44 CAMILLE PAGLIA Shakespeare are exponents and defenders of a high culture that is steadily disappearing. Sir Ben Kingsley Because of the dominance of the Method in theater train- ing here, American actors seeking their own “truth” are some- THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS times impatient with the technical refinements in which British actors, with their gift for understatement, are so skilled. Rehearsal is central to the Method actor as a laboratory where SIR BEN KINGSLEY, CBE, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the ensemble merges through self-exploration. American cul- 1967 and has been recognized with the title of Honorary Associate ture, from Puritan diaries and Walt Whitman to Jackson Pol- Artist. He has performed in theatrical productions of Macbeth, As lock and Norman Mailer, has always excelled in autobiography. You Like It, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Much Ado About But which is more important—the actor or the play? Shake- Nothing, Richard III, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, speare’s plays are a world patrimony ultimately belonging to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antony and Cleopatra, The the audience, who deserve to see them with their historical dis- Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, tance and strangeness respected. The actor as spiritual quester Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and the one-man play Kean, is an archetype of our time. But when it comes to Shakespeare, based on the Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, as well as in the actor’s mission may require abandoning the self rather than films ofAntony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night. His work in such films as Gandhi, Bugsy, Schindler’s List, Sexy Beast, The finding it. House of Sand and Fog, and Hugo has earned him many honors, including an Academy Award and three nominations, two Golden Globe Awards and seven nominations, three BAFTAs, a Screen Actors Guild Award and three nominations, two Emmy nomina- tions, and a European Film Award. He is currently working on a film of Christopher Rush’s novel on the life of Shakespeare,Will .

hen Daniela, my wife, was offered Titania in A Midsum- Wmer Night’s Dream last year, it was her first experience performing Shakespeare. I had been in the famous Midsummer Night’s Dream of Peter Brook as Demetrius, and so we sat in our kitchen, right before I had to go to Morocco to film, and we worked through the role of Titania— and two things absolutely delighted me. The first was that my recall, myjoyful recall, of the play was complete and instantaneous, and very detailed. 46 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 47 The second was that Daniela’s grasp of the poetic rhythms of ton and Cicely Berry, I know that it’s possible for them to grasp Titania’s way of speaking was immediate, which could be some- the essence of that acting in the same way. I needed Daniela thing to do with her being Brazilian and with her speaking Bra- to continue this wonderful work on her Shakespeare for longer zilian Portuguese. Our appreciation of rhythm is an extremely than the run of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because she’s got important part of how we communicate artistically, musically, it, and it mustn’t elude her. And Anna did tell me, in all sincer- metaphorically, mythologically. Rhythm in speech, rhythm in ity, that the teachers in the tradition do exist. There are people written language, is crucial to the survival of an idea, and so in who completely comprehend and celebrate what Cicely is doing exploring her Titania— which turned out to be magnificent— I and they are able to pass it on, which to me is a great relief. realized that I myself had really taken in that John Barton key Now, however, the arena in which it’s being passed on is to deciphering poetic drama and turning it into an event that shrinking. I came through the British repertory system, and an audience can be moved by. The way that had stuck to my rib then the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for a period that cage was really gratifying because it has been a while since I’ve loosely spanned eight years I was part of a company in which we performed Shakespeare, and yet it was right there, hugely I’m were all listening to the same beautiful voices on stage decipher sure thanks to Peter Brook, to that production of the Dream, this extraordinary text and make it fresh to the audience, so that and to Cicely Berry, the great voice coach whom I love dearly, they were standing and cheering at the end, shouting, “Please as everyone does. do it again! Please do it again!” My plea, therefore, would be for Now, the concern with the lineage—since John Barton, Cic- schools to adopt or invite a group of travelling players. That was ely Berry, and Peter Brook are of the generation that preceded how I started, actually. It was in what’s called Theatre in Educa- my generation, and are all in their eighties—is that the thread tion, and I was with a group of players who travelled to schools that joins Shakespeare to us, that was twined by them, braided doing Shakespeare