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HONOURING THE UPBEAT

HAMLET Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. . .

Act 3, Scene 2

‘GOOD MORNING, MR PRESIDENT. WELCOME to the Globe!’ I say from the stage. From down in the yard, a confident, low and strong ‘Good morning!’ comes back at me. Having played to no shortage of prime ministers and presidents over two years of journeying, we have now landed the Big Kahuna. The least-disappointing man in the world, Barack Obama, stands in the yard of the Globe. He is on a quick visit to London, and to honour Shakespeare’s birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death he is paying us a visit. It is the end of our tour, and before we start a final weekend of performances we are giving a quick private turn. A security cordon has shut down the whole of Southwark, helicopters hover noisily above, and a liberal scattering of terrifying men with big guns sets no one at their ease. But in the theatre it is early spring and fresh, and the company are backing me with music as I say briefly who we are and what we do. Then Matt Romain tears into Hamlet’s advice to the Players, delivered straight to President Obama:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. . . Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

The Hamlets have been instructed when they soliloquise to quash their fears and talk straight at the President, to give an impression of the Globe’s direct communication. After the performance, he joins us on stage – as relaxed, warm and direct as one might imagine – and talks Shakespeare. I ask him if he has ever acted, and he comes straight back with ‘Have I ever acted? I act every single day. Every time I go down to Congress, I’m acting. When I sit down with certain world leaders, I have to do a lot of acting.’ It’s done with laconic timing, and with a surprising frankness before a group of actors he has never met. I decide to test his humour.

‘It’s great that Matt delivered “Speak the speech” straight at you, because it’s quite a lesson in oratory. . .’

‘Yes, indeed, there were a few tips I could take from that,’ he conceded.

‘Well, let’s face it, you certainly need them,’ I deadpanned.

There was a spilt-second of glint in his eye, a flash of ‘who the hell is this guy?’, and then a big laugh. Whatever admiration we felt – off the scale already – flipped into overdrive. The President could take a tease.

* * *

These words, Hamlet’s celebrated advice to the Players, delivered before they perform his lamentable play, are, of course, lessons in acting rather than oratory. They are the prayer offered up by every playwright on the eve of each first night since. They can be brutally compressed into ‘Oh, please, stop acting and just say the fucking lines.’ Ever since first spoken on the Globe stage by Richard Burbage in 1601, they have been the ultimate rule book, which generation after generation of actors since, have done their level best to ignore. These words imprinted on their minds, they have walked off in the opposite direction and carried on mouthing, sawing, whirlwinding, o’erstepping and overdoing as if their lives depended on it. People treat these injunctions as if they were specific to the sins of Elizabethan actors. They are not; they are a perennial. Rehearsals for the last four centuries have often been simply a matter of returning and returning to their wisdom.

At the heart of the speech is a cri de coeur for respect for the ‘modesty of nature’. The world is not full of people trembling or gnashing their teeth; it is full of people being. Nor of people muttering and mumbling either, sitting on the back foot and undercutting the energy of others. It is naturalness that is wanted – the same apportioned and appropriate energy we give to life is what we want to see on stage. Holding ‘the mirror up to nature’ is often quoted as if it means being studiedly contemporary, reporting on the world and trying to emulate what newspapers do; it is not. It is about being judicious and true in the playing of people and relationships; it is about being unforced and unaffected in the speaking of language. If that is played true to humans in the world, the form and pressure of the time will naturally make itself felt.

How do you create a rehearsal room so these things can happen? First, you make the room sharp: not clever, not necessarily wise, but certainly sharp. A room that is dull of wit will lead to a dull show. The wit, the insight, the spark of thought and imagination that is in the room will appear on the stage. This does not mean casting people who have university degrees. Nothing wrong with them, but they are not a necessity. It means casting people with emotional intelligence, with street-smart wit, and with an understanding of how language works in the space between people. Fill a room up with smart people and the play gets smart. Fill it with dullards – even if they’ve all got firsts from top universities – and you’re stuffed.

