Worlds Elsewhere (19 page)

I DID GO BACK TO BERLIN.
As spring turned to summer, then autumn, then winter and spring again, I made several return trips, not quite able to let Germany go. I read and reread
Die Hamletmaschine,
teasing apart its poetic paradoxes and marvelling at the way Müller made Shakespeare's play shiver in the glare of a surveillance state:

I spent a strange evening in a themed beer hall – dirndl-wearing waitresses, bagpipe player – with Alexander Weigel, dramaturg on
Hamlet/Maschine,
hearing rehearsal-room tales. (Rehearsals had been torturous, mostly: Müller had been so paralysed with indecision that months had gone by without any useful work being done.) I saw Thomas Ostermeier's
Hamlet
for the third time, and was obscenely pleased to catch something that had eluded me before – a thespian in-joke about
Die Hamletmaschine.

On a later visit I watched four hours of the murky VHS recording of the production at the Akademie der Künste on Robert Koch Platz, and spent an afternoon in an Indian restaurant with Margarita Broich, Müller's Ophelia and his sometime partner, who talked about the out-of-body experience of rehearsing Shakespeare while the GDR was collapsing.

Broich – willowy, beautiful, surprisingly shy – also talked, more sadly, of their life together. She was just twenty-one when they met, Müller in his fifties; him from the East, her from the West. She laughed ruefully as she recalled the shenanigans required: the hotel room next to the border crossing, the Stasi paperwork. She had played Ophelia just as they were separating after nine years together – the end of an era in more ways than one. As she spoke, she shook her head, as if ridding it of memories. Another country, another life.

The following day I stood, in sidelong autumn sunlight, in front of Müller's grave, a slender iron column in a quiet corner of the Dorotheenstadt cemetery. Müller died in 1996, four years after the communist country in which he so fervently believed was declared a useless experiment.

Did any of it help me answer the question of why Shakespeare, or
Hamlet,
or Heiner Müller had become so entangled in German history? Not really. More than once I thought of a line from the play, addressed by an infuriated Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

Perhaps it was best to leave some mysteries unplucked. Ramona had been right: there were no more answers, but the questions seemed more interesting.

Somehow, I sensed I would end up back in Gdańsk. As I had nearly finished writing up this account, an email from Jerzy Limon dropped into my inbox. At long last the theatre was nearly finished; they were planning a grand opening, during the annual Shakespeare festival. Could I come? I booked the first flight I could.

Seventeen months after I'd last been there, three and a half years after I'd first been out, Gdańsk looked identical: same cobbled streets, same finicky mansions, same tourists drifting along Długi Targ, same high royal-blue sky. Only the Teatr Szekspirowski had changed: if before it looked like a naval frigate lying at anchor on Wojciecha Bogusławskiego, now a maximum-security prison had taken up residence, angular and forbidding, finished in menacing dark brick.

Inside, it didn't take long to locate Jerzy. He was the man of the hour, spotlit in a bank of Klieg lights brought by news crews from across Europe. Black suit shimmering, he seemed in his element, caressing the cream leather seats of the auditorium, rapping his knuckles against the wooden finishes, pointing out the building's features – fully reconfigurable stage! roof retractable in three minutes flat! – in an effervescent flow of Polish and English. The space was certainly handsome: airy and open, galleries stacked neatly on three sides, finished in honey-coloured birch and beech.

The final budget had been 93 million zloty (£16.2 million), over half of it from European Union coffers. It hadn't hurt that Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk – about to be made president of the European Council – was a Gdańsker. Tusk would be attending the opening, was the word; goons in dark suits and shades had started to congregate.

After Jerzy finished being interrogated by a Polish lifestyle magazine, I caught his eye. I asked if he was pleased. His grin was nearly as broad as the stage.

Tusk's presence that night turned out to be a mixed blessing: eager not to be outdone by the massed presence of Poland's theatrical elite, the PM had personally prepared some brief remarks on the similarities between Shakespeare's plays and Polish politics.
Julius Caesar
held many lessons for a wise politician, he informed us, as did
Macbeth
—

The intake of breath in the room was almost audible. Tusk had invited an ancient theatrical curse, mentioning the Scottish play by name in a theatre that wasn't staging it. A well-known female director tutted loudly.

Sure enough, twenty-five minutes later, the ceremony was brought to an abrupt halt when a voice came over the tannoy. A suitcase had been discovered in an upstairs room and its owner couldn't be located. This was not a drill. Ten minutes after that, 600 VIPs were kicking their heels on the pavement outside while the bomb squad was summoned. Tusk fled. I watched the remainder on local television.

The opening production, a touring
Hamlet
from London travelling the globe, was only moderately more successful. The cast, who had been on the road for a constant six months, plainly couldn't wait to get back to their dressing rooms, if not on the first flight home. They looked as though they had come to detest every line of the play. But it wasn't just that, I realised: there was something about the concept of taking a British, English-language production around the world that seemed a relic of another age. It took no account of the things I had excitedly begun to discover, the multiplying ways in which Shakespeare had been translated and disseminated globally, how he had already infiltrated so many cultures in ways that would barely be recognisable back home. In its sense of smug cultural superiority, it struck me as typical of an attitude I had been doing my utmost to leave behind.

