Hamlet
| Affiliation: | a Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK |
David Tennant played the title role in Gregoty Doran's production of Hamlet at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon from 24th July to 15th November 2008 and for some performances at the Novello Theatre, London in December to January 2008-9. In this interview Tennant discusses the process of production from casting to performance - his initial thoughts on the part, rehearsal preparation, character interpretation and realization. Situating Doran's production within the performance history of the play, Tennant discusses the reasons behind their modern-dress interpretation and the relevance of the play to a twenty-first century audience.
Abigail Rokison: What was the process by which you came to be playing Hamlet?
David Tennant: Two things sort of happened at once. I, for many years, have known Tara Hull who produces for the RSC. I saw her socially, and I'd been doing TV a lot, and the conversation turned to what I might do next, and I said, “What I would really love to do is to go back and do a couple of shows at the RSC; in an ideal world I suppose I would do Hamlet and either Berowne or Benedick.” This was a social conversation that she then mentioned at some RSC producers' meeting, at pretty much the same time that Greg Doran was thinking that it might be an idea to do Hamlet. He also tells the story - I don't know how apocryphal it is, but it's a good story - that when I did the BBC Who Do You Think You Are? show, and went to the Isle of Mull, tracing my ancestors, I went to a small church where they were having some renovation done and had taken up the floorboards and discovered some skulls, and I picked a skull up and looked at it, and Greg claims that when he saw me do that he thought - “Ah, he's auditioning for Hamlet, what a good idea.” So I'm not sure in what order the two events happened, but there was a meeting of the moons. Greg called me up and said, “What do you think?”, and at that time I didn't know exactly what I was doing in terms of working on Dr Who. But then the production schedule for Dr Who presented itself in such a way that there was going to be this gap, so I went to Greg and said, “This might be a possibility.” It was going to be quite tight with the two shows - getting them up and running and getting them to London - so there was a bit of to- and fro-ing and talking about how things might work out. But Greg had some strong ideas already. The first time we met he said, “Patrick Stewart's desperate to play Claudius so it would be good if we could work that in.”
AR: You'd worked with Greg before hadn't you?
DT: Yes, years ago on a double bill of The Real Inspector Hound and Black Comedy in the West End, but never on Shakespeare, which is his great love. So I knew Greg and liked him very much and knew that Shakespeare was something that he had a huge talent and passion for, and I wanted to work at the RSC again. Lots of things just slotted into place, and when the schedules tied in and it presented itself I thought that I really couldn't resist any longer. And then, of course, it goes from something that you have just talked about to something you have to do.
AR: What were your feelings about the part, and indeed the play, before you began rehearsals? I remember you saying that you were terrified.
DT: Yes, I was terrified. But the terror is part of what makes it such an attractive prospect, because it's Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is where you would want to play Hamlet if you're going to do it. That's exciting, but it's also immediately terrifying because it sets you against all those people who have done it there before. Greg loves to talk about the unbroken line of Hamlet performances that have been passed down through the generations. It's thrilling to think that you are a part of this, but at the same time, it only serves to make you more scared.
AR: Were there any performances that you had seen that had particularly stuck in your mind?
DT: Yes. I think that the first time I saw the play performed on stage was Mark Rylance in the RSC's production of 1989. I'd seen it at school on video when we studied it for Higher [Higher Grade, exams taken by schoolchildren in Scotland around the age of 15-16], but I'd never seen it on stage before. That was such an extraordinary performance. I remember seeing it and realizing that Shakespeare could be modern and conversational and anarchic and inspirational in a way that it hadn't been for me up until that moment. So that performance was inspiring and intimidating in equal measure. I have, of course, seen lots of performances since then, all of which have had something about them. That is the one mitigating factor I think, that it is the sort of part that although you connect more with some performances than others, there is always something about it. To an extent, although it's a huge test it is also pretty much actor-proof. Whatever you throw at it will illuminate something.
AR: Mark Rylance's Hamlet has been talked about as the genuinely mad Hamlet, Jonathan Pryce's was the possessed Hamlet, David Warner's was the student prince. Is there any pressure to make your mark as a particular type of Hamlet?