Before anything else, you read the play, sit round a table and make sure of one thing: that everyone understands every single word of each scene they are in. There is nothing more depressing than a stage of actors who have no idea what is coming out of other people’s mouths, nor even sometimes their own. This happens not infrequently. The earliest stage of rehearsals is the moment to sort this out. As you go through the play, no one is allowed to say the overall meaning of this, or the gist of that; you precisely drill down on every line, every phrase and every word, and make sure they know its exact meaning. If we are to have any theatre of meaning, we do not need to learn how to mime bottles into babies, how to monocycle, or how to scream and shout; we need to be precise and clear about language. Language is what is remarkable about us, language is what makes us and our world, not our ability to wave our arms around in the air. Dancing is a joy, singing takes us to places we could not otherwise reach, but language and being human are an intertwined genetic code creating us and our world. When we start hearing that theatre is not about language, we are often dealing with people who secretly hate it.

To keep the room sharp, there are a few rules. First, everyone is allowed to be a fool, and no question is too stupid. If something is mysterious or unknown, no one should be frightened to admit it. We all have black holes of ignorance, and we should be open about them. But just as important, everyone should be allowed to be smart. No one should be frightened of being informative and generous with knowledge. We are plagued in our contemporary theatre with a fetishising of childishness and simplicity, a worshipping of ignorance. If someone has something of interest or value to say, all should want to hear it. Most important of all, the room needs to be relaxed, and not proud. It always helps if you have a few people who have worked together before, and their relaxed manner with each other can help others worry less about being formal. If I can call one of my old colleagues something unspeakably rude on day one, it usually relaxes the air. If they can call me the same, even better. You want a room to be kind, and to be respectful of each other’s feelings, but never, never formal.

The moment when people get up from the table can be awkward. There is no solution beyond getting on with it. If the room has the right atmosphere, and if everyone feels free to try stuff out, to make mistakes and be brave, then the awkwardness passes. Making the room feel right is axiomatic. People have to allow each other space to be human and honest and foolish. Many things can help with this: a few daft stories to start the day, an attentiveness to listening, a little clowning about. Nothing relaxes the air more than laughter, and a room full of laughter is a healthy room. Tears should be able to flow freely but not indulgently. And a room needs a powerful communal bullshit detector. This starts with how people treat each other, and extends out into the work. If people start acting untruthfully, or phonily, or ostentatiously, you want the room rather than the director to let them know that it is wrong.

There was a unique technical problem with rehearsing this Hamlet. It ended up making it one of the most exciting times I have spent in a rehearsal room.

Our challenge was to rehearse not a team but a squad. To ensure that we always had cover, we had created a system where everyone was learning two, three, four, five, six or seven parts. This was in the full expectation that not everyone would last the full two years (it is still impossible to imagine the same sixteen people that left returned). We had two people to play Hamlet at the start (three by the end), three Ophelias, three Gertrudes, three Claudiuses, three Poloniuses, and by the conclusion of the tour six people who could play Horatio. We could do the play with eight, nine, ten, eleven or twelve actors. We set this up to provide cover and to spread the load of playing, and we soon realised it would be another way of keeping the play fresh. Not only would every venue be new, but also the combination of roles would surprise. In the first year of performance, the company only performed the same combination twice.

We created a carousel system, where we would rehearse a scene with one group of people, then at the end of one iteration, ask one actor to step out to be replaced by another; at the end of the next, a different actor would step out and be replaced, and so on. The scene would spin around the room, and people would jump on and off the bobbing horses. From the first, I said that everyone should be generous and selfish. If they saw someone making a choice on a line or thought that they liked, they should steal it; if they did something new, they should be prepared to give it away. Similarly, if they wanted to do something different, everyone working with them should accommodate it. The broad structure, clean and simple and driven by storytelling, was set by its directors; the details were very much up to the cast.

The work in the room became a fertile mix of imaginative commitment and critical judgement. In the moment they were in the scene, they were in it, alive to its feelings and imaginatively responding to its possibilities. The moment they were out, they were watching the same scene and assessing the truth or life of what their colleagues offered up. There were drawbacks: it was hard for the actors to gain the sheer grinding consistency which ceaseless repetition works into their bones. But the rewards were immense: it gave them an in-depth knowledge of the whole play, it gave them a mature perspective on what they were doing, and it created an atmosphere of parity and of generosity which made them a team. No one was leading the show, everyone was sharing, and all had to look out for each other. This set them up for the challenges ahead. It was also exhilarating to watch. Always the same, and always different, just as every rehearsal should be.

