twenty-year-olds, and remark to myself that I was born seventy years ago in a world so different to theirs! How to begin to explain the changes, the difference in aspirations and expectations?

Leaving superficial coincidences aside, I think Hamlet contains a certain amount of autobiographical content at quite a profound level. Shakespeare himself was a man suspended between two universes. On the one hand was Old England with its Old Faith—medieval Catholicism. This was the religion of his forebears and not-so-distant relatives. Warwickshire was regarded as a hotbed of Catholic fealty. Shakespeare’s father was very possibly a closet Catholic and the Ardens, on Shakespeare’s mother’s side, were under suspicion. Whatever his later agnosticism or even atheism, Shakespeare seems never to have lost a certain affection for the old ways, quaint rituals and homely pieties, just as he retained an affection for rustic pastimes and folklore—fairies, goblins and the like. No doubt he shared this nostalgic sentiment with many of his contemporaries, especially in the countryside where the Reformation was a lot slower to take root. You can’t eradicate centuries of practices and deeply held beliefs overnight or by a simple edict. He very likely deplored the destruction of ancient statuary, frescoes, missals and beautiful stained-glass windows that adorned the Guild Chapel and parish churches. A nostalgia for medieval England, its romance and chivalry, shines through his plays about Henry IV and Henry V.

But in the city and in the court where he spent his professional life he encountered a very different set of values. Here the Reformation was firmly entrenched and jealously prosecuted. At its extreme edge, Puritan preachers denounced all display and frivolity, including the theatre. Catholic practices were reviled as superstition and papists regarded with hostility and occasional persecution. Whatever his private opinions, the prudent Shakespeare would have paid lip service to the prevailing Protestant orthodoxy.

Hamlet encapsulates some of this double-think. He is a university student at Wittenberg, Luther’s university and the home of Protestantism. As a good student of philosophy there he has learned that purgatory is nonexistent, a Catholic superstition. He arrives home to be confronted by his father’s Ghost, who actually lives in purgatory:

And for the day confined to fast in fires

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

This supernatural visitation is enough to throw Hamlet’s whole belief system into chaos and impel him to inform his fellow student:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

So what and who can he believe? Who is to be trusted? The world is corrupt, treacherous, a garden gone to seed.

He can no longer have faith in womankind. His mother, far from displaying grief over his father’s sudden (and suspicious) death has remarried ‘within a month’. Not only that, she has married a man Hamlet despises—‘a satyr’, ‘a mildewed ear’, a ‘bloat king’ who later turns out to be ‘a murderer and a villain’. Hamlet heaves with disgust at his mother’s presumed carnal appetite, ‘honeying and making love over the nasty sty’.

Add to this his confusion and rage when his beloved Ophelia returns his love tokens and letters and is set up to spy on him. Well might he exclaim, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman.’

He can no longer have faith in friendship except for the constant Horatio. His ‘excellent good friends’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he soon realises, have been sent to spy on him and report back to the King. Before long they have become Claudius’s creatures, capturing Hamlet and escorting him (though possibly unwittingly) to his death. Hamlet has no compunction in disposing of them.

One thing he retains faith in is theatre. Because it is transparently artificial, you can believe it: because the actors are so upfront about feigning emotions, you can trust them. They are not duplicitous like Ophelia, Claudius or his ‘friends’.

In Hamlet’s metaphysical quandaries, in his speculations about mortality, fame, honour, friendship and responsibility, maybe we come close to hearing the authentic voice of Shakespeare. But that is always a dangerous speculation.

The best Hamlets encompass an enigma, they don’t try to explain it. No matter how well you know someone you’re aware of private corners; not necessarily dark, just private. Even your wife and children have a right to areas you don’t pry into. Hamlet has lots of dark corners. He is a mass of contradictions. Any actor who tries to iron out those contradictions will produce a bland Hamlet. He must remain unpredictable. Neither he nor the audience must know how a scene is going to end. He sets up the play in order to observe Claudius’s reaction but then can’t help commenting, provoking and nudging Claudius, thereby blowing his cover. He resolves to confront his mother and to speak daggers but use none. Five minutes later, he’s killed Polonius in a fit of rashness. His leaping into Ophelia’s grave, his killing of Laertes and Claudius are all done on impulse, totally unpremeditated. This rashness is interspersed with episodes of intense and paralysing introspection and self-flagellation over his inertia.

So, as I said earlier, my advice to Hamlets is simply to play the moments—one moment you’re cruel, next minute you’re kind; now tender, now tough; now hyperactive, now sluggish. Play the moments, let the audience join the dots. Don’t try to explain Hamlet, just experience him. Keep the audience intrigued. And the performance can vary every night—not the essentials, but certainly in the details. You don’t play the role, you live it. You use it to tell the audience all about yourself—well, not all; you keep a few dark corners, just to keep them guessing.

