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5

MADNESS IN MEXICO CITY

HAMLET How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself,

As I perchance hereafter shall think meet

To put an antic disposition on. . .

Act 1, Scene 5

‘DID YOU HAVE THE CHICKEN? Did you eat the chicken? OK, which of us had the chicken?’

Like refugees from a 1970s disaster movie, we quiz each other earnestly. We are an hour away from the start of our second show in Mexico City, and the company is crumbling like a castle under bombardment. Our designer, Jonathan, went down first, stricken by an all-possessing fever, with a sideline in comprehensive self-evacuation. He had struggled into our technical rehearsal the day before and lain prone for a couple of hours, raising his head feebly a few times before banging it heavily back down on the bench. He is now safe in his bedroom high above the Zócalo, the city’s huge, heaving central square, and occasionally drags himself to the window to wave to us. Malu, one of the show’s producers, lies flattened in the same hotel with a drip in her arm, the needle of which I’d replaced myself earlier, in the absence of anyone vaguely medical.

You can do a show without designers and producers; it is harder to bring one off without actors. With only an hour to go, Tommy, who is playing Horatio, has announced that he will not be appearing. He disappeared the night before, hasn’t been seen since, and point-blank refuses to open his door. Noises have been erupting from his room, and they don’t sound healthy. A long queue is already snaking around the makeshift theatre our hosts, the National Theatre of Mexico, have thrown up for us, and we are an actor down. The whole company has that febrile uncertainty that precedes a hefty burst of illness, that distant roar you sense within your body before the tsunami hits. Two nights ago, we had all sat together for a company meal high above the same square, eating the Mexican food, living the Mexican dream, and congratulating ourselves and each other for our all-round Mexican chillaxness. Now we are paying for it. Well, everyone who had the chicken is.

I improvise a quick plan and instruct the company, all too aquiver with anxiety to object. We will deal with the absence of Horatio by skipping the scenes in which he appears. At these moments, I will come on stage with a microphone and tell the missing bits of plot. The tide of fever is approaching fast, and I am starting to get a little messianic. ‘Let’s revive the old oral tradition,’ I cry. ‘Storytelling. Wey hey!’

‘You don’t speak Spanish,’ someone objects. I look at them cussedly for being so all-round negative and unhelpful, then concede. ‘Good point. I will bring this woman with me! She will translate!’ I point at one of our Mexican production managers, whom I heard speaking reasonably good English earlier, and who is, well, close to hand. There are many other, much better, English speakers around, but they are not standing right next to me and thus disqualify themselves. My chosen translator looks terrified, never having been on stage before. The company look less than reassured.

The Zócalo is bang in the centre of Mexico City, and is the crucible that distils the essence of the whole diverse, confused and thrilling city. Largely consisting of seventeenth-century Spanish buildings, it has a grandiose splendour to outdo any European capital. But it’s all a little wonky. The great Baroque monstrosity of a cathedral is slowly sinking down into the swampy marshland upon which the city floats. Almost right beside it is the freshly excavated Aztec pyramid of the Templo Mayor. The two religious edifices look like 400-year-old boxers, slugging it out for supremacy, the Christian church buckling at the knees and slowly sinking as the old Aztec temple rears triumphant from the ground.

When our Mexican hosts told us they were going to make a temporary theatre for us in the Zócalo after the style of an old Spanish corral courtyard theatre, we were thrilled – a great statement about public theatre to make in such a high-profile spot. It was only when we arrived at the stylish construction they had made out of scaffolding and cloth that we realised there was a fundamental problem: noise. The Zócalo is the noisiest place on earth. Four lanes of traffic circle the square, each driver feeling an irresistible compulsion to beep his horn as frequently as possible; every day sees a new political gathering at which compañeros proclaim they will fight to the death for their cause through speakers that can be heard in Honduras; each shop boasts its own sound system loudly touting the virtues of its wares; and in the early evening, everyone gathered in the square decides to blow a whistle, simply because they can. At any time of year, it would not be a great place to play Hamlet in an open-air venue. When our hosts announced there would be rock concerts every evening as well, we almost turned around and went home.

We decided to do the first show with microphones. We discussed the relative benefits of float mics, head mics and body mics, eventually erring on the side of the latter. Not a good move. These mics had a very limited field from which they could pick up sound, so when heads swung back and forth in the throes of articulation, the sound ebbed and flowed dramatically, deafening one moment – ‘TO BE, OR. . .’ – then an absent whisper – ‘. . . not to be’ – then suddenly returning to top volume again – ‘that is the QUESTION’. Worse, with the mics secreted within the heavy cloth of the company’s costumes, every time they embraced each other they sounded like a bunch of grizzly bears enjoying a brutal orgy. Motivated by some group instinct for self-destruction, they all started hugging each other at every opportunity, thereby punctuating the show with regular outbreaks of ursine group sex. Worst, Miranda, who was playing Gertrude, was filled with Iberian duende and decided to strike her own chest whenever overcome with emotion. Which was often. Every time she did so, she hit her microphone and a minor thunderclap filled the auditorium. It was one of the most emphatic performances I have seen. A packed house had the decency not to laugh or throw things.