DT: It's funny. Although people talk about Mark Rylance's Hamlet in those terms, that's not how I remember it. I suppose there is a temptation, and you have to guard against finding yourself trying to define your version, to look for the gimmick - or worse for the critics' strap-line - when you're rehearsing. As soon as you get self-consciously idiosyncratic, you might as well go home. I'm sure that Mark Rylance wasn't in rehearsals thinking, “I'm going to do the mad Hamlet.” I'm sure that he just responded to the play as he went along. Having seen it and not read about it - which I think is interesting because performances become defined by what is written down about them - having seen that production twice because it meant a lot to me, I would never describe it as the “mad” Hamlet. For me he was terribly real - not that madness isn't real - but he was terribly connected, and the language made beautiful sense and was very conversational in many ways. If anything, he didn't carry his princeliness with him; he showed Hamlet to be a normal, flawed human being.
AR: Having decided to take on the part, what preparation did you do in advance of rehearsals?
DT: Short of reading the play, I didn't do much. I did the obvious thing of going through the text trying to make sure that I understood what it all meant, making sense of any archaic words. Beyond that I tried not to do too much. There is so much that you can read, but I didn't want to start reading about how other people had done it and the choices that they had made, partly because I knew that that is what Greg does - Greg reads every performance history and every anecdotal report on every production that has ever been, and that informs and helps him I think - but I didn't want to be continually setting myself against what had gone before. The role should exist as something that is being performed as if for the first time or it's not relevant. I also wanted not to terrify myself with expectation, or confuse myself with notions of what had been judged in the past to be good or bad.
AR: You didn't learn any lines before rehearsals began?
DT: No I didn't. I started learning lines the first night after the first day of rehearsals and I gave myself a schedule to keep to, so that purely in practical terms I would know it all by the first night, but I didn't want to start learning lines before I started. As soon as you start learning lines, however much you strive against it, you make psychological decisions about how they link up.
AR: And then it is difficult to unlearn them.
DT: Absolutely. And that's not to say that things don't evolve or change through rehearsal and even during performance, but it is just inevitable that once you start committing things to memory your brain remembers them as part of an emotional journey. So I tried to wait until the last moment to learn them.
AR: How long was the rehearsal process and how was the time used?
DT: I think that we were about two weeks around the table at the start of rehearsals, going through the text line by line. We had a cut text to begin with. I think that Greg had cut around 25% of the lines.
AR: How long did it run at in the end?
DT: Three and a half hours, including the interval. I think that uncut it's about four and a half, isn't it?
AR: It depends which text you use.
DT: Quite, and indeed how you do it, of course. Greg was quite free with the texts as to where he took bits from.
AR: You moved act 3 scene 1 to its place in the First Quarto. Was that a decision made before rehearsals started?
DT: No, that wasn't done before rehearsals. That was a decision made quite far in. One of the glorious things about the RSC is that you get six or seven weeks of rehearsals. We were presented with the cut text, and we were encouraged to bring any more cuts, but not reinsertions, I think quite rightly because otherwise things can get out of control. Actors can love some little line that they found in the fourteenth quarto hidden under the settee and can make convincing defences about why it doesn't work for them if that line's not in. It did happen a couple of times, but I was up for streamlining it as much as possible. If I think back now, I think that he had probably cut about 20% and was looking to cut about 25% and things did come and go a bit. For the first two weeks you work around the table and Greg keeps you away from your own part. You're not allowed to comment on or read your own part. You work round the table with each person taking roles in turn and playing that character for a few pages. After they read out the line it is then discussed, interpreted and debated. It is quite a fastidious process, but totally invaluable. If you happen to be next when your part comes around then you miss that round, and as your lines are being discussed and interpreted by the table you're not allowed to comment. Some people try to break that rule. It can be quite frustrating if you get a room full of people agreeing that your line definitely means something particular, and you are thinking “It really doesn't!”, but you just have to sit on your hands and allow these other ideas to percolate, and sometimes an idea that you think you have can be challenged.
AR: Presumably this is also useful in creating a sense of ensemble.
DT: That's the fantastic thing as well. At the end of those two weeks, we read through the play in our own parts for the first time, and even in the white terror of that moment, speaking these lines out loud in front of people for the first time -. But even from within my own terror I remember thinking that it felt as though we all knew what we were talking about already and that we had a group ownership of the play. It goes without saying, I hope, that as you are working round the table like that there is absolutely no hierarchy. Someone who is playing Fourth Player has as much right to debate as the person playing Hamlet, or even the director. You've got such a range of experience around that table. Some people have been doing Shakespeare for fifty years, and others have never done it before in their lives, and this range of experience gives you a range of reactions to the text and an idea of how different audience members might receive it as well.