Incidentally, I’ve always felt that ‘To be or not to be’ doesn’t belong in the play—at least not where it occurs. That’s an odd thing to say, because in one sense ‘To be or not to be’ encapsulates all of Hamlet and is as much a signifier of the play as Yorick’s skull. Its philosophical tone is very much in the spirit of the play overall and sounds like the sort of thing Hamlet would have said at Wittenberg, in a seminar maybe, before he came home. It has a Protestant emphasis on ‘conscience’ and negates purgatory, ‘from whose bourn no traveller returns’ (a rather difficult thing to say after he’s seen the Ghost). But it comes at a very odd place in the play. Last time we saw Hamlet he was all fired up with excitement about his plans to stage the play and ‘catch the conscience of the King’. Why this sudden and irrelevant relapse?

It’s also a difficult piece to stage. Polonius and Claudius withdraw, having planted Ophelia to ambush Hamlet. He walks on and soliloquises for some time before noticing her. Either she takes refuge somewhere and reappears at the end of the soliloquy or else she hovers around, pulling focus, while he utters it. And poor old Polonius and Claudius are stuck behind the arras wishing he’d get on with it.

It proves far more dynamic if you take the soliloquy out and bring Hamlet straight into confrontation with Ophelia as is set up to happen. No time out for a soliloquy. But of course simply cutting it is hardly an option. Audiences would demand their money back. But when I’ve directed the play I have found it very useful to put ‘To be or not to be’ earlier in the piece, in the middle of Act II, Scene 2. Polonius has just told Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is mad and spends hours walking in the lobby. Then they spot him approaching, book in hand, and withdraw so that Polonius may interrogate him. This seems to me the perfect place to pop in ‘To be or not to be’, as if Hamlet is chewing over a thesis in the book he has been reading. It is not a passionate, urgent speech but academically discursive. It leads very well into the dialogue with the nosey Polonius: ‘What do you read, my Lord?’ Hamlet: ‘Words, words, words . . .’

But I can never get over the feeling that it was a speech Shakespeare pulled out of a bottom drawer and snuck into Hamlet.

Macbeth

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

I can’t think of any more nihilistic statement in all of literature. As with Shakespeare’s other Tragedies, there is no sense of redemption for the protagonists. Life goes on without them but it somehow seems reduced. Fortinbras is no substitute for Hamlet, nor the devious, scrupulous Malcolm a replacement for the force of nature that is Macbeth. There is something sublime and magnificent about him as he faces eternal damnation and flings himself recklessly against his last impregnable and fatal enemy, Macduff.

The most compelling feature of Macbeth is the scope of his imagination. He is so overwrought as he approaches Duncan’s bedchamber, knife in hand, that he starts to hallucinate. He sees a dagger in the air, pointing the way, and watches as it congeals with blood. His mind is flooded with a vision of universal wickedness:

. . . Now o’er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder,

Alarum’d by his sentinel the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost.

After Duncan’s murder he feels no joy or exultation, but sinks into sleeplessness and nightmares, a murky twilight existence:

. . . Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood.

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

His ultimate downfall is presaged by a public display of guilt and terror as he conjures up the ghost of Banquo at his coronation banquet.

Macbeth is one of the most readable of Shakespeare’s plays. The story is simple, linear and moves at a cracking pace. The verse is urgent and muscular and the imagery both concrete and sensuous. As a schoolboy I thrilled to the sinister atmosphere of Macbeth’s castle, the witches’ cavern, the blasted Scottish heath, the gloomy forest that witnesses the murder of Banquo. The male/female struggle for supremacy between Macbeth and his dynamic wife is at once domestic and epic. And the play comes to a grand finale with the powers of good rallying to overthrow the tyrant:

. . . Macbeth

is ripe for shaking, and the powers above

Put on their instruments.

For a play so compact and thrilling to read, it is usually disappointing in performance. I have directed it twice and twice played Macbeth, and feel a kinship with Ingmar Bergman, who said after directing it eight times that next time he hoped to get it right . . .

I studied the play in high school and loved it to the point of learning it off by heart and making my own production of it. My first professional encounter with it was in 1967 when I played Lennox in Peter Hall’s RSC production starring Paul Scofield and Harold Pinter’s then wife, Vivien Merchant, in Stratford. John Bury’s set consisted of a huge cave made of red fur which covered the walls and floor. There were giant rips in it for entrances. It was like the inside of some enormous beast or else a vision of hell itself. Hall had decided that there were only two real ‘characters’ in the play, the Macbeths; the rest of us were choric figures grouped like chess pieces to comment on the action. This seriously undersold the other protagonists like Banquo and Macduff, besides stripping the play of its humanity. It became a sort of spoken oratorio.

Too late in the day Hall realised his mistake and urged us each to scramble around and invent ‘a character’, but as we were dressed more or less identically, this wasn’t so easy. It was yet another example of the design getting in the way of the play; some people thought a quick look at the set said it all—there was nowhere left to go. Although we all scoffed at the old theatre superstition that equates Macbeth with bad luck, we were touched by the famous curse: Peter Hall contracted a severe attack of shingles and the production had to be postponed for six weeks.

Reviews in England were mixed but we took the production to Moscow and Leningrad as part of the USSR’s fiftieth-anniversary celebrations and it met with great acclaim. Whether this was for the show’s inherent virtues or because it was an exercise in international diplomacy was hard to gauge. We felt the Russians were just glad to see some foreign faces after so many years of Cold War.

