Ezra Pound once wrote that ‘any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.’ With this, he laid down an arresting challenge, which I wish to consider in relation to a subject I am currently much concerned with – the revival of old plays.
I am currently directing a production of Hamlet (Wadham Chapel, 8th week), and the need to ‘make it new’, as Pound termed it, has been a central concern in rehearsals. A problem that increasingly besets Shakespeare as he is buried ever deeper in hagiography (to which this, hypocritically, adds) is that he is very, very well known. Surprise is a difficult thing to generate when everyone knows the ending – the twists and turns of the narrative can’t be relied upon alone. And yet surprise intensifies emotion; and dramatic tension, the gathering momentum that coheres a play, is heightened by uncertainty. Surprise makes for good plays. It’s obviously a good thing that Shakespeare is widely read; but it causes a problem for productions of him, that exists entirely outside of the text – a conditioning culture that perhaps cannot be as easily excited by Hamlet as they might be if they could encounter it without preconditionings.
My production is interested in this problem. We are doing Hamlet, one of the most famous, widely known and revived plays in English, because it’s brilliant; but we also want to stage a beginning, an invention, a discovery. Of course, we’re engaged in a slightly different process to the one Pound was writing about, because revival is re-imagination, not original composition. But Shakespeare wasn’t. He was writing something strikingly new. To be faithful to that spirit, we have tried during rehearsal to draw something provocative out of the text. In the firm belief that Shakespeare is bigger than all of us, that you can find almost anything in him if you look for it, we have tried to pattern our production with surprises.
In a sense, this Hamlet wants to challenge: by cutting characters, re-imagining sequences and generally translating the play into what will hopefully resemble a distinct version, it wants to get a response. But all this sacrilege is just a way of being faithful to a spirit that I believe lies behind this play, which after all is about the frightening, and the unknown. The version of Hamlet I am putting together is a love letter to a text far larger than any production of it: it’s just why I love Hamlet. If you come to the play, I will be pleased if you like it, and find it fresh; but I’ll probably be glad if you disagree with it as well, because then, we’ll have prompted you into determining why and how you love this enormous, marvellous play. I don’t think anyone should ever put on ‘old plays’; I think that the only way theatre works is if it’s part of a live conversation, between the bodies on stage and the minds in the audience: if it’s a beginning, an invention, a discovery.
