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Director Interview Greg Doran, director of Hamlet This is a transcription of the Director Talk event chaired by Paul Allen in front of an audience at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 4 August 2008. I'm going to start, Greg, just by mentioning a very topical thing. I gather you don't watch Dr Who and you don't watch Star Trek, so you hadn't spotted that the playful intelligence mixed with existential angst that David Tennant brings to the Doctor is absolutely perfect for Hamlet? No Paul, that's why I cast him - clearly I knew that entirely! No actually I did watch it when I was ten, and I used to really enjoy it. I think it was William Hartnell then, so I'm a few Doctors out. But I did watch the episode where David played the Doctor in the one about the lost Shakespeare play, if you recall that one, as it was thematically appropriate to do so! Likewise the calm pragmatism of Captain Picoult seems to apply very much to smooth Claudius? As you will find tonight. [laughter] No, I am aware that I have representatives of both the Tardis and the Starship Enterprise, but I think there's almost nothing more to say about that particular aspect of the production! Hamlet is kind of 'The Big One' for a director, is it not? Is it one you've always wanted to do? No, actually. No, I've always been rather terrified of Hamlet. I think it might be pique, because at the age of thirteen I managed to fail to get the part of Ophelia at Preston Catholic College, where I was educated. Maybe it was because of Gareth Ronson who got the part (never spoken to him since) and it might be that I was just cheesed off about not getting the part. It is perhaps regarded as the most revered of the plays in the canon, yet at the same time perhaps the most familiar. A friend of mine put this very well: "You know", he said. "I've often watched Hamlet, many times watched it, been challenged by it, impressed by it, but never actually enjoyed it." I couldn't work out why that was, but I think it's one that you get measured against, I suppose. It [the production] is defined by your [actor playing] Hamlet, and that might be why it's taken me a while to get round to it. Did you feel you had to bring something new to Hamlet because it is familiar? No, again. I try not to do that. People frequently say to me, "How and what are you going to do with it?" and I suppose I always reply, "I think I've got enough on my plate doing it." But at the same time, Hamlet may be more than many of the plays in the canon before you can even start, which is going to define your approach. Of course, one of those things is the casting, not just of Hamlet, but of those major parts. The other element is simply how you're going to cut it, because there's no such thing as a definitive production of Hamlet, I don't think, because there's no such thing as a definitive text of Hamlet. So you've got the First Quarto, the Bad Quarto, (the 'paperback edition' if you like) and which is about 2200 lines. Then you've got the Second Quarto, which is a whacking 3900 lines, and then it's a bit shorter in the Page 1 © RSC Folio. In my experience, Shakespeare goes at about 900 lines per hour, so to those quick, dizzy with arithmetic of memory, among you I would say that the full Second Quarto text is going to last at least 4.5 hours before you've done the fights and without an interval, which would bring you out sometime shortly after midnight. I knew with this particular production, that with David's popularity with a young audience, that some of those would form a constituency of our audience, and that to do a 4.5 hour+ version of Hamlet wouldn't perhaps attract them back! In fact, wouldn't attract quite a lot of people back! It's interesting to note that the first time we are aware of the full Second Quarto Hamlet being done was in Stratford, but way back in 1899 when Frank Benson did it. He did it by doing the first three acts, up to the end of the closet scene in the afternoon, and then you came back and watched Acts 4 and 5 in the evening. So it was the first Shakespeare marathon day! To me, that's indicative of the fact that if you're going to try to bring it down to a length that a modern audience is going to be prepared to sit through, then you're going to have to make some choices very early on. Surely Shakespeare did as well, and that's why there are different versions? Having made your decision about cuts, you also have to make decisions about placing some of it because the texts don't tell you definitively where everything goes. The classic instance is, "To be or not to be"… That is absolutely true. The Bad Quarto has instead of, "To be or not to be, that is the question," it has the lines: "To be or not to be, aye that's the point." Now what's interesting about it is that it's quite often rejected on the basis that it's a corrupt version, badly memorised, badly remembered by perhaps the actor playing Marcellus as his lines seem to be perfectly remembered. Keith Osborne who plays Marcellus thinks it's a very good idea to do that version! We did think of replacing, as it were, the corrupt lines with the Folio or the Quarto ones, and that would provide an interesting 2200 lines, that's 2 hours 20 minutes, and provide perhaps the structure and the length that maybe Shakespeare's company actually performed. Looking at the "To be or not to be" speech, we started the rehearsal with it in what I might call the Folio position: Hamlet, having heard the players arriving in Elsinore, decides that he'll put on this play, The Mousetrap, and "catch the conscience of the King". Then in the Folio, the next time we see him he seems to have slipped into this slough of despond and existential angst of trying to decide whether "to be or not to be" is the question or not. But in the Quarto, the position of that famous soliloquy, (perhaps the most famous soliloquy ever) is just after he's seen the Ghost. So he meets the Ghost (his father), he apparently bursts into Ophelia's room, doesn't say anything, runs away again. The next time we see him, he is contemplating existence. That seemed to David and to me to be a better narrative tick, actually. It was certainly a choice and we decided to take the Quarto option for the structure with the Folio text. Let's come to the narrative because it seems to me that Hamlet is often almost dismissed as a play about a man who can't make up his mind. If Shakespeare had written a play about a man who can't make up his mind, probably it would not have survived 400 years at the front of the canon. How do you therefore make it a thriller? It is a thriller. Dr Johnson said that its peculiar quality was its variety. Actually, if you think about it, it's got a ghost, it's got a girl who goes mad and it's got a play- within-a-play and a jolly good fight at the end. It's got lots of variety in it, but there seem to be so many different ways in which you can take it. Page 2 © RSC Having got what I regarded as the best possible cast together for it, I decided that it would become effectively our Hamlet, and we would decide moment by moment what to highlight and what, as it were, to disregard. As Jan Kott said in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, you can only ever reach for a Hamlet. It will never be as great as Shakespeare's complete Hamlet, but it'll be a play existing in its time – i.e. 2008, now. For instance, there's a scene in the Quarto which is cut in the Folio, which is about Hamlet seeing the Norwegian troops of Fortinbras on their way to conquer a tiny corner of Poland, which provokes in Hamlet a sense of his own inaction. That seemed to us to be very resonant, and we wanted to retain that moment. At the same time, in terms of actually putting the play in its context, we realised that there were many things that seemed astonishingly resonant. [For example] the whole obsession of the Elsinore court with surveillance. Laertes is sent off to Paris and moments later his father is sending a spy after him. Ophelia's set to be "loosed on" Hamlet, reading her book so that Polonius and Claudius can watch her. Then of course there's the closet scene (that we [the company] at one point referred to as, "Polonius' final snoop") which is another example of the state obsession with sticking their nose in everybody's business, which had a very contemporary ring to us.
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