AR: It also seems to me to be important because there is a sense that at the RSC at the moment there is Michael Boyd's idea of the long-term ensemble (two or three years) with little or no hierarchy, being set slightly against the short-run productions with a couple of big names, and yet it sounds as though the process was as ensemble as it possibly could have been given that someone is playing the Fourth Player and someone else is playing Hamlet.
DT: I think that's right. Of course, that company did do three plays - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost - and many of the actors had already done A Midsummer Night's Dream, so it already felt like a company when I turned up. Myself, Patrick Stewart, Oliver Ford Davies and Penny Downie all showed up for Hamlet. Oliver and myself then went on to do Love's Labour's Lost and Nina Sosanya joined then. So 60% of the company were in three plays and about 80% of the company were in at least two. To an extent there was a hierarchy of casting within that, in that I was playing two quite major roles, some people were playing one larger role and one smaller. It is also about how you set the room out and what the process is. I would hope that everyone in Hamlet felt that the play belonged to them and that no one felt as if they were playing a supporting role to the production. That's certainly how rehearsals felt to me.
AR: So, you did a couple of weeks of working around the table, and then you had the read through. The RSC is known for having voice and textual classes. Was that all part of the rehearsal process?
DT: We were rehearsing in Stratford because Midsummer Night's Dream had already opened. A lot of the cast were rehearsing Hamlet during the day and then doing a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream at night. Being in Stratford we had the benefit of Lyn Darnley and Cis Berry. Cis was great. She comes and goes whenever she can. I saw a lot of Cis on Hamlet and Love's Labour's and it was just glorious. She was more involved in these two productions than any of the previous times I've been at the RSC. Lyn Darnley is just brilliant and because I hadn't been on stage for a while I did a session a day with Lyn. That sense of support helped to keep me vaguely calm. All those resources you have at the RSC are just invaluable.
AR: How did your conception of the character and his place in the play change during rehearsals? You say that you had tried not to do too much preliminary work.
DT: I tried to be as blank as possible at the beginning, although inevitably you do come with ideas. Even if you read a play once you have preconceptions and notions about it. It's hard to be specific about things, because things are so gradual, and also talking about it now at the end of a run, it's quite difficult to work out where you were at the beginning, especially with a play like this that changes from night to night. I do remember being surprised, because I had always assumed that Hamlet and his father had a slightly distant relationship, that his father was a slightly distant patrician, quite a bellicose figure with whom Hamlet didn't really identify. But whilst I do think that they are very different, I remember that once we actually started playing those scenes, there was a sense of the bond that they had and a sense of that paternal connection, and I was quite taken aback by that.
AR: After seeing your father's ghost, as part of your oath to him you made a decision to cut your hand, which had resonances both of self-harm and of stigmata. What was the impulse for this decision?
DT: A decision is made at this point to move forward, to fight the fight and to avenge. The idea was that the hand would act as a reminder - a blood oath. There is definitely something of the self-conscious martyr about him: “Yes I will cut myself.” It never quite connects with him on an emotional level, the idea of carrying anything through, but he gets very whipped up by the idea of it and by making grand gestures, both to himself and to the world. It was partly the sense of fevered excitement that actually there is a way forward. I think that at the beginning in “O that this too too solid flesh would melt”, there is the feeling that I am trapped and there is nowhere to go, that I am on my own and that the world has gone mad and I'm the only sane person left and I'm bereft. Suddenly I am given a lifeline - not only is there someone to avenge, but there is something to fight against and to validate that anger. There is a great joy in being able to stand up and say, “This is my oath to myself and I will remember when I look at that and I'm tattooing this on myself so that I can't forget.” Maybe he already knows that he will find it easy to forget.
AR: We have, from the Olivier film, the idea that “this is a story of a man who could not make up his mind”. This comes partly I think from the trajectory of the First Folio and Second Quarto texts, notably in the placement of “To be or not to be”. Moving this speech and the whole “nunnery scene” to the place that it is in the First Quarto gives Hamlet a very different journey.