for children. We performed excerpts from by them, is going to snap. I recently asked my future daughter- Shakespearean plays, because we were only a group of four so in- law, Anna, who sometimes works with a Shakespeare com- we couldn’t do the whole plays. Later on in my career, whilst I pany, if there is anyone who is going to pass on this baton of was still associated strongly with the Royal Shakespeare Com- how to decipher this miraculous language. It’s important that pany and the National Theatre, I had an opportunity to tour people not force-feed children with it at school badly, but that American campuses with a similar small group of actors. Then, when children encounter it they actually slap their foreheads we were with much more mature students who were in their late and realize, “Of course! It’s my mum, it’s my dad, it’s my cousin, teens and early twenties, but the same gasps of recognition and it’s my life, it’s the war, it’s today.” Which of course it is. To keep understanding of a passage in a play that they were labouring banging on about Shakespeare being relevant is a bit stupid, over, and that seemed totally abstract, were beautiful to hear. really, since of course it’s relevant. It’s us. It’s the birth of the Students were exclaiming, “Oh my God, of course, that’s what greatness of our language. Using my wife as an example of the it means.” I get a rush of experience whenever I come across a generation of younger actors who have been denied John Bar- passage, especially a thorny passage which tends to lie dead on 46 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 47 The second was that Daniela’s grasp of the poetic rhythms of ton and Cicely Berry, I know that it’s possible for them to grasp Titania’s way of speaking was immediate, which could be some- the essence of that acting in the same way. I needed Daniela thing to do with her being Brazilian and with her speaking Bra- to continue this wonderful work on her Shakespeare for longer zilian Portuguese. Our appreciation of rhythm is an extremely than the run of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because she’s got important part of how we communicate artistically, musically, it, and it mustn’t elude her. And Anna did tell me, in all sincer- metaphorically, mythologically. Rhythm in speech, rhythm in ity, that the teachers in the tradition do exist. There are people written language, is crucial to the survival of an idea, and so in who completely comprehend and celebrate what Cicely is doing exploring her Titania— which turned out to be magnificent— I and they are able to pass it on, which to me is a great relief. realized that I myself had really taken in that John Barton key Now, however, the arena in which it’s being passed on is to deciphering poetic drama and turning it into an event that shrinking. I came through the British repertory system, and an audience can be moved by. The way that had stuck to my rib then the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for a period that cage was really gratifying because it has been a while since I’ve loosely spanned eight years I was part of a company in which we performed Shakespeare, and yet it was right there, hugely I’m were all listening to the same beautiful voices on stage decipher sure thanks to Peter Brook, to that production of the Dream, this extraordinary text and make it fresh to the audience, so that and to Cicely Berry, the great voice coach whom I love dearly, they were standing and cheering at the end, shouting, “Please as everyone does. do it again! Please do it again!” My plea, therefore, would be for Now, the concern with the lineage—since John Barton, Cic- schools to adopt or invite a group of travelling players. That was ely Berry, and Peter Brook are of the generation that preceded how I started, actually. It was in what’s called Theatre in Educa- my generation, and are all in their eighties—is that the thread tion, and I was with a group of players who travelled to schools that joins Shakespeare to us, that was twined by them, braided doing Shakespeare for children. We performed excerpts from by them, is going to snap. I recently asked my future daughter- Shakespearean plays, because we were only a group of four so in- law, Anna, who sometimes works with a Shakespeare com- we couldn’t do the whole plays. Later on in my career, whilst I pany, if there is anyone who is going to pass on this baton of was still associated strongly with the Royal Shakespeare Com- how to decipher this miraculous language. It’s important that pany and the National Theatre, I had an opportunity to tour people not force-feed children with it at school badly, but that American campuses with a similar small group of actors. Then, when children encounter it they actually slap their foreheads we were with much more mature students who were in their late and realize, “Of course! It’s my mum, it’s my dad, it’s my cousin, teens and early twenties, but the same gasps of recognition and it’s my life, it’s the war, it’s today.” Which of course it is. To keep understanding of a passage in a play that they were labouring banging on about Shakespeare being relevant is a bit stupid, over, and that seemed totally abstract, were