Although Paul Scofield was one of the actors I most admired in the world, he did not seem able to encompass the evil nature of Macbeth. There was something too fundamentally sweet-natured, almost saintly, about him. And although Vivien Merchant projected the image of a glittering serpent, she seemed too small, both physically and vocally, on that mammoth set, especially next to the rugged and sonorous Scofield.

In the early days of the Nimrod Theatre (now the Stables Theatre, Kings Cross) I produced Macbeth as a sort of black mass with a cast of seven. It was well suited to that tiny intimate venue and was heavily ritualistic: Macbeth was vanquished and the theatre cleansed with a version of the Dies Irae. The production was heavily influenced by the murder of Sharon Tate by Charles Manson and his weird cult members. Gillian Jones as Lady M gave a compelling and febrile performance of someone with a moral vacuum addicted to substance abuse. That’s one of the fascinating aspects of Lady Macbeth: she has far less imagination than her husband and is oblivious to the consequences of her actions:

Macbeth: If we should fail?

Lady Macbeth: We fail!

Yet she’s the one who really cracks up. She is confident and commanding following the murder of Duncan: she mops up her husband and covers for him brilliantly. But as he steps deeper and deeper into crime he leaves her behind, confused and lonely. Macbeth hardens in resolve, becoming increasingly brutal, whereas Lady Macbeth begins to lose it and is finally reduced to a demented wraith, reliving the horrors of the past in her nightly sleepwalks.

When I directed the play for Bell Shakespeare in 2007, I went for a more contemporary approach and set the play on a blasted heath—a landscape devastated by years of warfare. Images of the US invasion of Iraq dominated the design. The actors were dressed in battle fatigues and the stage was littered with the detritus of war. It was a natural habitat for the witches—feral survivors and camp followers.

The two productions in which I played Macbeth were far more lavish affairs and I think were somewhat swamped by the design. Richard Wherrett directed Robyn Nevin and myself for the Sydney Theatre Company in the Opera House’s Drama Theatre in 1982. Richard saw the Macbeths as a glamorous couple, revelling in celebrity and power—a sinister version of the Kennedys and their ‘Camelot’. The set was spacious and entirely abstract. But I think the play works best in a small space with a sense of claustrophobia. ‘I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d,’ growls Macbeth, and you need to feel the walls closing in.

David Fenton directed the play for Bell Shakespeare in 1998. Design dominated here, too. David depicted the witches as aliens in spacesuits, dabbling in genetic engineering. Their cave was a well-equipped laboratory and their incantations were like scientific formulae. The spectacular banquet scene featured a crucified white horse with its entrails spilling out—Banquo’s ghost appeared amid the offal.

This time my wife Anna played Lady Macbeth and we spent a gruelling research period reading up on monsters like Brady and Hindley, the child murderers. One of the problems the Macbeths have is that they cannot live in the moment: ‘tomorrow’ is the most oft-repeated word in their lexicon. They are always projecting themselves into the future, perhaps because, as Jan Kott suggests, ‘they have suffered some great erotic defeat’. Devoid of children himself, Macbeth seems determined to wipe out everyone else’s progeny. Fleance must perish along with his father and Macduff’s entire family is wiped out. Anna and I worked hard on the psychology and inner life of the Macbeths—but it was the witches and disembowelled horse that got all the attention.

Of all the productions I’ve seen, the most successful is probably Trevor Nunn’s RSC production at The Other Place in Stratford with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. You can still see it on DVD and a lot of the acting now looks arch and affected, but Judi Dench is compelling and truthful as always. A shiver of terror runs through her as she invokes her demons:

. . . Come you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown until the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty.

Many actresses play Lady Macbeth like an evil bitch from the beginning. Dench shows us the terrible effort it takes for this woman to overcome and suppress her natural femininity. If she’s evil already, she has no need to invoke the powers of darkness.

Orson Welles’ film version is full of great images (even if they are all too clearly indebted to Sergei Eisenstein) but suffers from some bizarre casting choices. Polanski’s is the more popular film and he handles the witches very credibly. But the film is weakened by the decision to internalise all the soliloquies. It gets very boring looking at an actor’s static face while a voiceover murmurs the text reflectively. It’s no substitute for a live actor on stage eyeballing you and spitting out those speeches with white-hot passion. Macbeth’s soliloquies are not reflective—they are full of action, anguish and torment. Most soliloquies are: it’s the chance for a character to rip off his mask and tear open his bosom, letting the audience in on his most intimate thoughts and emotions. Soliloquies are never time out for reflection; they are the highlights, the linchpin of the drama, and should feel shockingly candid and intimate.

The main reason the Trevor Nunn production worked so well was this very intimacy. Productions of Macbeth tend to go off the rails when they get too grand, too epic and too busy. The Other Place provided a very confined space and close actor/audience relationship. A small cast sat in a circle, stepping in and out of the space to play their scenes. It must have been reasonably similar to the atmosphere of the Blackfriars Theatre where Macbeth was performed at night, indoors, by torch and candlelight. Very spooky . . . But such is the play’s power over the imagination that it succeeded with the big popular Globe audience in broad daylight as well.