DT: Absolutely. We had just got the play up on its feet, and we had sort of staged it, so around the end of the third/beginning of the fourth week, every time I had read the play that point always felt like a “trip”. Of course there is something interesting from an acting point of view about a character who seems certain and then changes his mind and drifts away again, but it goes against the drama of the story-telling, I think. That's not to suggest that it is wrong, and of course, what Shakespeare intended we will never know - it seems that he intended different things at different times. The fact that there were the two versions meant that we allowed ourselves to consider both, and quite quickly both Greg and I and most of the company felt that it was better. Also, you have this issue that the play is so well known and so well worn, how do you create any dramatic tension? You've got to be telling a story, rather than just presenting some well-known scenes strung together. It does strike me as a thriller, and with the more traditionally accepted texts, the Players' scene coming where it does stops it being a thriller, it stops the forward momentum. Whereas if you do it with “To be or not to be” in its location in the First Quarto, it just seems to make more sense. It suddenly became clear to me and to Greg that that made sense, that he would see his father on the battlements, he would get fired up, would go back to his room wanting to share this with someone and couldn't and his head was exploding and he didn't know what to do with himself, and he went to bed and had a sleepless night where he started doubting everything that had just happened and realized that the world he was living in was even worse than he had dreamt it was, speaks “To be or not to be” thinking “What am I going to do?”, and then suddenly the Players arrive and he can see a way out, and you go straight from that into “The Mousetrap”. It made more sense, and it made it more linear. Because we were talking about it as a thriller all the time and talking about keeping it fresh, and because we were also looking for ways to subvert expectations - not that it's not been done before many times, but we were always looking for opportunities to be a bit free with it. We tried it one day and we never looked back. Going out of “The play's the thing” straight into the play - I think it's quite hard to argue against it.
AR: It certainly makes Hamlet more of a Revenge hero.
DT: Yes, because it's not the story of a man who can't make up his mind, it's about a man who keeps making his mind up and becomes full of energy and certainty and then hits brick walls here and there. At the start of the play he is so lost and exhausted and when he sees a crack in his prison's walls he just leaps at it.
AR: I suppose it means that other characters or circumstances create your obstacles, rather than you creating them for yourself. In both the moment in which you catch Claudius praying and the moment at which you stab out at what you think is the king behind the arras, if the situation had been slightly different, you'd have murdered him.
DT: Absolutely, and we wanted to keep pushing the idea that he might, which is why we put the interval where we did, in the middle of 3.3. That was one of Greg's first ideas and I loved it. To put the interval in the middle of “Now might I do it pat”.
AR: Was that a choice made during rehearsals?
DT: Greg had always had it as an idea, and we talked about it and thought, “That's quite cheeky and quite bold, but it might just work.” I think that we ran each act before we ran each half, so it was actually quite late in rehearsals when we tried it, but again, everyone just loved it. There was a collective decision in the room that that was the kind of production that we were wanting to do. If you have never seen Hamlet before you should believe that he is going to plunge the knife into his back. Or even if you have seen it before, you might just for a second go, “Is he …?”. It is about creating these little moments where the audience doubt that they know it and that is what we were very keen to do.
AR: Presumably you were always aware that due to your popularity as Dr Who you were likely to attract quite a young audience who maybe hadn't seen the play before but were coming in order to see you.
DT: It wasn't a conscious thing for me. I think other people were more aware of that than I was, because lots of people have mentioned it. I don't know how much that was in Greg's head. He certainly didn't share that with me if that was his thinking. I think that it was just part of a natural instinct that Greg and I share, and Patrick certainly shares, and most of the cast to an extent probably share, that if we are going to tell these stories again, let's tell them as though they have never been told before. It's always going to be the case that there are people in the audience who haven't seen the play before. It might have been more so with this production because there were Star Trek fans and Dr Who fans. I don't know, but it certainly wasn't why we did it. Any play should be exciting to watch, especially something like Hamlet that is a thriller, a ghost story. I think that it is quite easy to forget that when you are in Stratford doing Shakespeare's works.
AR: Within this structure of the play on which you decided, how did you then see the trajectory of Hamlet's madness? Did you see Hamlet as really mad, or deliberately assuming an “antic disposition” or does the assumption of the “antic disposition” start to send him mad?
