That Isaac Asimov’s retelling of a bemused reader’s response to Hamlet – ‘I don’t see why people admire that play so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together’ – has itself become a well-worn anecdote is only a testament to the challenges faced by those daring to stage the play today: acknowledging Hamlet’s canonical status has become clichéd, it is already canon. What can a new production do now when confronted with all that has already been done? There’s only so many different ways you can inflect ‘To be or not to be’. The play itself is haunted by Old Hamlet’s ghost, and today the play’s past versions haunt all those who dare to take it on.
Carys Howell seems to recognise this in her Hamlet, which played at the Keble O’Reilly. In Act 2 Scene 2, she has Claudius, bored and hungover, flick through a programme while Polonius pontificates in front of him. The programme used turns out to be for The Motive and the Cue, Jack Thorne’s new play about John Gielgud’s 1964 production of, you guessed it, Hamlet. Recognising a difficulty, though, is not the same as overcoming it.
This production’s new, present-day, concept was advertised quite explicitly. The marketing team of Nicole Gibbons and Evie Holloway promised a ‘press angle’, as Howell described it in a Cherwell interview. Professedly inspired by recent media coverage of the Royal Family, this production promised to explore the impact of newly emerging forms of media, both social and otherwise on public life. Occasionally, we see Howell’s production live up to this. Between some scenes we hear talk radio-style discussions of Elsinore’s ongoings. In a tone more combative than anything we could hope for from the British media, these additions bring the political infighting of the Danish court into the present day. The new media angle also feels meaningful in Hamlet’s mockery of Polonius. Scrolling on his phone, Josh Sneddon claims to read ‘words, words, words’ and, later, ‘slanders’ from ‘satirical rogues’.
Apart from this, though, the references to new media are quite rare, and feel tacked on. Entering the theatre, we see two actors lying on stage engrossed in their phones, but nothing comes of this. Occasionally, a stage manager comes onstage with a video camera, but the actors never give it any attention, nor does it seem to lead anywhere. There is another problem, though, that first becomes noticeable with the entrance of the video camera. The direction too often follows Robert Icke’s direction in his 2017 version with Andrew Scott. Sneddon’s Hamlet hides behind a sofa in Act 1 Scene 3 just as Scott’s does, and this is not the only instance of copying. Like in Icke’s, the search for Polonius’s body is stylised with torchlight. This continues to the play’s end, when each of the dead characters in the play’s final scene stand up during Hamlet’s monologue and pass him to exit upstage, while Old Hamlet’s Ghost returns once more. The second biggest laugh of the night comes when Claudius mistakes Rosencrantz for Guildenstern and vice versa, only for Gertrude to correct him. This is a joke straight from Icke’s production. Influence is one thing (Howell cites the set design from Icke’s version in her Cherwell interview), but this much results in a production that just feels like a pale imitation.
As for the acting, the standout performer is Joe Bangbala as Old Hamlet’s Ghost and the First Player, who brings an intensity of presence and clarity of speech that sets him apart. Meg Bruton as Horatio brings an endearing quality that justifies Hamlet’s fondness of her, and Nic Rackow’s delivery of Claudius’ public pronouncements is assured. Josh Sneddon plays Hamlet well in parts. He has a habit of pausing in places that loses the meaning of the lines, so that, for example, ‘I do not know why/ Yet I live to say “This thing’s to do”’ turns ‘I do not know why yet I live’ and ‘This thing’s to do’ into separate impulses, with ‘to say’ stranded in between. Perhaps he wants to imply that Hamlet is coming up with his speech in real time, but this comes across as formulaic, especially when combined with his persistently ironic tone. He would do well to follow Hamlet’s own advice to the players: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.’
It is also regrettable that Sneddon fluffs some of his lines. We lose even some lines that Asimov might claim as part of the string of famous quotations, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her’ being one of the most noticeable. It is not an easy task to learn all the lines for the title character of Shakespeare’s longest play, especially when combined with the demands of a degree, but that is what Sneddon signed up for, and he falls short of it too often. That said, his performance grows stronger in later scenes, and he has a good rapport with the more minor characters, especially in scenes in prose.
As a whole, though, the production’s most successful moments are additions that don’t come from the text. When Claudius video calls his emissary, Voltimand, he tells him, deadpan, ‘I think you’re on mute’. All the major laughs come from these sorts of extras. Humour already in the script, like The Gravedigger’s claim that in England ‘the men are as mad as’ Hamlet, tends to fall flat. Similarly, the design team seems to be at odds with the text used. Old Hamlet’s Ghost is dressed well in a dark military suit, and yet he is still described as ‘in complete steel’. The fencing foils in the final scene both have obvious rubber tips on the end, despite Laertes admitting to using an ‘unbated’ sword. Howell is clearly not opposed to minor alterations to the text (she changes the word ‘hugger-mugger’ to ‘speedily’, presumably to make the dialogue easier to understand), so in this vein we ought to have consistent alteration carried throughout.