beautiful to hear. really, since of course it’s relevant. It’s us. It’s the birth of the Students were exclaiming, “Oh my God, of course, that’s what greatness of our language. Using my wife as an example of the it means.” I get a rush of experience whenever I come across a generation of younger actors who have been denied John Bar- passage, especially a thorny passage which tends to lie dead on 48 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 49 the page, which suddenly springs to life in performance. These Fortunately I got into a really good school, and so I think by passages have to be acted to be understood, because there’s so osmosis I realized it was a cornerstone of my culture and my much irony in Shakespeare, and irony doesn’t translate in print. language, and so it rather effortlessly just became an accepted And also, if teachers are unaware of irony in a line, they’re not part of my landscape as a schoolboy. And I don’t know what going to pass on the irony to their pupils; they’re just going to the moment was when I realized I wanted to be a part of it all struggle with the text as it is. on stage. When I was in my late teens, nineteen I think it was, I I think the issue is very serious. I think that we need to fainted halfway through Richard III. It was a very hot day and examine the education system in the Western world and stop there were no seats for sale in the auditorium, so I paid to stand hurtling desperately into an electronic future. If there’s no at the matinee performance. The heat was so overpowering that money for education, if there’s no money for a Shakespeare I collapsed, but then I revived and watched the rest of the play, syllabus, then we’re all wasting our time. We’re all wasting our standing at the back and sometimes walking along the back of time if nobody says, “I’m going to fund a group of actors to go the auditorium as Sir Ian McKellen walked across the stage, to into classrooms, so that that’s all they do”—because it’s a won- keep a minimum distance between myself and him. The play derful first job for any group of actors. They’re well schooled, is probably 98 or 99 percent verse, so the iambic pentameters they love their Shakespeare, and they go into the classroom are remorseless and they sweep you up from the moment of and they throw a bomb into it. Bang. And they perform a scene the first line to the end. The exquisite rhythm of that language from Romeo and Juliet and kids are thinking, “I didn’t know and its mesmerizing effect has been diluted horribly, and I about that.” I’ve heard that in classrooms. think now we just have noise the way it’s usually performed. But all those wonderful gasps and revelations are not going But they’re still related. The noise is a sort of horrible offshoot to happen unless someone says, “Here are millions of dollars of the original, which is poetic drama. After the play, I met all for you. Let’s take the money from over there and put it here the actors and vowed that I would join their company, and they instead so that our children can learn to speak to each other said encouragingly, “Good luck” and “I hope you do.” and learn our language.” Instead, we’re shoving them into semi- Two or three years later, I did join them. Trevor Nunn audi- illiteracy and it’s brutally unfair. Our heritage as humans is our tioned me, and I am eternally grateful for his accepting me and language and our expressive skills, and yet we think it doesn’t then guiding me and molding me and looking after me so that I matter. “Just give them an iPhone. It doesn’t matter, it’s all became an associate artist of the company after a year, and then they’re worth.” No, it’s not. Our children are worth more than in a few years, a very few years, was playing Ariel in The Tempest that. And so I urge: funding, funding, funding. and Demetrius in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That then gave them the confidence to give me Hamlet, and to *** me that was the cornerstone and a huge event in my life. Thinking back, I can recall no specific moment when I first I’ve now done seventeen of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven or discovered Shakespeare. There was no moment of epiphany. so plays, and the only similarity I find in the characters is that 48 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 49 the page, which suddenly springs to life in performance. These Fortunately I got into a really good school, and so I think by passages have to be acted to be understood, because there’s so osmosis I realized it was a cornerstone of my culture and my much irony in Shakespeare, and irony doesn’t translate in print. language, and so it rather effortlessly just became an accepted And also, if teachers are unaware of irony in a line, they’re not part of my landscape as a schoolboy. And I don’t know what going to pass on the irony to their pupils; they’re just going to the moment was when I realized I wanted to be a part of it all struggle with the text as it is. on stage. When I was in my late teens, nineteen I think it was, I I think the issue is very serious. I think that we need to fainted halfway through Richard III. It was a very hot day and examine the education system in