Greg Doran, director of

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 brings to 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 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.

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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.

This is in modern dress, isn't it? I haven't seen the production but I gather they're in modern dress so those references will be helped to breathe by that. Do you then also point them out to the audience? In a way, underline them as you go along? I'm thinking of all the recent Henry Vs there've been in which the opening scenes have been about dodgy dossiers and Iraq…

Yes. In terms of modern dress, it's a very interesting element for me. It seems that every single Shakespeare play has its own challenges, and I wanted to do Hamlet in a modern context (not just because David Tennant looks terrible in tights!) but somehow I think it's a very interesting thing that sometimes if you put plays back in their period, it can exoticise them in a way that makes you not see the density and the complexity of the politics in the piece. In a way, it's witnessed in our production – the play-within-a-play is done in absolutely glorious Renaissance costume designed by Rob Jones. The point there (that people take quite a while to clock) is that this is a piece of metaphor particularly pertinent to the court of Elsinore.

What I don't like though is modern dress which prompts irrelevant questions. I hate Romeo and Juliets that are a mobile phone world, because you think, "Why didn't he text her? That would have sorted it all out."

I try, I suppose, to make it what I call 'modern iconic', so you can look at it and not quite know which decade it is, but it has an accessibility. With characters like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Horatio and some of those middle-range characters, it enables you to know precisely who they are because of the signifiers of their dress which, if they were all in doublet and hose, might be much more difficult to convey.

Does that free up an alertness to what the psychological state of a rather disturbed young man might be?

I think it does, and I think it freshens up some of the imagery. One of the things that I found astonishing in this play (that I thought I knew backwards) was imagery that I hadn't really ever been aware of hearing. For instance, when Hamlet describes Claudius' reaction to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says that Claudius, "Keeps them like an ape keeps an apple in the corner of its jaw, first mouthed to be last

Page 3 © RSC swallowed." I thought, first of all, how did Shakespeare come up with that image? What apes was he seeing? Clearly there were some baboons or something down at the bear-gardens, but how astonishing to have observed that those poor, shallow creatures, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are lodged in the corner of his jaw.

I think it takes quite a lot of the rehearsal period to really mine the text and really understand the text so that we can approach it as freshly as I hope we do. That involves about two weeks worth of the rehearsals sitting around the table putting it all into our own words - literally sitting around a table. Nobody says their own lines for the first two weeks, and you say the lines round the table, and then you say what it means. Hamlet, on side of the table, who isn't speaking but who's playing Gertrude at that point, thinks, "Oh that's what it means." We gain a collective knowledge of the play, and quite a specific knowledge, which we have to agree because not everybody reads the line the same way.

Yet it's not ever quite what it means, is it? Because the language is the language, and the language is part of the performance. So somebody's got to get their head and tongue and heart around that.

Yup. That's the next big stage in that you have to develop it, of course, in this space. One of the early rehearsals was of the opening scene, and we were rehearsing in working lights, so all the lights were on in the grid and in the auditorium but there was no light on stage. It was very useful as a rehearsal because I couldn't see the actor's faces, but I could hear the text. It takes quite a lot of muscularity and effort to get the actors to speak in this particular space, sometimes even speaking upstage, to be able to get that text freshly across to the audience, to make them feel as if they're hearing it for the first time.

We're talking about it a kind of modern play, and so it is, but it's also a play of 1600 or thereabouts, isn't it? One of the things that persists in it is the language of purgatory - the Ghost's in purgatory and needs to be rescued from there, which is a Catholic idea. Hamlet always seems to me to embody that Protestant personal relationship with his own destiny and God that suggests the ferment of the situation without espousing the politics of that ferment, somehow. Is this fairly hard to make intelligible now, or not?

I don't know whether it's hard to make intelligible, but what is hard to do, both for modern actors and for a modern audience, perhaps, is to hear it. Everybody in the cast, all the main characters talk about their soul, therefore they have a relationship to their soul, and they have a relationship to repentance. For instance, structurally the closet scene seems to me to be modelled on the confessional. She [Gertrude] has to be taken through a process of repentance towards absolution, in a way.