* * *

What sort of production was it to be? Hamlet is one of the most misconceived plays in performance history, its original intentions now obscured by the barnacles of 400 years of theory and presumption. How do you clean off all these misconceptions and try to return it to its original colours? When the Sistine Chapel was cleaned and revealed its primary freshness, many were upset that those nice faded colours, saturated in the smoke and dirt of history, had been lost. They found the renewed work disturbingly vibrant. Part of the Globe’s remit was to reveal Shakespeare’s plays with their original vitality, and for that it was always running into the conservatism of those who like a screen of history between themselves and a classic – just as they liked the musty grime on the Sistine Chapel.

The best way to avoid a misconception is to have no conception at all. There is such a glut of ideas about how to present particular plays, it is sometimes most radical to have no idea. This is hard for many to negotiate, since without a concept, or an argument, they have nothing to talk of afterwards but the play itself, a nudity which they find embarrassing to look at. Our job at the Globe was always to tell the story cleanly, to judge the relationships impartially, and to let the language do the work. To keep true to the modesty of nature. This approach requires oceans of technique and discipline and rigour, where most conceptual work requires puddles. Yet because the work is invisible – it chooses to be – most do not notice it. We ask hard questions about the relationships, about the world and about the language, and then we work our thoughts in discreetly, always ensuring that story and language is bright and clear.

Before becoming technical about language and the verse, it is vital to remember that this is a series of scenes that present life. Without dipping into naturalism, it is important to keep in front of us Shakespeare’s particular realism. This is not a realism based on scenery, on sofas or drinks cabinets or kitchen sinks. It is a realism based on actors coming out and establishing their own reality. They believe that this is a cold rampart of a castle in Denmark, so we can believe it too. The actor playing Hamlet has to believe he is Hamlet so we can join him in the illusion. It is bare-bones realism and has to be presented with absolute conviction. With nothing to back you up, you have to look behind you and say ‘this is a castle’, and look out beyond the audience and say ‘that is Norway’, and believe that both are true. If you can do that, and grind the everyday truth of it into yourself, you can convince an audience. Fingunt simul creduntque, said Tacitus – as soon as they imagine, they believe. This is the bedrock of Shakespeare’s theatre – believe it, say it, and with the participation of the audience it starts to come true.

The advantage here is that the scenes are written with a deft but tungsten-strength verismo. Whether it is that first scene on the battlements with its quick jerky questions and answers; or the torrid swirls of give and take between mother and son in the closet scene; or the awkwardness of the reluctant cleric officiating over Ophelia’s funeral; or the strained goodwill of the Players as they are told how to act by an amateur – in each of these moments and others, Shakespeare sketches a couple of quick lines and there is life: this is his great art. These moments are mysterious and unknowable as life is: they have all its meandering rhythms and peculiar upbeats. Like a breathing still life or an artful photograph, these scenes have that sense of life contained, of impermanence briefly held. This requires truthful acting, alive to each moment as it comes, not trying to force it into a scheme. Actors can be eager for patterns to help decipher plays, and audiences as well. It takes discipline to resist the inclination to fall into the seductive falsehood of patterns, and to stay true to the wonderful inconsequentiality of life. But when every detail is animated, then we start to warrant that life – not speeches, or ideas, or patterns – is at the heart of the mystery of each play.

Our actors were up for this, and relished the responsibility. The extra challenge was not just embodying the feeling of the scene, but expressing it with nothing to help as a visual signifier. Without scenery, their bodies had to do rampart, or throne room, or closet, or graveyard. Each of them expressed with a different physical energy: Ladi was a boxer briefly, and has some of that watchfulness; Rawiri is all buffo comedy and prop-forward, bull-like energy; Miranda has a proscenium grace; Jen is a slip of a thing and looks like a delicate blossom. It was impossible to force them all to be the same, or to adopt a unified movement scheme, without bleeding the democracy and humanity out of the event. Each in their own way learnt how to occupy the empty space and fill it with their own imagination. And thus, with theatre’s natural complicity, ours.

As well as the life of a play, it is important to seek out its wit. This is not a matter of looking for laughs; it is finding the irony and the comic sense of each particular play and releasing it. When you get to know a new friend, you spend a little time winkling out their humour, finding out what sparks the twinkle in their eye (if you find nothing, then walk away); in the same way, you look for what curls the smile of a play. There was not far to look with Hamlet. No clown appears until the arrival of the Gravediggers, but up to that point an abundance of humour has spilt from the Prince himself. To a degree, he is the fool who is missing from his own play.