In directing Macbeth you face a number of challenges. How do you convincingly embody and convey a sense of evil, and how do you maintain the tension and the horror without tipping into bathos or melodrama? Extreme images and situations must be handled boldly: the witches’ cauldron scene, the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, the chaos following Duncan’s murder. If you play safe and pull back on those moments they can be easily dismissed or become laughable. As with the playing of the Macbeths, you need courage and a wide-ranging imagination. You need great emotional commitment.

Macbeth in particular is in danger of dwindling as the play progresses. Striving for power is exciting but having it can be boring.

I know it is said of him:

. . . Now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

But Macbeth cannot afford to see himself that way. On the contrary, he sees himself as a brave bear surrounded by yapping dogs:

They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly,

But bear-like I must fight the course . . .

Treacherous, murderous and bloody as he is, there is something awesome about his final confrontation with Macduff, so you can’t fire all your big guns in the banquet scene. Save a bit of puff for the end.

Some directors are uneasy, too, with what little humour there is in the play. The witches seem to possess magical qualities as well as being vile, vindictive crones. Shakespeare’s audience would have had no problem with that, nor with finding them simultaneously funny and horrific. Too often directors tie themselves into knots trying to rationalise or intellectualise the witches.

At school we were taught that the porter is there for ‘comic relief’. That’s only partly true. He is also there to screw the tension to breaking point. We have just seen the guilty Macbeths with blood on their hands startled by a knocking at the gate—like the sound of doom. They hurry off to wash their hands and put on fresh clothes. Meanwhile the knocking continues. We want to know who’s there—will they come in and discover the murderers? But the entry of Macduff and Lennox is delayed by a drunken porter slowly coming to his senses and playing knock-knock jokes as he dresses himself.

To Shakespeare’s audience (the older ones at least) he would have been a familiar figure. In the old Mystery Plays such as Shakespeare saw in Coventry when he was a boy, the porter of hell’s gate was a comic knockabout figure who tormented the souls of the condemned sinners. It was a comic interlude with sinister connotations. In Macbeth the porter has something of the same function; but more importantly he identifies Inverness with hell and Macbeth with Satan himself. The play is elevated to a metaphysical level appropriate to the worst of all crimes, regicide:

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

The Lord’s anointed temple . . .

The visceral impact of Macbeth on its audience was guaranteed by the fact that treason, powder and plot were very much in the forefront of everybody’s mind. Only months before, Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators had attempted to blow up Parliament. Had they succeeded they would have wiped out not only the King but a goodly number of the royal family, the nobility, judiciary and military. The subsequent round of executions was savage, as was the crackdown on Catholics, especially in Warwickshire, the home of one of the leading conspirators, Robert Catesby. (Ben Jonson seems to have been involved in fingering him.) The trial and execution of the equivocator, Father Henry Garnet, gets a guernsey in the porter’s monologue. The already paranoid King James took to wearing armour under his doublet and shunning public appearances. He was also greatly fascinated by witchcraft, sat in on witch trials and wrote an authoritative book on the subject.

As a new King’s Man, Shakespeare was writing a piece calculated to please his royal master. To cap it off, he takes the minor and rather dubious historical figure of Banquo (James’s ancestor) and gives him heroic status. And as one final little flourish of flattery he makes mention of a saintly English king who can cure disease by merely touching the afflicted. James was conceited enough to believe he possessed this power himself.

For an actor and director, Shakespeare’s Tragedies are the peaks of challenge and achievement. They are the most engrossing, exciting, fulfilling and finally frustrating of all theatrical endeavours—frustrating because you always fall short of expectations.

You can read glowing accounts of the great nineteenth-century tragedians, but in my lifetime’s experience there have not been many productions or performances of Lear, Macbeth or Othello that have won universal praise. People seem to have in their minds some ideal performance of those roles that few modern actors can satisfy. Maybe Kean, Kemble, Siddons and Macready playing ‘in the grand manner’ in those large auditoria satisfied the nineteenth-century taste for the epic and the grandiose, something modern audiences find hammy. The twenty-first-century actor is still caught between the conventions of cinematic naturalism and the demands of heightened seventeenth-century verse. Where to turn? Do you try to reduce the scale of the work to contemporary realism, and mumble and stumble your way through the text in an attempt to make it as ‘natural’ as possible? Or do you eschew all those naturalistic signals and invent a whole new theatrical language, something that can embrace the epic and metaphysical? This is the path chosen by contemporary German theatre, one which is impacting on a new generation of actors and directors in Australia.

The extremes of passion and suffering experienced by Lear, Macbeth and Othello defeat most actors—you can never really win. Hamlet is the exception—with him you can never really fail. Whereas the three former protagonists are locked in a blind obsession that intensifies as the play progresses, Hamlet remains open to suggestion, ready for change, flexible and playful to the end. With the first three we stand back in horror while we witness their pain and disintegration. We cannot imagine ourselves in their shoes, or see ourselves behaving the way they do. But Hamlet is more like us, or we like him. His doubts, his hurts and mistakes are all familiar—we’ve all more or less been there.