the Western world and stop there were no seats for sale in the auditorium, so I paid to stand hurtling desperately into an electronic future. If there’s no at the matinee performance. The heat was so overpowering that money for education, if there’s no money for a Shakespeare I collapsed, but then I revived and watched the rest of the play, syllabus, then we’re all wasting our time. We’re all wasting our standing at the back and sometimes walking along the back of time if nobody says, “I’m going to fund a group of actors to go the auditorium as Sir Ian McKellen walked across the stage, to into classrooms, so that that’s all they do”—because it’s a won- keep a minimum distance between myself and him. The play derful first job for any group of actors. They’re well schooled, is probably 98 or 99 percent verse, so the iambic pentameters they love their Shakespeare, and they go into the classroom are remorseless and they sweep you up from the moment of and they throw a bomb into it. Bang. And they perform a scene the first line to the end. The exquisite rhythm of that language from Romeo and Juliet and kids are thinking, “I didn’t know and its mesmerizing effect has been diluted horribly, and I about that.” I’ve heard that in classrooms. think now we just have noise the way it’s usually performed. But all those wonderful gasps and revelations are not going But they’re still related. The noise is a sort of horrible offshoot to happen unless someone says, “Here are millions of dollars of the original, which is poetic drama. After the play, I met all for you. Let’s take the money from over there and put it here the actors and vowed that I would join their company, and they instead so that our children can learn to speak to each other said encouragingly, “Good luck” and “I hope you do.” and learn our language.” Instead, we’re shoving them into semi- Two or three years later, I did join them. Trevor Nunn audi- illiteracy and it’s brutally unfair. Our heritage as humans is our tioned me, and I am eternally grateful for his accepting me and language and our expressive skills, and yet we think it doesn’t then guiding me and molding me and looking after me so that I matter. “Just give them an iPhone. It doesn’t matter, it’s all became an associate artist of the company after a year, and then they’re worth.” No, it’s not. Our children are worth more than in a few years, a very few years, was playing Ariel in The Tempest that. And so I urge: funding, funding, funding. and Demetrius in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That then gave them the confidence to give me Hamlet, and to *** me that was the cornerstone and a huge event in my life. Thinking back, I can recall no specific moment when I first I’ve now done seventeen of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven or discovered Shakespeare. There was no moment of epiphany. so plays, and the only similarity I find in the characters is that 50 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 51 they’re written by the same great writer. They’re all aspects of now, I sometimes get screenplays sent to me where a sequence the same extraordinary mind. Hamlet and Feste, for instance, of dialogue can be “Fuck you!” “No, no, fuck you!” “No, fuck are both products of this huge intelligence and yet are com- you!” “No, no, fuck you!” “Oh, great,” I think. “How wonderful pletely unlike each other, even though both play the fool and that we’ve evolved to that.” But it’s catastrophic, really, when in both share a certain detached wisdom. What we lack now, in the space of that many lines Shakespeare could have given you our society, in our leadership, are people who are “No” men a little kingdom of intellect and challenge. “To be, or not to be” as opposed to “Yes” men. So many people who get elected into now would be “What the fuck?” And that would be it. powerful positions are around people who say, “Of course you During rehearsals of Hamlet, we played with colloquializa- can,” “Of course you must,” “You’re absolutely right,” rather tions to get into the play and help it feel modern, and then one than the all-licensed fool who says, “What are you doing? You day a curious thing happened. Buzz Goodbody, a wonderful have a brain like an egg”— and won’t be shot, or sacked, or dis- young woman who had terrific authority and massive affec- missed. Unfortunately, Hamlet can’t be his own fool, but in a tion for her cast, was directing, and Andre Van Gyseghem, a sense he has to be. That’s what damns him and blesses him: he senior member of the cast then, was playing Polonius. We were has to try to be his own fool. focusing on the relationship with the generation that played the In terms of commenting on my own work, of telling more dysfunctional parents, Polonius and Claudius and Gertrude, about how I played Feste and how I played Hamlet, I’m hope- all of them spying on their children, all of them power- mad, less. The commentator can comment on my work, but I can’t, all of them serving very distorted causes. As we were rehears- just in the way that Hamlet can’t be his own fool. I simply can’t, ing, we were seduced wrongly by the fact that we were playing since I’ve really no idea other than I have a deep