DT: Well, he's not going to know, is what I thought. Any human being does things from moment to moment, and Hamlet won't be making decisions about whether he is mad or not, because if you are mad you don't believe you are, so I think you just have to play each scene and see what each scene gives you. Whether or not he is mad is for the audience or a doctor to decide, it's certainly not for Hamlet to decide. What is madness anyway? Where does madness end and sanity begin? So I just played each scene and tried to make emotional sense within the context of what we were doing.
AR: How did you conceive the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia? Did you, for example, discuss any background to their relationship - what it had been like before the play starts?
DT: Yes we did. Obviously there's the scene that she describes to her Dad. I think that if circumstances were different then they could have been together. I mean, he has been away at University, so they haven't seen each other for quite a long time, and you wonder what has been going on for him emotionally and sexually whilst he is away. You also wonder what has been going on for him emotionally and sexually whilst he is at home with Ophelia. In my head they were a couple who spent a lot of time together and relied on each other when he was at home. It is ultimately far more distressing if there was an intimacy between them that is suddenly gone. We struggled with getting the “nunnery scene” to make sense. I couldn't quite see past the idea that when she appears he's not just going to want to curl up in a ball and have his head stroked. We tried to pursue that for a long time and it just wasn't working. You're trying to extrapolate the whole relationship from that brief period of time that they spend together on stage. The assistant director - one day when we were getting tied up in knots trying to work out how they could be intimate, and she said something about the fact that Hamlet can't be intimate with Ophelia, that he mustn't be because he is working quite hard at maintaining a certain way of being and keeping up the act that he is putting on and if someone gets inside that then it will fall apart. So as soon as we started that scene with him saying “Oh fuck, she's here and I can't look at her because as soon as I look at her it's all over,” which implies that the relationship has been intimate but can't be any longer, then it seemed to work.
AR: Did you have a particular moment when you realized that Claudius and Polonius were there watching, like “Where's your father”?
DT: Yes we did, and at that point. We did struggle with that, and I don't think that we ever quite solved that. It's very tricky. We had a sound cue where something happened - Polonius dropped a book - and in that moment Hamlet realizes what is going on and that he has been betrayed. It's tricky finding that switch, and there is nothing in the text that really helps you. It did work dramatically, but looking back on it now it does rather feel that we just shoved something in to shape the action around that isn't in the text.
AR: It is fairly firmly embedded in the performance history for the recognition to happen at that moment.
DT: Right, well Greg probably knew that. That was certainly the scene that we struggled with most. A lot of scenes seemed to work - I don't know what word to use other than the pretentious actorly “organically”. We just talked about them and played them and they found their own rhythm and journey, but that was the one that we struggled with. But once it opened up it felt great and it joined the journeys together. The structure of “To be or not to be” into that and then into the “Fishmonger” scene does seem to work. I saw it that he had been up all night, and in “To die, to sleep,” does he really want to die or does he just want to be able to sleep? I know that feeling - I would quite happily die rather than being awake any longer. All of that confusion carries through into the arrival of the players, which creates a lightbulb. When we cracked that scene then that whole long passage - it becomes one extended scene in one location - seemed to become fluid.
AR: What about the relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude? You made the decision, for example, to make use of a bed during act 3 scene 4. Was that a decision that was talked about with regard to the question of whether their relationship is Oedipal?
DT: I don't really remember any discussions. Clearly there is another room where Claudius sleeps, but they might well have separate bedrooms. In my head it's her bedroom because that's what we did and it never felt as though it should be anywhere else.
AR: I am not convinced that an Oedipal relationship is implied in the text, but again that is a strong part of the performance history of Hamlet.
DT: I'm not either. I'm not quite sure where that's come from. I don't really see where he wants to fuck her. It's certainly not something that we discussed. We certainly never rehearsed the scene without a bed, so it must have been a decision made early on, but that decision wasn't made with any sense of a sexual relationship between them. I don't even remember it coming up in the two weeks of talking about the play line by line around the table. I think that there's a lot of sexual stuff going on, but that is about “I can't bear the thought that you are a sexual being and are fucking my uncle, who is a shit, when my father has just died.” I don't think that the thought of being repulsed by your parent's sexuality is the same thought as wanting to have sex with them. I think that that is what it is about, it is a repulsion at the thought of his mother having sex, and how dare she? How dare she not be my mother any more?
AR: Moving on to the theatre itself. Having performed in the RST, what was it like playing in the Courtyard Theatre, which seems to encourage, and even demand an intimate audience/actor relationship, and what was it like subsequently moving to a proscenium arch stage in the West End?