It’s harder to imagine oneself travelling the same road with Macbeth.

Othello

Othello is one of the few Shakespeare plays I haven’t been in or directed. But it has a special place in my memory and in my heart because it was the first time I saw Laurence Olivier act on stage. And I still regard it as the greatest live performance I’ve ever seen.

Olivier was my acting idol since the age of fifteen and the biggest single influence on my love of Shakespeare and my decision to be an actor. And then there I was at the age of twenty-three, flying into London to take up my scholarship at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. As the plane flew low over the little red roofs my dominant thought was, ‘Laurence Olivier lives here!’

My friend Neil Fitzpatrick had joined the National a couple of years previously and was playing the herald in Othello. He couldn’t get me a ticket but said if I was prepared to sleep on the pavement outside the Old Vic I might get a ticket next morning because they always held a few in reserve for sale on the day. I saw Othello four times, mostly by sleeping on the pavement. The seat was always the same one in the back row of the gods, but it was worth it. Olivier seemed to fill the entire theatre with an easy unforced power and feline grace. Some critics complained that his Othello was like a West Indian bus driver, but Olivier always had that populist knack of relating his characters to someone familiar to us. Nowadays his performance would be seen as grossly insensitive and ‘politically incorrect’, but putting that to one side, his impersonation of a coloured man was impeccable and brilliantly observed. Unfortunately he committed his performance to film, where it looks grotesque and overblown. You can’t just stick a movie camera in the theatre and call it a true record of the experience.

Olivier was one of the last white actors to take on the role. At present it is out of bounds, which I think is a pity. I fully understand cultural sensitivities and the peril of racial stereotypes, but how far are we prepared to go? Should only a Jewish actor be allowed to play Shylock? Should only a Russian play Uncle Vanya? I guess fashion will change again, the dust will settle and we’ll find a new way to address the issue. And it’s a good temporary corrective to some of the mindless casting in Hollywood in the forties and fifties. Did you ever see John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Or Robert Morley as the Emperor of China? Slightly better (but just as ‘incorrect’) were Alec Guinness’s Arab chieftain in Lawrence of Arabia, Olivier’s Mahdi in Khartoum and Marlon Brando’s Japanese houseboy in Teahouse of the August Moon. As for Anthony Quinn, well, he played every nationality under the sun . . .

One of the points Olivier’s performance made was that Othello’s great weakness is not jealousy but pride: he cannot bear the thought of being cuckolded. If anyone’s jealous, it’s Iago. He hates everyone who has the qualities he himself lacks. He says Cassio must die, for example, because

He hath a daily beauty in his life

That makes me ugly.

In his essay ‘Of Envy’, Francis Bacon says:

A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others. For men’s minds will either feed upon their own good or upon other’s evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of the hope to attain to another’s virtue will seek to come at even hand by depressing another’s fortune.

Coleridge summed up Iago as the embodiment of ‘motiveless malignity’, but that’s a hard thing for an actor to play. Iago does have a motive: to destroy the love, virtue or beauty of others so that he does not have to withstand comparison with them. His hatred of others is surpassed only by his hatred of himself.

William Hazlitt, that great Shakespearean critic, sums it up thus:

Iago in fact belongs to a class of character, common to Shakespeare and at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are hard and callous.

Iago’s jealousy has not specific cause but is a permanent disposition. When Emilia speaks of jealousy she is speaking not about Othello but Iago:

But jealous souls will not be answered so.

They are not ever jealous for the cause,

But jealous for they’re jealous. It’s a monster

Begot upon itself, born of itself.

Orson Welles is a great speaker of verse, with a voice that is both ringing and mellifluous. It is a joy to listen to his Othello in his film version. The movie suffers from a queeny and one-dimensional Iago, Michael MacLiammoir, but the visual aspects, the camera work and editing are stunning, as always with Welles. His earlier stage performance was not to everyone’s taste. A precocious schoolboy named Kenneth Tynan reviewed it for his school magazine under the headline citizen coon.

My other favourite Othello is Plácido Domingo in Zeffirelli’s film version of Verdi’s opera. Domingo has the size, passion and emotional commitment to carry it off, his task made easier by Verdi’s sympathetic score. One of the hardest things for the actor playing Othello, according to Olivier and others, is to maintain the required level of impassioned rage. Here the music helps.

In Othello, Shakespeare created the first ‘noble’ black man in Western literature. Hitherto blackness was associated with evil, as with Marlowe’s Ithamor in The Jew of Malta or Shakespeare’s own Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus. His sympathetic portrayal of a black man may have been typical of his cussedness in running against the tide of popular opinion. At the time he wrote Othello, London was experiencing a tide of Moorish refugees fleeing persecution in Spain. And, as always, the arrival of refugees created racial tensions in the city. Secretary Cecil complained about blackamoors ‘infiltrating’ English society and Queen Elizabeth issued an edict against ‘the great number of negars and blackamoors which are crept into the realm’.