That was the first night. This is the second and, amazingly, it promises to be even more disastrous. The sun is lowering a great anvil of heat over the city, the noise level is high and rising (tonight we’ve opted for float mics), and the actors are forming urgent queues for the two plastic Portaloos backstage. Unfortunately, the long and sweetly excited line of audience members that circles the theatre runs alongside the queues for the loos, separated only by a low fence. It’s difficult for any performer to maintain the necessary mystique while banging on a Portaloo demanding that the incumbent gets the fuck on with it.

Nevertheless, the usual glorious surge of optimism that prefaces every performance the world over, from primary-school nativity play to the glitziest opera, kicks in just as the show is about to begin. We walk out with a residual thin gleam of hope that all will be well. Madness. I stand there, microphone in hand, my appointed translator beside me. The outer edges of fever have arrived – colours are acquiring a lurid neon glow, and connections are becoming more magical than logical. My translator looks like she wants to cry.

‘Good evening,’ I say. ‘Welcome to the Globe tour of Hamlet.’

Confident translation follows and a roar of joy erupts. This is great, I think. I explain that we are an actor down, but that the show must go on. The translation elicits sympathy and support from the audience. I explain that I will be appearing to bridge the missing bits with storytelling, and everyone seems ready to relish the game. This is going to be great, I tell myself. So I start:

‘It was a cold, dark night in Denmark. . .’

Not bad, I think, and turn to the acting company arrayed behind me while the words are being translated, expecting looks of approval. Claudius’s face has ‘What in the name of fuckity fuck are you doing?’ written all over it.

This throws me slightly, but I press on.

‘And up high on the battlements. . .’

‘Qué?’ my translator mutters.

‘Up high on the battlements,’ I repeat forcefully.

‘Qué? What is bateelmence?’

‘Battlements. You know.’ My febrile confusion is starting to max out. ‘Battlements, edges of the castle, high edges of the castle.’

‘Qué? High edges of the castle?’

‘Yes, top bits, high margins of castle, where people walk about. . .’

All this is being played out amplified in front of 600 now slightly confused audience members, eager to see the famous Globe theatre perform Shakespeare. I look despairingly at the audience, who start to volunteer suggestions for what battlements might be in Mexican Spanish. I look back at the company, who are all wearing the rictus grins of the crew who know the captain is sinking the ship but can’t admit it to the passengers. We eventually reach a consensus on the translation plebiscite with the audience, and I do the rest of my storytelling in the simplest English I can muster. I retreat from the stage throwing a ‘best of luck’ look at the company.

The rest of the evening is a matter of precision timing, as the company, all now succumbing to convulsions, try to judge whether they will be able to get in and out of a scene in time to satisfy their greater needs in the khazi. Then they have to calculate whether they will be able to get in and out of the toilet in time to attend to stage business. These are difficult calculations, with only two conveniences available. Actors are now starting to throw up as well, so buckets are brought ever closer to the stage to facilitate a quick feinted exit, a deft hurl, and then a return to the stage without missing a beat. Organisers, promoters and producers, including myself, are wandering around with that hopeless look of active concern assumed by those in impotent authority presiding over an unavoidable catastrophe.

As the venerable storyteller, my interruptions are becoming less and less frequent as my head starts to spin. And considerably less detailed. ‘Someone tells Hamlet about an army’ is my precis of the part of the Captain; ‘Horatio says that Hamlet has come back’, my pithy summation of the Fourth Act narrative pivot. The actors are possessed by a similar spirit of self-preserving censorship, excising chunks from scenes just so they can get to the end.

It is all a little too much: the heat crushing us in its vice-like grip, the panic and chaos backstage, the excitement of the crowd still inexplicably beaming towards us, the increasing eccentricity of the make-believe, the capacity of the Zócalo to transform its own noise and chaos into essence of rage and wildness, the fact that around us Mexico City is decked out in full Day of the Dead splendour. Everything is starting to melt: the swags of plastic sheeting into the scaffolding, the actors into the audience, English into Mexican, the play into reality, the speeches into the noise that fights them, all blurring into the dark-blue air that weighs heavily on the city – one big Mexican soup, its ingredients bubbling away and rearranging themselves into something strange and new.

* * *

Much as the disorienting, deliquescent evening is a product of particular circumstances, it is also a product of the play itself. Hamlet takes place in queasy mental territory, the tectonic plates of sanity shifting from the first scene. Bedlam itself was a magnetic presence in Shakespeare’s world, sitting just outside the walls of the City of London, and drawing audiences to gawp at the behaviour of its patients. Many playwrights were lured by the spontaneous theatricality of the place, by its naked presentation of mental fragility, and the contingent nature of identity. The language of madness, set alongside the language of what purports to be sanity, undermines the security of an objective truth or value in words. Language, which can provide comfort as the source of healing, can also prove perilous as the gatekeeper to confusion. It can become the primary sponsor of madness, its endless strata and spirals driving both speakers and listeners from their senses.

Shakespeare dealt with madness more discreetly, and yet more profoundly, than his colleagues. In Othello, we see the collapse of a fortressed identity as the hero is undermined by Iago’s facility with nuance and suggestion. In King Lear, we get a spectrum of different forms of madness: Edgar’s feigned lunacy, with its linguistic bravura; the Fool’s osmotic relationship with insanity, the thin membrane between sense and nonsense allowing just enough of the latter to pass into the former; and in Lear himself – Shakespeare’s most pathetic demonstration of the consequences of the mind’s slippage – memory, language, imagination, perception and passion are all at war with each other on a windswept battlefield devoid of familiar landmarks.