His very first line, ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’, is a thousand things, but it is also a serviceable gag. It is clear from his first engagements with Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that their friendships are based on sparring wit and competitive funnies. Hamlet himself is a bright generous wit, throwaway pearls spilling out of him. Compare him with any of the other major tragic figures. A night of Live at the Apollo with a bill of Lear, Othello, Anthony, Coriolanus and Macbeth would be big on heckles and short on laughs. But Hamlet could hold his own. Especially if his wit is played as giveaway and involuntary as it should be. If it settles into mordancy or sarcasm, then you’ve got someone telling you he’s the most intelligent person in the room, and we can all go home.

Humour ripples through the play. Polonius is a comic creation whose speeches have a not-entirely-under-the-character’s-control Shavian irony. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern travel a darkly comic journey from two enthusiastic boobies on a free holiday, to the heart of a corroding state, and on to their eventual deaths. Hamlet gives some of the best comic advice ever delivered to the Players, so he is clearly not only fun in himself, but a student of comedy. The play within the play, or at least the lines that Hamlet has written with some clumsy moral lessons for his mother, are so eye-wateringly bad, their intention must be humorous.

When the clowns do arrive in the form of the Gravediggers, they have deliverable material and a deadpan vaudeville exchange with Hamlet worthy of a partnership that has worked long years round the provinces. When Hamlet is brought face to face with death, it is with the skull of a comedian. It is the death of laughter that he registers as the most switching irony:

Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now. . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

It is a vivid and abiding image – a boy shrieking with laughter charging around on the back of a clown. It is a laughter that has gone now, but we know it was once there.

Even after this episode, the humour has not gone from the play, since right at the death Shakespeare throws on the campest and most ludicrous colour in the play, the flamboyant and futile Osric. This is not an inexorable tonal drift towards death; this is a sudden firework display of character comedy. At exactly the wrong moment. Shakespeare doesn’t just pull the rug of expectation away, he exposes the bottomless pit beneath it – the Chekhovian existential pit that always opens up when you get stuck with a weapons-grade bore.

Observing these things in rehearsal, delighting in the comic invention and observation the actors brought to the room, was not playing it for laughs, it was observing what is there, and allowing it to breathe. It oxygenated the room and allowed us to understand more of the play. It released the relationships and hence some of the pain at its centre. It ran counter to an imposed orthodoxy about how tragedies should be remorselessly tragic, but the Globe, I’m glad to say, had always bucked that orthodoxy. Happily, it had always been at war with all that Victorian crapola about suffering being allied to virtue, seriousness being good for you, and joy bad.

A year or so later, I was completely lost in Addis Ababa, a town of swirling complexity which defies conventional map-reading. I ended up walking along a motorway for a while, then speared off into what I took to be a park. Somehow I found myself in the presidential compound. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by dogs and men with guns, all shouting and barking with enthusiasm at the shambling foreigner. They saw me off. The compound, a sprawl of manicured acres, sat high on a hill looking out over a wide vista of tin slums, wooden sheds and half-built/half-broken blocks. Starving figures sat propped against the railings on the other side of the road. There was something obscene and desperate about the contrast. ‘You have to laugh,’ I thought aimlessly to myself, a bit of Somerset wisdom which has never left me. Just as I thought it, I looked up to see a roadside billboard garishly advertising ‘The First Indigenous Laughter School in Africa’. It was presided over by the World Laughter Master, Belachew Girma, a man who has broken all known records for continuous laughter. Research revealed that he holds regular classes to teach people how to laugh continuously for hours on end. Ethiopia’s very own Yorrick. I have thought of him every time since, whenever I encounter the po-faced sternness of those who say that tragedies must be tragedies and laughter can never walk through them.