Apart from the shock of seeing a ‘noble’ black man on the stage, Shakespeare’s audience would have found the play excitingly modern and topical. Anti-Spanish feeling was running high and it had been reported that the Spanish King Philip II was an insanely jealous man who had murdered his wife. He became suspicious when she inadvertently dropped her handkerchief and he ended up strangling her in her bed. The villain of the piece is given a Spanish name, Iago, after St Iago of Compostela, nicknamed Metamoros—the Moor killer.

As always Shakespeare researched his subject well and seems to have drawn heavily on Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny talks of ‘medicinal gums of the Arabian trees, mines of sulphur, a state made of chrycolite, mandragora and coloquintida, the Pontic sea and the Anthropophagi’, all familiar to us from Othello.

If you were directing Othello you could set it in a remote army base today in the country of your choice (Australia, Britain, the USA) where a company of white soldiers is commanded by a black general. The word ‘race’ need never be mentioned—it would be implicit. And an army base has that same insular, confined hothouse atmosphere Shakespeare conjures up in his Cyprus: a remote island, full of soldiers, bored and idle, prone to drinking and quarrelling, open to intrigue, sexual frustration, whoring and wife-swapping. The play needs an air of claustrophobia, of the walls gradually closing in; we start out in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, but end up in a bedroom on the island of Cyprus.

This tension was missing from the film version with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh—although Branagh is among the best Iagos I have seen, along with Marcus Graham for Bell Shakespeare in 2007. Iago must be intelligent, jovial and credible. If he is at all transparent it makes Othello look like a fool. Everyone trusts Iago: Desdemona, Cassio, Roderigo. Only Emilia has her doubts and only the audience knows the truth. It should be agonising for an audience watching Iago spin his evil web, and seeing his victims becoming increasingly enmeshed. It certainly seems to have worked when Macready played Othello: at the moment he seized Iago by the throat, a gentleman in the audience, overcome with rage and frustration, yelled, ‘Choke the devil! Choke him!’

When Bell Shakespeare produced Othello in 2007 it was gratifying to see a fine Indigenous actor, Wayne Blair, in the role and to realise that no other country in the world could have produced that particular Othello. It was our own.

King Lear

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. That is what Shakespearean tragedy accomplishes for us.

Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography

I have had the great privilege of playing King Lear twice in my career and, as I write this, am limbering up (literally) for a third attempt.

My first effort was in the Nimrod production of 1984 directed by Aubrey Mellor with a strong cast: Judy Davis doubled as the Fool and Cordelia, Colin Friels played Edmund and Robert Menzies was Edgar, John Ewing was Gloucester, John Howard played Kent and Michael Gow was Oswald. Goneril and Regan were played by Gillian Jones and Kris McQuade. After a try-out schools season in the unlikely setting of the Penrith Panthers Club, we played the York Theatre in the Seymour Centre. The set consisted of a huge pile of rubble, as of some bombed European city at the end of World War II, and the costumes were the rag-tag clothes of guerrilla fighters. This certainly gave the second half of the play a suitably blighted landscape but was not helpful for the beginning, when Lear is carving up his kingdom and doling out ‘shadowy forests and with champains riched/With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads’.

Barrie Kosky’s 1998 production for Bell Shakespeare was more successful in this regard. The curtain rose on a scene of fairytale splendour with Lear on his throne in front of a gold curtain, his court garbed in a dazzling array of colourful furs and jewels. Something of this fairytale approach seems appropriate. ‘There once was an old king with three daughters. To whoever loved him most he would give the richest part of his kingdom . . .’ This simple set-up suggests the parable-like nature of the story, the folly of the king’s plan, and sounds a warning note of impending hypocrisy and treachery.

Kosky’s production was a far cry from the determined realism of Aubrey Mellor’s. From start to finish it was intensely theatrical. Kosky sat on stage throughout, pounding on an upright piano. Beside him stood two ageing trumpeters who were more at home on the club circuit than in the ‘legit’ theatre. All three were dressed in black tie, dinner jackets and red fez hats. Instead of his accompanying knights, Lear had four ‘dogs’ on leashes. These were four young men stripped to the waist sporting plastic shower caps and white clown makeup. They wore baggy pants from which protruded outsized genitalia. Louise Fox’s Fool was a Shirley Temple look-alike who led the tapdancing dogs in a rendition of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’. These were some of the least controversial aspects of the production.

More provocative were Goneril and Regan sucking out Gloucester’s eyes and swallowing them; or Matt Whittet’s Poor Tom: he disguised himself by stripping down to his jocks from which he scraped handfuls of shit, daubing himself with it and eating a bit on the way. The hovel was a big gold box with holes in it. We mad folk crammed inside it, stuck our arms and legs out of the holes and jabbered insanely. Probably the most memorable scene was that set in Dover, which was reminiscent of one of those ghastly bus terminals with rows of plastic chairs and flickering neon lights. People wandered about wearing huge grotesque puppet masks while I chatted away to Gloucester, dressed in Cordelia’s discarded pink fur coat, handing out rubber dildos to passers-by . . . Barrie never did explain the rubber dildos.