Getting the actors to engage with that, for us all to come to an understanding of what that means and how potent that is, brings really surprising results. For instance in Claudius, this man who has murdered his brother (I'm not giving too much away!), he comes to a point where he's wishing he could repent and that he could be absolved of his sin, and realises that repentance only comes if you give up what you've gained by that sin. The whole speech where finally he appeals to the angels, if you like, has to be rooted in a real belief system. That is, without peppering the play with a lot of crucifixes or something, you don't have to forefront the belief system in order for them to really have it. In fact, if you sometimes do that, you scenically forefront that it's a religious world, you can leave the responsibility to that, and somehow the actors never quite convey the intensity of belief. But it is one of the most difficult things to invest in the show: that profound sense of their philosophy.

Page 4 © RSC One of the elements in the play is strong, personal love interest. Hamlet and Ophelia is a sort of anti-love story. Something has gone horribly wrong with what might have been a wonderful relationship. The big question is over Gertrude and Claudius. That presumably is a major decision you have to take: how to play those relationships?

It absolutely is. Everybody, all the characters, mine the text for the evidence of their particular agenda. As far as Gertrude and Claudius are concerned, you have to decide: did they start their affair before the murder of Old Hamlet? Was that murder therefore partly a crime of passion? Was it an entirely political manipulation on Claudius' part? The Ghost certainly says that their affair is "incestuous". Now that might be in the same terms that Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon as she had been married to his brother, and therefore it was incest. It means something different to us now, too, so that's another difficult area. Hamlet also describes Claudius as "adulterous". Is it adulterous if he marries Gertrude after the death of the previous husband? So there are various clues there.

I'm not going to tell you, so you'll just have to find out how we play it, and you can make your own decisions about what we do. But yes, those are big decisions you have to sort out.

In terms of Ophelia, what is rather irritating is that you never get to see what Ophelia and Hamlet were like beforehand. Or indeed what Hamlet was like beforehand. Everybody calls him "the gloomy Dane"…

But there are clues, aren't there? He's a witty man…

He says, "I have of late lost all my mirth." That implies that he had mirth and therefore he wasn't a gloomy Dane before his dad died. So there are elements of his wit that seem to come sparkling through, albeit often just as a reaction or a cover-up to the grief, anger and loss that he's feeling.

Finally, Shakespeare always to some extent brings plays back to Stratford, doesn't he? Doesn't Ophelia's death by drowning seem very like the River Avon? No rivers like that in Denmark - not as far as I know!

Not as far as I know! In 1579, just at the end of School Lane in Tiddington, a girl astonishingly called Catherine Hamlet drowned herself. There was a pretty extended debate in the Court records about whether this was suicide or whether she had actually just slipped whilst she was filling her pail with water. Shakespeare was 15 when that happened, so it must have impacted upon him, I think.

I can't remember if it's the same case, but there was certainly one case in Stratford where they exhumed the body to see whether the young woman was pregnant or not, because it was a commonplace reason for suicide, and she might have killed herself. It turned out not to be so. So presumably Ophelia's not pregnant at the start of the play!

OK - questions from the audience.

Q: I was interested in the very close relationship Hamlet has with his father's ghost…

It's a really interesting one, isn't it? I'm not giving too much away to tell you that Patrick Stewart plays both Claudius and his brother, Old Hamlet. In rehearsals, it's a very interesting thing: it's very difficult for actors to play abstracts: what does a ghost do or not do? What are the rules about this ghost? We had to invent those.

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Apparently he's looking for Hamlet. He turns up on the battlements with Marcellus and Barnardo and Francisco but doesn't seem to be able to appear to Hamlet until they bring him there. But then he [Ghost] wanders into [Hamlet's] mother's bedroom and he [Ghost] doesn't see her and she doesn't see him. But Bernardo, simple, humble Bernardo can see the ghost, so why can't Gertrude?

So you have to make rules about the Ghost and then stick to them. One of those was: because he's insubstantial and a spirit, does that mean he can't be touched? We have all sorts of backlogs of physical imagery about ghosts from films, such as Patrick Swayze as a ghost pushes through her [Demi Moore's character]. Can he touch his son or can he not touch his son? We ultimately decided that the physical contact is rather extraordinary when it happens, because you don't perhaps think it's going to happen.