DT: The Courtyard is completely different from the RST but very like the Swan. It just felt like a bigger version of the Swan, which I was very happy with. There are certain problems about from where you can address the whole of the audience. It was very important to me that the soliloquies were directed straight to the audience, and when you are in a space like that it's quite hard not to address them to the audience. I like the fact that you can actually see the people sitting there, that you are not just talking into a void. I really liked it, and even though it is a big old room it felt very intimate. It feels very involving and inspiring. I thought that I would hate moving to a pros. arch in the West End, but the Novello is such a beautifully designed theatre, that nobody feels very far away. Vocally the Novello took a lot less, which I was amazed about. The Courtyard has a bit of an echoey metal thing going on, and acoustically there are areas in the Courtyard that trap the sound. I know this from having voice sessions in there with the company and trying out sitting in different seats. There are some seats that are difficult to reach. You are either shouting too loud or not speaking loudly enough. On the whole, however, the Courtyard is great, and I can't wait to see the new RST which will be based on that model, but with all the slight problems that the Courtyard has ironed out, allegedly.
AR: Can you talk a bit about the set design? The use of mirrors, for example.
DT: The mirrors were a season decision. They were used through the three plays. I don't know where it started as an idea. Obviously there are lines like “hold the mirror up to nature” and it is a surveillance society which fits well with the idea of the two-way mirror. I think that Greg will admit that the idea for smashing the mirror led back to the idea of how that could be a gun shot, so there was horse/cart thing - could we make that work? We had to find reasons why, for example, Gertrude would have a gun in her bedside table, and she might well, when you think of how that man broke into the Queen's bedroom a few years ago. It all felt OK as a means of enabling that theatricality and ultimately it felt part of our world and it was such a great image, once we had worked out how to do it. It's always great to have those things, as long as you are careful that they don't start leading the production.
AR: You say that you didn't particularly think about the fact that you might get a young audience for the play, but when you talk about making the play “speak” to your audience and telling them the story as if for the first time were those some of the motivating factors for setting the play in the present day?
DT: When Greg and I first talked about it, that was what we talked about. I prefer it, I'll be honest, so I was very happy and encouraged that thinking. I think that the whole doublet and hose thing is, not insurmountable, but it is a barrier to connecting with a modern-day audience. Again, you have to be careful that you are not allowing it to get in the way. Our production was modern-day but it wasn't too specific. We didn't go for mobile phones and Blackberries and fax machines. If you keep it non-specific enough it allows the audience to watch and see people that they recognize, rather than seeing people from another time. Particularly if you are trying to present a something with which you want people to connect and for it to be exciting and thrilling and emotional, it is just easier to connect if they look like people look like now. So, it was always the intention. Just as it was, conversely, always the intention with Love's Labour's Lost that it would be the full Elizabethan chocolate box, because that is the kind of play that it is. It is a box of posh chocolates, whereas Hamlet is … I can't continue the analogy … Hamlet is a whole dinner.
AR: So you set it present day but made an effort not to be too specific. In rehearsals, or indeed in performance, did things come up which enabled you to see strong resonances between the world of twelfth-century Denmark and that of twenty-first century Britain?
DT: The whole idea of Polonius as this spymaster general and it being a surveillance society made a lot of sense because we live in a surveillance society. We are constantly monitored and people are constantly watching each other. Politically it also makes sense - Claudius is just another corrupt politician. And emotionally it is very modern - the whole idea that although it is set in this God-fearing world where the existence of God is pretty much accepted, Hamlet is coming up with these huge doubts. What is interesting about that is that one moment he seems to be fearing Heaven and Hell and the next he is doubting their very existence and the fact that we are anything other than a puff of dust. I think that that is quite a modern sensibility and is quite surprising when you think about the world that he is in. It makes you wonder whether the Elizabethans were quite as godly as we are led to believe.
AR: I think that the Elizabethans were unsettled, living as they did in a society where there had been shifts from Catholicism to Protestantism and the two religions had different conceptions of the afterlife.