It was a bit of a wild ride, that Lear. A lot of people walked out, we got bags of hate mail and sometimes the audience would yell things like ‘Rubbish!’ during the curtain call . . . but people still talk about it. I found the production freed me up a lot, removing the constraints of naturalism, of trying to reconcile heightened verse with everyday behaviour as well as act both old age and insanity. There was certainly no need to act the insanity—the production did that for me; the imagery of the hovel and Dover scenes suggested the inside of Lear’s head.

My next attempt at the role will perforce be very different—another director, another vision. I look forward to coming back to the psychology of the role, the interplay of characters and Shakespeare’s dissection of monarchy, of patriarchy and of family.

Kosky dismissed Goneril and Regan as ‘monsters’. I don’t see that at all. I am interested in the relationship between Lear and his daughters that has made them the way they are. He makes no secret of the fact that he loves and prefers Cordelia and wants to give her the biggest slice of his kingdom. Enough to embitter her siblings, I should think. Even so, they begin quite reasonably in their treatment of their father until his demands and his behaviour get too much for them. What a lousy deal: ‘I’m going to give each of you half my kingdom to administer but I’ll hang on to the title and all the perks of a king and have a happy old retirement. I’ll come and stay with you in turn, month and month about, and I’ll be bringing with me a hundred knights, my hunting buddies, to be housed at your expense.’

Bad enough, especially when the hundred knights turn out to be a drunken rabble and that bloody Fool never stops insulting you with his wisecracks. Incensed by their father’s capriciousness, and driven increasingly apart from one another by their fear and ambition, the two sisters find themselves stuck in a quagmire of resentment no family counsellor could resolve. And what of Cordelia? Is she Lear’s favourite because she is so docile? I suspect rather the reverse—she’s a chip off the old block, as stubborn as he is. Her refusal to play in the flattering love contest is a show of wilful independence, a public humiliation of her father.

Lear’s folly is evident from the very start: the idea of breaking up a prosperous and successful business just so that one can enjoy a comfortable retirement is as indolent as it is short-sighted. Surely Lear should see that all he is doing is brewing rivalry and conflict. Worse, the game is rigged. He knows in advance he is going to give ‘a third more opulent’ to Cordelia. What kind of equal third is that? He means he is going to give her the choice bit and spend his retirement with her. Worse still, he is not just selling off the farm—he’s giving it away. He intends to marry off Cordelia to either the Duke of Burgundy or the King of France, and one of them will inherit the choicest slice of Britain. No wonder Kent labels it ‘hideous rashness’.

Once I crack that opening scene the rest is pretty plain sailing. But that first scene is tricky. Some commentators suggest Lear is mad at the beginning and the rest of the play is about him coming to his senses. I don’t think so. That first scene isn’t about madness—it’s about the pitfalls of power. It’s what happens when a man has got used to having absolute power and is convinced he has a divine right to it. It’s important that Lear is old. He’s been in the job too long. He’s bored and wants out of responsibility. Because he demands and basks in flattery he is out of touch with the business and with the people around him, and most of all with his subjects—the homeless, poor and hungry whom he has never encountered. His grand plan has been tossed off without a thought to its ramifications and consequences. He is indeed ‘King’ Lear and the rest of the play is about learning what it is to lose that title, that authority, and to realise that he is only a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ like other men.

In that opening scene we see Lear at his worst: vain, shallow, stupid, short-sighted, bullying and childish . . . Yet we’re told that people love him! Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester and the Fool are all ready to lay down their lives for him. I can’t recall seeing a Lear who deserved that sort of devotion. One has to invent some sort of back-story to say that he has had a long and successful reign and the kingdom is in great shape. He has earned the love of at least some of his subjects, those named above. They remain loyal and loving, despite the fact that he is hardening into a cranky old tyrant. So I have to find something in the first scene that suggests that back-story. A celebratory atmosphere might help, with Lear getting a bit pissed and irresponsible? We’ll see . . .

After that things get easier. Lear is certainly ugly in his confrontations with Goneril and Regan, but by now we start to feel some compassion for him given their rough treatment of him. Some humanity starts to bleed through the carapace of his folly. His pain finds relief in the violence of the storm—he exults in it and starts to come to his senses. He suddenly realises that the hungry and homeless are constantly exposed to these forces of nature: ‘O, I have taken too little care of this.’

The sight of mad Poor Tom tips his senses into a new kind of consciousness which I would hesitate to call madness because it is so piercingly clear-sighted. Lear now realises his common humanity. He sees through the privileges of wealth and power that stand in the way of justice. One is awed by Lear’s devastating critique of human institutions and hierarchy. His humility and patience when he is awakened from his torment cannot fail to attract a sympathy that turns to admiration when he defies his captors and accompanies Cordelia to prison.

Not that the play is about ‘feeling sorry’ for King Lear. The last thing you could accuse the play of is sentimentality . . . We should not feel a cheap thrill of satisfaction at the downfall of Goneril, Regan and Edmund. Rather, we are asked to reflect on the tearing apart of family, of community, of country, due to arrogance, moral blindness, emotional deadness and the abuse of authority.