The attitude is not just about laughter; it is more about spirit. Listen to the energy in that ‘Speak the speech’ exhortation. This is not a moany boy; it is an exhilarated fire of breathless anticipation falling out of a hot-wired brain. It is an instruction for acting generally, but also for this play in particular. It is a call for wit and brio – the French cavalry cry of ‘À l’attaque!’ In a 1960’s arts programme, an unashamedly old-fashioned bit of television, Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole discuss Hamlet, quaffing whisky and chain-smoking cigarettes with sixties cool. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the principal fact about Hamlet is that he is a ‘genius’. Where Othello’s central characteristic is that he is a black man in a white man’s world, King Lear’s that he is a tyrant and a bad father, Anthony’s an old soldier, Hamlet’s is that he is a bona fide genius. A Mozartian prodigy of thought and feeling, out of step with his own world, who cannot help spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, but a true one, and a significant instruction for the whole play.

Central to the playing is the way we handle the verse. Much has been written, much spoken and much argued over in relation to how best to treat Shakespeare’s verse. On the one hand there are the iambic fundamentalists, who believe passionately that every foot (two syllables) should be stressed the same way with a clean de-dum stress on the second syllable at all times, and that the end of every line should be given a light pause. At the other end of the spectrum are those who don’t give a toss, and who mutter, shout and maul the verse in any way they like. Both are criminal, the latter deserving of a longer sentence. In the middle is our resident guru at the Globe, Giles Block, who believes that the stresses are flexible, that there is a form in the verse, and that observing that form, and its hidden music, is the best way to understand the intentions behind the thought.

A year later, and a long way from the Globe, I was sitting in a nomadic tent in Hargeisa, being taught the many forms of Somali verse. The highest literary poetry, as exemplified by their leading poet Hadrawi, is called Gabri, with a sophisticated metrical system and definite rules of scansion. There is another form for warriors on horses, a form that follows the movement of the horse; a poetry for putting up a house; one for women for weaving; another for taking camels to water; even a specific form for milking goats. Each form you can recite for hours on end to entertain and entrance yourself while you sink into the rhythm of words and work together. Some experts say of Shakespeare’s iambic verse that it relates to footfall, and to our natural pace of walking; some that it has an intimate relationship with the heartbeat; and others with the pace at which we breathe. Whichever, what is plainly apparent, and made clear in the variety of Somali forms, is that there is a physiological relationship between verse and our bodies. It does not live only in our heads; it relates to how we move and how we live.

There are Somali forms for courtship, where potential lovers meet and recite to each other. They compete with rival lovers for who is the best within that verse form. They test companionship of soul and sex with potential partners through how well rhythms and inventiveness commingle. It was thrilling to hear these examples from a culture that is still genuinely oral, just as it was in Shakespeare’s day. President Obama himself talked of the similarities between Shakespeare and rap, and how the new Broadway hit Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda is Shakespearean in its verbal inventiveness and in its scope. Rap is a great indicator for Shakespeare in the freedom it affords. It has a matrix of musical rules, which are there not to inhibit, but to release. Rhyming in rap, as in Shakespeare, is there not to make people freeze, but to delight in language and its possibilities.

As far as possible, I remain a verse agnostic, not adhering to any particular system. What matters is that there is clarity and wholeness in the saying of the verse. That the energy is the sound of something flying swift and bright past you, fast as a kingfisher on a bright summer’s day, that makes you want to follow it, join it and buckle yourself to it. The complexity in the language is something to be relished – it is forged from brightness and excitement.

Actors get that or they don’t. Some can hear the pitch and the music of a play, almost as if they have a mystic sense, some clue to the red shift in the life of the writer which occasioned the particular music of the play. As if they can hear that event, whatever it was, and understand how energy is still rippling out from it. It is impossible to teach; it is something innate in the stomach of the actor. They can hear it from each other and imitate it as they would learn a song, but it can’t be taught. John Dougall, whom I have worked with often, is an actor of this sort. I have usually cast him in the early scenes of a play, so that throughout rehearsals, at the read-through, when people first stand up, when they first do runs, at the dress and on the first night, he has hit the right groove and, like a tuning fork, set a tone and a pitch for others to follow.