appreciation in modern dress and therefore thought that we had to make of language and of gracefully communicating an idea, which it modern, which is ludicrous because Shakespeare is modern is shrinking so fast in our culture it’s shocking. How can you anyways. If you put it in modern dress, the language doesn’t gracefully impart an idea to another? Graciously, tantalizingly, need to change. Why should it? But the occasional “um,” “oh,” in such a way that it is intriguing and beautiful? The language and “you know” were slipping in, which was dreadful, in the is collapsing at an astonishing rate. Conversation and wit and same way that you don’t put twiggy bits into Mozart. And then riposte and debate were a pastime for people. They actually Buzz said, “Okay, one of you in the cast is rehearsing in a com- went to coffeehouses or inns or taverns or had dinner, and they pletely appropriate manner, and is serving the text,” and we never stopped talking. Even well after Shakespeare, there were all realized, of course, that it was Andre, who was performing, huge, wonderful architectural ideas like those of Mozart or like rehearsing, and speaking at twice the rate of anyone else in the those of the great architects themselves in the Reformation and room, and we realized that speed is of the essence when you’re Restoration. The architecture and the music were ascending and reading Shakespeare, just as speed and rhythm and compressed awkward and confident, and I’m sure their creators’ conversa- energy are of the essence when you’re performing Mozart. You tions were like that too: they were capping one another. And don’t pause. If you pause, you lose the audience. The audience 50 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 51 they’re written by the same great writer. They’re all aspects of now, I sometimes get screenplays sent to me where a sequence the same extraordinary mind. Hamlet and Feste, for instance, of dialogue can be “Fuck you!” “No, no, fuck you!” “No, fuck are both products of this huge intelligence and yet are com- you!” “No, no, fuck you!” “Oh, great,” I think. “How wonderful pletely unlike each other, even though both play the fool and that we’ve evolved to that.” But it’s catastrophic, really, when in both share a certain detached wisdom. What we lack now, in the space of that many lines Shakespeare could have given you our society, in our leadership, are people who are “No” men a little kingdom of intellect and challenge. “To be, or not to be” as opposed to “Yes” men. So many people who get elected into now would be “What the fuck?” And that would be it. powerful positions are around people who say, “Of course you During rehearsals of Hamlet, we played with colloquializa- can,” “Of course you must,” “You’re absolutely right,” rather tions to get into the play and help it feel modern, and then one than the all-licensed fool who says, “What are you doing? You day a curious thing happened. Buzz Goodbody, a wonderful have a brain like an egg”— and won’t be shot, or sacked, or dis- young woman who had terrific authority and massive affec- missed. Unfortunately, Hamlet can’t be his own fool, but in a tion for her cast, was directing, and Andre Van Gyseghem, a sense he has to be. That’s what damns him and blesses him: he senior member of the cast then, was playing Polonius. We were has to try to be his own fool. focusing on the relationship with the generation that played the In terms of commenting on my own work, of telling more dysfunctional parents, Polonius and Claudius and Gertrude, about how I played Feste and how I played Hamlet, I’m hope- all of them spying on their children, all of them power- mad, less. The commentator can comment on my work, but I can’t, all of them serving very distorted causes. As we were rehears- just in the way that Hamlet can’t be his own fool. I simply can’t, ing, we were seduced wrongly by the fact that we were playing since I’ve really no idea other than I have a deep appreciation in modern dress and therefore thought that we had to make of language and of gracefully communicating an idea, which it modern, which is ludicrous because Shakespeare is modern is shrinking so fast in our culture it’s shocking. How can you anyways. If you put it in modern dress, the language doesn’t gracefully impart an idea to another? Graciously, tantalizingly, need to change. Why should it? But the occasional “um,” “oh,” in such a way that it is intriguing and beautiful? The language and “you know” were slipping in, which was dreadful, in the is collapsing at an astonishing rate. Conversation and wit and same way that you don’t put twiggy bits into Mozart. And then riposte and debate were a pastime for people. They actually Buzz said, “Okay, one of you in the cast is rehearsing in a com- went to coffeehouses or inns or taverns or had dinner, and they pletely appropriate manner, and is serving the text,” and we never stopped talking. Even well after Shakespeare, there were all realized, of course, that it was Andre, who was performing, huge, wonderful architectural ideas like those of Mozart or like rehearsing, and speaking at twice the rate of anyone else in the those of the great architects themselves in the Reformation and