The following evening, I walked across to a pop-up space backstage at another of Gdańsk's theatres. The show was called
I, Malvolio,
by the maverick English theatre-maker Tim Crouch. Commissioned by the Brighton festival to create work for young people, Crouch had written a gloriously eccentric series of one-man pieces starring himself as, respectively, Peaseblossom, Caliban and Banquo.
I, Malvolio
– an alternative perspective on
Twelfth Night
from Shakespeare's drama-detesting puritan – was the latest in this rogue's gallery. Sprung from the prison into which the playwright throws him near the end of the action, Malvolio was here in Poland, two nights only.

As Crouch strutted, writhed and sneered across the stage, wearing shit-stained undergarments and a battered coxcomb, the Polish audience looked distinctly jumpy. Shakespeare –
this
? A man dressed like
that
? I could feel the panic mounting. Things got still jumpier when Crouch, attempting to ad-lib his way out of danger, tossed the surtitles to the wind and began to pick on audience members individually, even though no one appeared to comprehend English.

Gradually, the show righted itself. The audience breathed more easily, began to share in the joke. Language ceased to matter quite so much; someone began to heckle good-naturedly in Polish, which had
the room in stitches. Crouch turned his ineptitude with the surtitles (no doubt planned) into a running metatheatrical gag, checking the screen for what he was supposed to say next, then attempting an outrageously poor Polish pronunciation.

‘Find that funny? Find that kind of thing
funny
?' he roared, half in character, half out. By the time the applause came round, the audience was eating out of his hand.

It was a virtuosic piece of stagecraft, laughable and faintly lunatic, spiced with enough existential precariousness to make it a serious meditation on the fragility of drama. Unlike most modern touring theatre, it experimented with the barriers surrounding language and culture, bringing them into the same shared, contained space: the world and journey of the play. The reason it worked, it occurred to me, was that it was properly spontaneous; every time, every place it was performed, it was different. Created in compact with each and every audience, its flexibility made it fully alive.

Afterwards, I walked back past the Teatr Szekspirowski, fronted with fluttering pennants and brightly spotlit against a charcoal ground of sky. As I stood there in the fresh sea breeze, I realised I'd been wondering since I first came to Gdańsk what it might have been like to watch the English Comedians at work, four centuries before – those travel-stained English actors, strangers in these chilly parts of northern Europe, using Shakespeare for their own purposes in a cavalcade of languages, making things up as they went along. So little trace survived that one could only guess what it would have been like to see them in action: the tumbling clowns, the wise-cracking, smart-alec heroes …

One could only guess, but maybe I'd just seen some kind of answer.

In the slate grey of too-early morning, William Shakespeare looked haggard and underslept. He gazed out from his roost in the bathroom, peering pruriently into the shower. The cotton tea towel on which he was printed shivered lightly in the breeze. Next to the bed in which I lay – oak, four-poster, with a counterpane embroidered in the manner of a Renaissance herbal – was a list detailing the ‘Symbolism of Flowers in Shakespeare's Plays'. Next to that was a watercolour of Anne Hathaway's Cottage. In the dawn, its colours looked unsettlingly luminous. A motto was painted in curling script on the wall: ‘If music be the food of love, play on.' Beneath it – somewhat redundant in the circumstances, I thought – was one word:
SHAKESPEARE
.

I groped for my phone: 4.46 a.m. I groggily surveyed my surroundings, taking fresh note of the hand-coloured engravings of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
above the headboard and the tiny casket of pot-pourri. Near the television were back issues of a magazine called
British Heritage,
with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall on the cover. Above the magazines, attached to a board, was a pictorial guide to the architecture of ‘Shakespeare's Stratford'.

Already it was starting to get warm: I could feel the humidity on my skin. Outside, through the opened mullioned window, the crickets and frogs were loud: a sharp, hot buzz, like the noise of radio static.

Puzzled and exhausted, head still thick from the sleeping tablet I had swallowed on the flight, I subsided into the pillows and tried to remember where I was. Slowly the answer came: Virginia. The United States. Jet lag certainly wasn't helping, but it was hard to avoid the
sensation that I'd flown 3,600 miles away from Britain and ended up exactly where I'd left.

I had only myself to blame. I had been searching for a route into American Shakespeare, a way to write about the fascinating and at times perplexing process by which a sixteenth-century British playwright had become absorbed into the culture and lifeblood of the United States. Not only had a nation founded by theatre-detesting Puritans been reconciled to Shakespeare; he had become a kind of national symbol.

Wanting to begin my trip into American Shakespeare near where Shakespeare's work had first landed in America, I had brought my eye to rest on a town called Staunton, Virginia. On paper, chiefly known as the birthplace of one of the blandest presidents of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson, it didn't have a tremendous amount to recommend a visit.

But Staunton (pronounced ‘Stanton', I was rapidly corrected) had found an ingenious solution to its deficit in the presidential stakes: the figure who had gazed down on me all night and invaded my dreams, William Shakespeare. Here, in the late 1990s, a buccaneering local troupe had the notion of building a reconstruction of a Shakespearian theatre. The reconstruction wasn't, as might be expected, a version of the Globe; it was more interesting than that, a replica of the indoor playhouse Shakespeare and his company moved into in late 1608. The new Blackfriars Playhouse had been running since 2001 under the ambitious name of the American Shakespeare Center. It was the first working Blackfriars replica to be built anywhere in the world.