DT: Sure. Obviously you have got the whole purgatory idea and yet he then talks about “the undiscovered country”. He contradicts himself, and at times seems like an atheist. But people do that, and that is quite modern. There were very few moments that didn't feel comfortable in the modern setting. There were some practical issues to address - if you mention a sword do you have to have a sword? But the guards might have ceremonial swords so that's fine and that got us through a couple of moments. You can change the word sword to blade without anyone really noticing and then it's a flick knife and who cares. We debated sometimes whether we should do something like that to stop the audience worrying. I had a flick knife and said “up blade” rather than “up sword”, just so that in the end people aren't going, “Is it a sword?”.
AR: In a way Baz Luhrmann has created a means by which that can be accepted - by having guns with the trade name “sword”.
DT: Yes, but he can have a close up.
AR: But now that he has done that it has opened up the possibility and maybe allows others not to have to “explain” those moments.
DT: Greg is quite happy to change the odd word - we changed “arras” to “mirror” once. I'm very up for that. I think that there's a danger of bardolatry, and I can't believe that Shakespeare wouldn't have changed the odd word himself. I find it quite liberating. Patrick is surprisingly free with the text. He is all for changing words here and there for sense and I think it is a good policy. These plays are 400 years old, so there are going to be things that a modern audience can't understand. We are very respectful of the Shakespearean text, much more so than we are of the work of most other writers. I think that the rule of thumb is that you don't want to fiddle with it so that people notice that you've fiddled, but if you stop an audience going for just one second, “Oh, he said arras and that isn't an arras, it's a mirror” then it keeps them in the story.
AR: Talking about how words get changed to fit the stage scenario, I was wondering how old you saw Hamlet as being, because of course in the Second Quarto and First Folio he is about thirty, given that Yorick's skull has been in the earth for 23 years, but in the First Quarto he is about 18 - Yorick died only a dozen years before.
DT: I didn't know that. Is that what Trevor Nunn used then?
AR: Well, I think partly the idea that he is a student and partly the references to “young Hamlet”.
DT: Well, obviously I was thirty-seven, but I didn't want to spend the whole time worrying about that, and I certainly wasn't going to spend eight months playing eighteen because again you're creating a barrier that doesn't need to be there. I didn't give myself an age. It is suitably vague in the text. I've always thought that you can get away with Romeo till you're about thirty and you can get away with Hamlet till you're about forty. I suppose when I played Romeo at twenty-nine I was more aware that I was pushing it, and that is partly because Juliet's age is so specific, and they are children - not that Hamlet is much of an adult - but generationally they feel like children. I never really thought about it with Hamlet. It never bothered me. I just thought, “He's whatever age you think I am right now.” I can't think how it would have changed anything if I had thought, “He's twenty-nine” or “He's thirty-nine.”
AR: No, I think it is only relevant in the more extreme choice of whether he is more eighteen or more thirty.
DT: He's certainly not a grown-up in lots of ways. He becomes more of a grown-up as the play goes on.
AR: Did you have an idea of the period of time over which the play takes place?
DT: It's very vague and very difficult to pin down. I remember that we talked about it a bit and elected not to focus on it, which again didn't bother me. I stopped thinking about it. I increasingly find that you can make so many decisions about character that they actually inhibit what you are doing. Especially during a long run, any given moment can change from one night to the next, and you can end up restricting yourself by making definite decisions.
AR: I suppose it is also the case that the way in which Hamlet perceives time in the play is sometimes warped, because his father's death seems so fresh in his mind, for example in the moment when he says “My father died within's two hours” and Ophelia says “Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord.”
DT: He can't believe that the court has moved on. Clearly in his head it is recent and present and that is what matters as opposed to the number of days.
AR: Finally, in terms of the run as a whole, did the play change a lot?
DT: I'm sure that it did, but it is quite hard to be objective about it. Some things changed nightly, whilst others remained amazingly consistent. It would be amazing to watch a video of the first night and the last night. How you felt about different characters changed - you'd fall in and out of love with Ophelia, you'd care for Gertrude more or less, be more of a friend to Horatio and at other times more self-centred. That is what happens when you do anything for any length of time. I had, of course, this back operation in the middle of it and had to miss some time and when you go into hospital because part of your frame stops working you do feel terribly vulnerable and terribly mortal, so I think that I probably felt more fragile when I came back at the end, because physically I was, but also, those thoughts about mortality were running through my head. We're almost certainly going to do a film of it in a month or so, so it will be interesting to see what it is like coming back and how it affects it taking it to a different medium.
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