room, and we realized that speed is of the essence when you’re Restoration. The architecture and the music were ascending and reading Shakespeare, just as speed and rhythm and compressed awkward and confident, and I’m sure their creators’ conversa- energy are of the essence when you’re performing Mozart. You tions were like that too: they were capping one another. And don’t pause. If you pause, you lose the audience. The audience 52 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 53 are running to keep up. That’s what they’ve paid for. That is as I said to my son, “Don’t look up, because you’ll feel it’s insur- their joy. Hamlet is not a four-hour anesthetic. It’s a two-hour mountable. Don’t look down, because you’ll fall. All you can do challenge to the brain. Having then as a group been given this is go from one handhold to another, one foothold to another, opportunity, we started to listen and appreciate Andre in a very and the rock face is all you can see.” You have to apply that to different way, and all of us then, overnight, dropped all of our playing Hamlet. You have to be in the moment. The responsibil- additions and colloquialisms and insertions of “um” and “uh.” ity itself is inextricably linked with Hamlet’s own journey and Then Buzz encouraged us to have speed runs, whereby we second nature. Hamlet himself says to the audience, in effect, would do the whole play at a very dangerous rate. It was nerve- “Why am I given this responsibility? Oh cursed spite, that ever wracking. A speed run forces you to be essential, to find in your I was born to set it right. Why me?” So the crushing responsi- speed the essence of what you’re trying to communicate, and to bility that Hamlet feels in setting a rotten dynasty right is so realize how emphatical, and how repetitively emphatic, Shake- massive, one thinks, compared to the act or struggle of getting speare can be, and how that emphasis finally gets through to through the performance— but they’re parallel. a rather restless sprawling audience on many, many different I discovered this parallel in great writing, and then I really levels. A lot of Shakespeare’s audience were illiterate. Now the learned to exploit it and explore it. It served me well playing plays have become quartered into some kind of elitist literate Gandhi, because my journey through Gandhi, my relationship exercise. It’s stupid. The plays are there to entertain and dazzle with the Indian crowds, and my acceptance of what it was to people who have brains and love language. A lot of people, the play him was a wonderful exercise in putting the ego in the groundlings, couldn’t read or write, but it didn’t matter. “Let us right place. It was a challenge just to get through the film and go and hear a play,” they used to say. They didn’t say “Let us go to play another of the most intelligent people in the world— and see a play,” although I’m sure the blood-and- gore action on although Hamlet is fictional he is one of the most intelligent stage was amazing and thrilling to watch. people who ever didn’t live, and Gandhi is possibly the most My son Ferdinand understudied Rory Kinnear as Ham- intelligent person who ever did live. He’s up there with Shake- let at the National Theatre in 2010. He played Rosencrantz in speare. And my efforts to be the most intelligent man in the that production, and his Rosencrantz was exquisitely good. As world, between action and cut, was a microcosm of Gandhi’s a result of his role as understudy, I was able to watch my son’s effort to liberate India. It’s all connected. If you choose the role own Hamlet on stage, with Dani and his sister and his brother or the role is chosen for you, either way it’s blessed, since the and various other family members and all the other family state of grace that the actor’s in is that his own state completely members and friends and agents of the understudy cast. It’s a complements the journey of the character. It’s no surprise to play I find very difficult to watch, but within a few seconds I me, having played Hamlet, that Hamlet is carried off the stage realized that even though Ferdinand is ten years too young to at the end of the play by his fellow actors. He’s exhausted. They play it, he’s already got it. bear him to the stage. He’s carried off. I was carried off the stage To capture Hamlet is an extraordinary responsibility. But by my fellow actors every night, lifted and carried. It was a won- 52 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 53 are running to keep up. That’s what they’ve paid for. That is as I said to my son, “Don’t look up, because you’ll feel it’s insur- their joy. Hamlet is not a four-hour anesthetic. It’s a two-hour mountable. Don’t look down, because you’ll fall. All you can do challenge to the brain. Having then as a group been given this is go from one handhold to another, one foothold to another, opportunity, we started to listen and appreciate Andre in a very and the rock face is all you can see.” You have to apply that to different way, and all of us then, overnight, dropped all of our playing Hamlet. You have to be in the moment. The responsibil- additions and colloquialisms and insertions of “um” and “uh.” ity itself is inextricably