When Hamlet can finally tell us ‘Now I am alone’, his moment to speak uninterrupted with the audience is barged in on by a soundtrack that seems intended to convey intrigue. Yet, near the end of that same soliloquy, when some intrigue actually presents itself in his plans for the play within the play, the track cuts and Sneddon mutters ‘the plays the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ as he rushes off stage with a blackout coming halfway through the line. This, to me, is symptomatic of the main problems with this production. In parts, the production is interestingly original, but, for the rest, we are left with a production that hasn’t spent enough time thinking about the play as a whole and its specific details. It is all just slightly ‘out of joint’.
Why We Might Not Beat Climate Change
In an interview with Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell critiqued their guest’s rejection of economic growth. While Raworth maintains that a new model is necessary to build a sustainable eco-economic system, Stewart and Campbell argue that the idea is simply politically infeasible. Both views are right. A model along the lines of the sustainable ‘doughnut’ that Raworth advocates is necessary if we are to avert the horrifying culmination of our 200+ year industrial experiment, yet is also impossible to implement in our current political system. A candidate or party advocating for such solutions simply opens themselves up to electoral annihilation.
Is replacement of our current political and economic model really necessary? Surely substantial progress has already been made? Case in point, the Inflation Reduction Act. Passed by the Biden administration, it was a landmark piece of legislation that transformed the American response to the climate crisis and provided a beacon of climate leadership for countries all over the world. China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has made pledges for reducing their emissions and is rapidly investing in renewables. Yet while major countries continue to talk about slashing their emissions, and endless COPs promise the final turning point for climate action, global emissions continue to rise and rise.
But even the current terrifyingly threadbare climate action may not last. The impassioned prayers of climate scientists were delivered with Biden’s victory in the 2020 US election on promises of substantial climate legislation. But with Biden’s popularity flailing, and deepening polarisation meaning that the Republicans are intransigent in their denial of climate change while the world burns, any GOP victory will lead the world’s largest democracy in a fossil fuel boom that will guarantee that any chance the human race has to avoid the worst is snuffed out. In Britain, the ruling Conservative Party, for example, set out the goal of net zero by 2050, including a provision for no new petrol or diesel cars to be sold by 2030, yet already the influence of pressure groups and right-wing outriders occupying the climate sceptic policy space have led the Conservatives to weaken their goals. Across Europe, right-wing parties are leading a backlash to green policies that threatens to undermine EU emissions targets.
Therefore, consider this thesis: the Western economic and political system is patently unable to accommodate the complete transformation that adapting to climate change would require, having developed through the industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels. The consumption of fossil fuels, which is destroying the environment, is also baked into national and global systems of governance. Campbell and Stewart both made this connection, the former referencing a ‘gulf’ between what needs to happen and ‘the political realities in democracies’. An increasingly apparent pattern is that the necessarily radical climate policies prove politically unpalatable, or that their cost is exploited by ideologues and cynical opportunists alike for electoral gain. Infrastructure projects like implementing renewable energy generation are hugely expensive and are scrapped or shrunk by recession-hit treasuries. Attempts to curb individual emissions like 15-minute cities are portrayed as attacks on individual liberties (obscuring real problems to be solved like their effect on low-income families). Degrowth and similar ideas are seen as simply further impoverishing already impoverished working people, and thus lie beyond the political pale. These are all changes that we need if we are to stand a chance against climate breakdown, yet are all changes that are unthinkable.
Of course, Western democracies are not the world. But the West clearly has an urgent duty to reduce emissions, due to having both some of the world’s highest per-capita emissions and because of the historical contribution to climate change. Cynical electioneering may lead liberal democracies to abandon their efforts to tackle climate change, a death sentence for any hope of meaningful and direly needed global action. The complex systems sustaining human civilisation cannot withstand the radical transformation that climate change will bring (see the paper by Steffen, Will et al. ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – PNAS 115.33 [2018], which explains the multiplicity of earth-systemic tipping points that, once reached, further accelerate climate breakdown in a feedback loop).The current equilibrium of the Earth system is at breaking point and yet global political leaders delay, ignore and frustrate the action that is necessary. We need political actors to overturn the same system that has installed them in the first place.
I would strenuously clarify that I do not have a vision of an alternative political system, and I certainly do not believe in an ‘eco-dictatorship’. I strongly and passionately believe in my country’s system of liberal democracy yet it may be totally unsuited to our era of entirely unprecedented and existential crisis. The truth is that I don’t know the answer. I can offer a diagnosis but I am at a loss for a treatment. The only rational response to this two-headed paradox may be doomerism, an acceptance of the inevitable entailing giving up any attempt to stop runaway climate change. But this, too, is surely the wrong answer. It is our duty to not only the rest of humanity, but our descendants, and our forebears, to do everything in our power to preserve the Earth system that has fostered our species. If there is even the smallest, barest chance that we might yet save these things, then we must try.
Image Credit: US Government/CC 1.0 Deed