Lear’s ‘madness’ is liberating. He has always denied the female (flexible and forgiving) part of himself. He refuses to weep, suppressing his natural instincts. This repression turns into a vehement disgust of all things feminine. He has renounced his warmth and a unifying principle of human existence, and he gives away his kingdom not because he loves his daughters but because he wants to own them. He mistakes this impulse for paternal affection, but he has to undergo a painful journey to learn what real love is.

I’m always amazed to reflect that King Lear was first performed for James I as a Christmas entertainment! It’s hard to imagine the present royal family sitting through King Lear at the best of times, let alone after the Christmas pud. Anyway, it was performed for the King at Whitehall on Boxing Day 1606. What was Shakespeare thinking? King James seems to have been no great lover of plays (especially long ones) despite his generous patronage of the King’s Men. As I’ve mentioned he was a great believer in the divine right of kings and their spiritual power to cure the King’s Evil (scrofula) by touch. So for a Christmas show Shakespeare puts on this play about a mad king who comes to realise that he is no better than other men, throws away his clothes and trappings of majesty and delivers a furious tirade against hierarchy, the hypocrisy of the court, the abuses of the judiciary and the speciousness of all human institutions. What on earth was King James meant to make of it? Perhaps history has underestimated him and he really was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. It’s hard to imagine the diplomatic and socially aspirational Shakespeare taking such a risk otherwise.

One thing that would have appealed to the King is the folly of carving up the kingdom. He was at the time trying hard to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland but meeting with stiff opposition.

For all its bleakness and horrors, King Lear seemed to strike a chord with its Jacobean audience and was performed at the Globe as well as at court. Jacobean drama had, overall, a love of horror and cruelty that surpasses that of the previous Elizabethan age—think of plays like The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil; King Lear is a fit, but much greater, companion piece. With the reopening of the theatres during the Restoration came a change in taste. Lear was now regarded as too horrifying, too barbaric. So in 1681 Nahum Tate undertook to rewrite it and make it fit for public consumption. He cut the Fool, nobody dies, Lear gives his kingdom to the young lovers Edgar and Cordelia, and goes off to live ‘in some cool cell’ with Kent and Gloucester. This was the version to be performed for the next hundred and seventy years. Not until the 1850s was a more or less restored version of Shakespeare’s Lear performed in public.

The last fifty years or so have seen a division between those who want to see Lear as a ‘redemptive’ piece and those who see it more as an existentialist, nihilistic statement. The latter interpretation was given a fillip by Jan Kott in his influential work Shakespeare Our Contemporary. His essay ‘King Lear, or Endgame’ yoked Lear to Beckett’s Endgame as a vision of an absurd and godless universe, an expression of twentieth-century disillusionment. Kott’s work had a big impact on directors like Peter Brook, whose landmark production of Lear in 1962 at Stratford starred Paul Scofield. The performance annoyed Laurence Olivier, who dubbed it ‘Mister Lear’. Brook had stripped away all the grandeur and panoply of the setting as well as guiding Scofield to play a down-to-earth, life-size monarch instead of the Job-like figure of biblical grandeur that had been the norm from Macready to Wolfit to Olivier himself.

I must say I find it hard to find any ‘redemptive’ message in Lear. All is ‘cheerless, dark and deadly’. If there are any gods (which is doubtful), they toy with us as boys do with flies and ‘kill us for their sport’. Our only weapon against this bleakness is stoic patience:

. . . men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither.

Where would I set the play? Which historical period of the past? Or would I set it in the present? Neither. I’d be inclined to set it in the future. It’s about the end of the world:

Kent: Is this the promised end?

Edgar: Or image of that horror?

Albany: Fall and cease.

King Lear hovers on the brink of nihilism but something holds it back. There are acts of extraordinary love, courage and loyalty from Kent, Cordelia and Edgar.

It is a miracle that these green shoots can survive in such a blasted landscape.

And it is a miracle that someone could write it all down.

Postscript

Since writing this section I have now played Lear for the third time, in a Bell Shakespeare production directed by Marion Potts to mark the company’s twentieth anniversary. It was a pretty gruelling tour of five months (including rehearsals) with seasons in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. We played to large audiences, breaking previous box-office records in most places, but the critics were negative almost to a man or woman.

I have never worked so hard on a role in terms of research and meditation (even though I’d played it twice before), physical and vocal preparation, and total commitment to every single performance—I gave it everything I had and came off stage wrung out after every show.

And yet I regard it as possibly the greatest failure of my career.

Why? I still can’t figure it out . . . Maybe the setting was too abstract and sterile; maybe we did not create a convincing world for the characters to inhabit; maybe the scale of the acting was inappropriate or misjudged—I don’t know. But I would have had a miserable time had not the audience response been so positive. Shakespearean Tragedy is a dangerous ocean. You might be lucky enough to catch the crest of a wave, but more often than not you’ll be dashed to pieces on the rocks.

Each play has a continuous stream of images or metaphors that are intrinsic to that play. They convey a unity of feeling rather than one of meaning, rather in the way that film-music works in the cinema. There is a cohesiveness, an internal harmony, within each play; it touches even the most minor character, and places all of the protagonists together in the same circle of enchantment. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the rude mechanicals are quite unlike the fairies, but they partake of the same reality. They have been touched by the same lightning.

Peter Ackroyd