linked with Hamlet’s own journey and Then Buzz encouraged us to have speed runs, whereby we second nature. Hamlet himself says to the audience, in effect, would do the whole play at a very dangerous rate. It was nerve- “Why am I given this responsibility? Oh cursed spite, that ever wracking. A speed run forces you to be essential, to find in your I was born to set it right. Why me?” So the crushing responsi- speed the essence of what you’re trying to communicate, and to bility that Hamlet feels in setting a rotten dynasty right is so realize how emphatical, and how repetitively emphatic, Shake- massive, one thinks, compared to the act or struggle of getting speare can be, and how that emphasis finally gets through to through the performance— but they’re parallel. a rather restless sprawling audience on many, many different I discovered this parallel in great writing, and then I really levels. A lot of Shakespeare’s audience were illiterate. Now the learned to exploit it and explore it. It served me well playing plays have become quartered into some kind of elitist literate Gandhi, because my journey through Gandhi, my relationship exercise. It’s stupid. The plays are there to entertain and dazzle with the Indian crowds, and my acceptance of what it was to people who have brains and love language. A lot of people, the play him was a wonderful exercise in putting the ego in the groundlings, couldn’t read or write, but it didn’t matter. “Let us right place. It was a challenge just to get through the film and go and hear a play,” they used to say. They didn’t say “Let us go to play another of the most intelligent people in the world— and see a play,” although I’m sure the blood-and- gore action on although Hamlet is fictional he is one of the most intelligent stage was amazing and thrilling to watch. people who ever didn’t live, and Gandhi is possibly the most My son Ferdinand understudied Rory Kinnear as Ham- intelligent person who ever did live. He’s up there with Shake- let at the National Theatre in 2010. He played Rosencrantz in speare. And my efforts to be the most intelligent man in the that production, and his Rosencrantz was exquisitely good. As world, between action and cut, was a microcosm of Gandhi’s a result of his role as understudy, I was able to watch my son’s effort to liberate India. It’s all connected. If you choose the role own Hamlet on stage, with Dani and his sister and his brother or the role is chosen for you, either way it’s blessed, since the and various other family members and all the other family state of grace that the actor’s in is that his own state completely members and friends and agents of the understudy cast. It’s a complements the journey of the character. It’s no surprise to play I find very difficult to watch, but within a few seconds I me, having played Hamlet, that Hamlet is carried off the stage realized that even though Ferdinand is ten years too young to at the end of the play by his fellow actors. He’s exhausted. They play it, he’s already got it. bear him to the stage. He’s carried off. I was carried off the stage To capture Hamlet is an extraordinary responsibility. But by my fellow actors every night, lifted and carried. It was a won- 54 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 55 derful moment, because you are high and you’re completely I didn’t know whether I could finish the play. I was exhausted exhausted, but you’ve done it. “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to already. During the third soliloquy I even left the play, and then the stage” (5.2.350) is what Fortinbras commands, and it should had to decide to come back. After that, of course, the rest of the be done, as it was in my production—he should be lifted and play provides its own amazing, escalating energy. carried. The magic of bringing these characters to life, either on What elevates the human being above other creatures on stage or in film, isn’t as imprecise as you might imagine. I think earth is that we are by nature expressive. We have to express. it’s a question of technique. In terms of the acting craft, what And Shakespeare gave himself expression. The intelligence, I can offer is a metaphor for what I was and what I now am: the questing, the unstoppable intellect was given expression that I was a landscape painter, and that now I’m a portrait art- through his plays. And I suppose that my journey as an actor is ist. However, my portrayal on screen is utterly dependent on also expressive. Whether or not I’m expressing anything of any the director understanding how I am exploring and sharing importance is not up to me to say, but I do feel it profoundly the character, and therefore putting the camera in exactly the as an actor, through my craft, as fully expressed when I choose right place to be a conspirator in the process of sharing with the the right role, with the right director—and that covers every audience— and it’s absolutely crucial because, I promise you, experience I’ve ever had with good directors and good material. if the camera is in the wrong place I am wasting my time. The Just as, at the height of my adrenaline rush performing connection will be lost. Hamlet there was a feeling of extraordinary