I have a physical allergy to attending workshops of any kind, and almost go into anaphylactic shock at the prospect of running one. However, about halfway through the tour, I was bullied into doing one in Ethiopia at their National Theatre. I sat in a shabby room with broken windows with a group of actors, someone banging together wooden scaffolding outside and someone else plaiting together strings of red onions in a corner. The actors told me of their theatre, its history and traditions. I asked them to recite a little of their traditional verse. It was a joy to hear, exhaling a coffee richness in their mouths. The mode of delivery was one of separation from self and from each other. They went outside themselves to recite, looking at the floor or above people’s heads. In the time available there was little to do, but they wanted to speak some Shakespeare, and they wanted to speak it in English. I gave them the briefest of talks on the iambic rhythm, and then we went through just two lines: ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer. . .’

It was hard at first to get them to slough off the effect of having watched too many movies, and they clung to a casual modern idiom. I encouraged them not to force individual words too hard, nor to run words together with an affected casualness, but to find the gently propulsive forward-walking rhythm of each thought, and to express it from their mouths into the room. To observe and relish that steady path into a thought. Their thrill at handling the language was immediate, and the simplicity of those essential six syllables translated swiftly. I encouraged them to say it looking into each other’s eyes, and to enjoy the bold ease of that. Again there were inhibitions. If you are not looking directly at someone, it is acting; if you are, it can feel like lying. They got over the other side of this and enjoyed the direct address, the clear engagement and the simple talking. There was a warm, happy energy in the room, and I noticed for the first time what lurks within the iambic rhythm – a hidden hope. As each gentle upturned stress occurred and passed from person to person, it pulsed a discreet energy into the speaker and listener, and beyond into the room. It gave a lift. I left the room in Addis Ababa with a better understanding of the nature of verse than I had achieved before. It is talking with invention, and with energy, and with a steady hope.

Just as each actor found their own way to make the scenes come alive, so they arrived at their own understanding of how to handle the verse. The seniors Keith, John and Miranda all had long years of Shakespeare with the RSC and others under their belts. The music was safely contained within them, so they could modulate delicately and freely within that music. Rawiri had much experience too, but a more declaratory style, which, together with his openness of face and heart, has a massive charm. Most of the young ones were finely tuned drama-school graduates who had an appetite for Shakespeare which was its own enchantment. There was a spectrum within their approach: Tommy has an easy conversational naturalness; Phoebe began as presenting a little more; Jen tended to the demure and the shy, and being the least experienced with the verse had the most to learn. But like any proper team of actors they lifted each other up. They watched each other and stole a little of this from him and copied a little of that from her. The last thing we wanted was an absolute consistency. A group of actors is not supposed to be a faceless unit; it is supposed to be a team of individuals, and by the end of rehearsals (thank the lord), a squad is what we had.

They needed to be. The conditions in which they made the play work over the next two years would have torn a fragile group to shreds and patches. I watched it in front of 200 ambassadors sitting at large desks in the UN; in front of a reluctant audience in Djibouti, with the waves of the Red Sea crashing loudly behind; to 2,000 restless students in an acoustic horror house in Phnom Penh; in a hotel ballroom in Hargeisa; in a tin shed in a Syrian refugee camp; and in a Roman amphitheatre in Amman. Everywhere they went, no matter the conditions, they tried to make the play come to life in front of whoever was watching. There were more extraordinary places I missed: 4,000 people crammed into a square outside a cathedral in Mérida, Yucatán; a roundabout in the rain in Bucharest; a bar in a Cameroon refugee camp; in a rock stadium before the crashing Pacific in Chile. Wherever they were, however impossible the conditions, or however speedy the set-up, they had each other, and they had the gentle support of each line of verse, its embedded rhythm tenderly placing a supporting palm on the base of their spines, the place where fear and exhaustion resides, and with the lightest touch it kept them upright and somehow kept them moving forward, into the story and towards the audience.

At one of the most difficult moments of the journey – one actor very ill, another about to lose a close relation, another nursing a great friend towards a young death, a stage manager having lost his mother-in-law, Paris having just suffered the Bataclan massacre which made everyone nervous about home, and with everyone blitzed by exhaustion – the tour for a moment looked threadbare and fragile. Everyone was finding ways of coping, but it was clear that we were not flying on full tanks. I wrote to them:

These are tough times. The play can help, your astonishing generosity to each other can help, the knowledge that you are doing something very special can help, the fact that beside all these personal heartbutts, and these more public tragedies, a lot of people are investing hope in what you are doing, that can help as well, but above all. . .

Be kind to each other, and keep putting one foot in front of another.

That is what Shakespeare’s plays teach us to do.