Yes, I think it seems to us that Hamlet was very upset at his father's death. How close they were is very difficult to determine. You have to make certain choices, and what the Ghost does in the closet scene is very interesting. Hamlet seems to be violently predisposed towards his mother. He seems to be getting more and more angry and violent and getting more and more off his chest, and the Ghost appears at a particular point. Now why does it appear at that point? It does seem to be a catalyst, whether it's intended or not, to bring mother and son back on to some level of being able to operate as mother and son again. The rediscovery of a modus vivendi, I suppose. Now does the Ghost intend that, or is there some kind of memory of the old family unit that they were that prompts something in Hamlet to forgive his mother? I don't know. We continue to explore that. So it does tend to be different every night!

[question inaudible]

The question is what is Greg learning about this space [The Courtyard], as opposed to other spaces and the way in which this space, and spaces in the past, might lead to new spaces in the future. Errm, that made perfect sense!

Perfect sense! What was the question?! I was very pleased, actually, to be able to revive [A Midsummer Night's] Dream in here as my first one, because Michael Boyd in particular has been hogging this particular bag of tricks with the History plays, so this is the first time I've been able to be in here, and I was very lucky to be able to do a play that I knew very well by that point. I had of course directed plays in the Swan - I think I've done probably more than any of my colleagues - so I'm very familiar with the thrust space.

Transferring Dream was fascinating because the audience reactions were somehow much more immediate in this space. In the RST [the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford], where I first watched Shakespeare, the back of 'the gods' [the highest circle level of seats] is a million miles away from the stage. Here nobody is [so far away], so the closeness and immediacy of response in this space is somehow much brighter, much more sparky. I find it a relief.

It isn't an easy space but then neither was the RST. It isn't an easy space because you do have to learn it and you do have to build up the muscles in order to really get the actors reaching everybody, and acting with their backs quite a lot of the time. You also have to make sure that you use the diagonals, that you don't block members of the audience. People don't mind if somebody stands in front of them as long as they don't stand in front of them for very long, or during a big speech.

Page 6 © RSC There's a sense of movement that this stage requires in the sense of balancing the action and also avoiding what is a big temptation, which is to just play it all up there [upstage, towards the back wall], and never really use the stage down here too [downstage, nearer the audience].

So that's been fascinating because it does seem to me that it's the best place for Shakespeare. It's the best and most live space because when Hamlet debates, he debates with you. He's not talking to himself. You don't just watch this mad bloke natter away, you are engaged with his dilemma. This space makes that very live, as does the Swan, I think.

Where I really learned this was from Terry Hands when I was his assistant director on Romeo and Juliet. He said to the girl playing Juliet, "Who are you talking to when you're talking about poison?" She said, "To myself." He said, "Who are all these people out here?" So she started off taking the poison and saying, "What if this be a poison that the Friar subtly administered to have me dead?" We all watched this girl's dilemma. Then after Terry's notes, she said, "What if this be a poison that the Friar subtly administered to have me dead?" [delivered more engagingly] and you [want to reply], "I don't know"! [laughter] You just engage instead of watching at a distance sitting out there in the dark. You have to be part of the story. At its best, that's what this theatre brings to Shakespeare.

"To be or not to be" is the place where that is most developed, is it not? Because nobody know what happens after you die.

[question inaudible]

The question is were you influenced by the Oedipus complex?

It's a big red herring, isn't it? Freud's analyses of those characters (and he also analyses Leonardo da Vinci and various other real people) - it seems to me that they're interesting as a group of observations but as actors' notes they're rubbish, actually.

[In terms of the closet scene] what we worked through with Penny [Downie] and David [Tennant] was moment by moment what happened. It happens in the closet, though in Shakespeare's day I don't think there would necessarily have been a bed there… I'm not giving it away, there's a bed in our closet! But there's something about the intimacy that is explored at that point and it is dangerous. I think there's an edge to the scene and a violence underneath it which is frightening, but whether the Oedipus analogy is useful… We didn't find it so.

It's perfectly grounded as a theory, I'm sure, but as with all these things you have to start from somewhere. Ellen Terry [actress who played Ophelia opposite Henry Irving as Hamlet] went to an asylum and watched mad girls to see if they did anything interesting that she could then pinch. We haven't done that, but the whole area of madness and lunacy is a very particular area to explore and to try to understand whether the "antic disposition" that Hamlet adopts is real or where it comes from. Mostly we find that the theories help up to a point and then you've just got to get on and do it from something deep within your own experience, I think.