public privacy, Since acting is so essentially expressive, it’s about getting so, between action and cut— as for instance when I portrayed close to other human beings, real or imagined. It’s about over- Feste in Sir Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night— am I at my coming the distances between us, and it’s about exploring our most sublimely private, even though the camera is there. The affective and intellectual potential. In our world, however, tech- cousin to the soliloquy now is the close- up. And in a close- up nology is taking over and getting in the way. The antidote is of me under Martin Scorsese’s direction— I’ve had the privi- not just Shakespeare; it’s each other. It’s the joy of that land- lege of being in two of his films—I am secure in the knowledge scape which we mustn’t allow to shrink— and yet it seems to be that I am at my most private, and that Martin is getting it. It’s shrinking with every generation. So I find that my biggest hope a lovely feeling, and so in the same way is my dependence on for the future is that we don’t sacrifice human contact. There’s the audience’s participation to get me through Hamlet by shar- no substitute for it, either in life or in art. ing with them, “Should I commit suicide or should I carry on? What should I do?” And it’s an absolutely honest, earnest ques- tion to the audience, in the middle of the play, when the actor doesn’t know whether he has the strength to finish the play or not. Every night, I came to that point and I thought, “Well, of course, of course it makes sense to ask these questions” because 54 SIR BEN KINGSLEY THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS 55 derful moment, because you are high and you’re completely I didn’t know whether I could finish the play. I was exhausted exhausted, but you’ve done it. “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to already. During the third soliloquy I even left the play, and then the stage” (5.2.350) is what Fortinbras commands, and it should had to decide to come back. After that, of course, the rest of the be done, as it was in my production—he should be lifted and play provides its own amazing, escalating energy. carried. The magic of bringing these characters to life, either on What elevates the human being above other creatures on stage or in film, isn’t as imprecise as you might imagine. I think earth is that we are by nature expressive. We have to express. it’s a question of technique. In terms of the acting craft, what And Shakespeare gave himself expression. The intelligence, I can offer is a metaphor for what I was and what I now am: the questing, the unstoppable intellect was given expression that I was a landscape painter, and that now I’m a portrait art- through his plays. And I suppose that my journey as an actor is ist. However, my portrayal on screen is utterly dependent on also expressive. Whether or not I’m expressing anything of any the director understanding how I am exploring and sharing importance is not up to me to say, but I do feel it profoundly the character, and therefore putting the camera in exactly the as an actor, through my craft, as fully expressed when I choose right place to be a conspirator in the process of sharing with the the right role, with the right director—and that covers every audience— and it’s absolutely crucial because, I promise you, experience I’ve ever had with good directors and good material. if the camera is in the wrong place I am wasting my time. The Just as, at the height of my adrenaline rush performing connection will be lost. Hamlet there was a feeling of extraordinary public privacy, Since acting is so essentially expressive, it’s about getting so, between action and cut— as for instance when I portrayed close to other human beings, real or imagined. It’s about over- Feste in Sir Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night— am I at my coming the distances between us, and it’s about exploring our most sublimely private, even though the camera is there. The affective and intellectual potential. In our world, however, tech- cousin to the soliloquy now is the close- up. And in a close- up nology is taking over and getting in the way. The antidote is of me under Martin Scorsese’s direction— I’ve had the privi- not just Shakespeare; it’s each other. It’s the joy of that land- lege of being in two of his films—I am secure in the knowledge scape which we mustn’t allow to shrink— and yet it seems to be that I am at my most private, and that Martin is getting it. It’s shrinking with every generation. So I find that my biggest hope a lovely feeling, and so in the same way is my dependence on for the future is that we don’t sacrifice human contact. There’s the audience’s participation to get me through Hamlet by shar- no substitute for it, either in life or in art. ing with them, “Should I commit suicide or should I carry on? What should I do?” And it’s an absolutely honest, earnest ques- tion to the audience, in the middle of the play, when the actor doesn’t know whether he has the strength to finish the play or not. Every night, I came to that point and I thought, “Well, of course, of course it makes sense to ask these questions” because