[question inaudible]

The question was about which big cuts did Greg make and how does he justify them.

Page 7 © RSC I have no difficulty justifying them, whatever they are, because to some extent I don't think there's such a thing as a definitive production, as I was saying before. I think the play will still exist and other people will do other bits of it.

From my point of view we discussed Fortinbras for quite a long time. I didn't cast Fortinbras, just in case I cut him. Then I had cast somebody in the production already and said, "Hey, you're playing Fortinbras now," so he was rather pleased about that, and therefore wasn't too worried that I'd taken many of Fortinbras' lines out.

I think Fortinbras is important. Vortimand and Cornelius, the Norwegian ambassadors, are frequently cut but I think they are very crucial too, because Old Hamlet was a belligerent old king and clearly diplomacy wasn't his major metier, if you like. Whereas Claudius, we learn very early on has brought this diplomatic coup in sorting out Norway, sorting out old Fortinbras by the use of the ambassadors. So we felt in terms of discovering who this new regime was under Claudius, Vortimand and Cornelius (a Cornelia in our production actually) are very important. But narratively you could say, "Let's get on with what Polonius has got to say about his daughter."

In the end I don't think you would detect a major cut of people. You can easily look back in The Shakespeare Centre [at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust] at old prompt copies and you discover that, for instance, Matthew Orchard's production with Alex Jennings cut the entire battlement scene, and actually started with something completely different. I can understand that instinct because it's a sort of desire to shake the audience up and say, "You think you know this play - maybe you don't," and allow the audience to be alert to it in a way perhaps they haven't been before.

On the other hand I think it's quite important that the first scene sets a sort of tone. Also there's a piece of text in it which is fascinating which is about the fact that secretly the new king Claudius is setting up a whole build-up of armaments. It seems to be happening secretly: through the night there are factories belching out new arms at a rate of knots and nobody seems to know really what this is all about. That piece of information comes after you've seen the Ghost for the first time, so probably you don't hear it anyway because most people think, "That was the Ghost." They're either thinking, "That was well done" or "No, it's a rubbish ghost," so they don't always hear that. But I think it's our job to make you hear those bits.

I suppose I've tried to fill it out. Sometimes surprisingly to people who know the text very well, the play-within-a-play (the actual text not the dumb-show) is much reduced, but then I don't think I know anybody who could actually quote the play- within-a-play, as the verse is a bit rubbish. So I think no, I hope it gives a good representation of the whole of Hamlet without drawing attention to what we've cut. I hope!

[question inaudible]

The question is about who decides, director or actor or both, about the decisions that have to be made about, for example: does Hamlet love Ophelia or not?

In a way I'm not a director who comes along and says, "This is what we're doing and please do it", because I don't think that's a way of working that's profitable. You have to get the actors to invest in and believe in what they're doing. My responsibility in a way is to create an environment where that can happen. So I might not always entirely agree with decisions as they grow, but as we work through a rehearsal we come to an agreement about what the play means and what it is.

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On the other hand, I'm also aware, as I've sometimes said, that directing is tyranny masquerading as democracy, and that ultimately I do have to carry the can!

[question inaudible]

The question is about the use of masks in the course of the rehearsals. [The show's programme contains rehearsal images which show the actors using masks.]

Yes - we don't actually use the masks in performance, but this was in fact the dumb show. We wanted to heighten the dramatic conventions, the way that the dumb show was acted. At one stage, we used masks partly to free up the actors physically to allow them to explore a non-verbal type of theatre and we ultimately moved on from that.

Masks have been very important in the rehearsal period of the whole season. We use masks very early on to demonstrate an interior world and an exterior world. Particularly in this play, that is very helpful because everybody is 'putting on a mask'. The whole of the court of Elsinore is pretending everything is fine but inside they're thinking, "Oh my God this is all falling apart." Ophelia can't wear a mask and she cracks up. I think a lot of the play's theme of the appearance that everything is fine – an idea that Claudius keeps up almost to the last moments of the play - was actually helped by the rehearsal process of using masks.

Thank you. Is there anyone in the audience who has never seen Hamlet before?

Lucky people!

It must be so wonderful to come to it for the first time. You probably know how it turns out, though? Our time is up, sadly. But thank you very much for coming and thank you Greg Doran.

Transcription by Veryan Boorman Edited by Suzanne Worthington © RSC

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