Hamlet In Pieces

Shakespeare Reworked by Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson

Andy Lavender

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781854596185
• eBook ISBN: 9781780019154
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Three extraordinary productions of Hamlet by three giants of modern theatre.

Peter Brook, Robert Lepage and Robert Wilson have all attempted radical reworkings of Hamlet. This book examines their very different approaches.

Brook's Qui Est La - his 'variation' on Hamlet - was first seen in Paris in 1995, incorporating the writings of Artaud, Brecht, Craig, Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Zeami Motikoyo into edited scenes from Shakespeare's play. He has since tackled the full play in a spare and definitive production which provides the subject of the epilogue to this volume.

Lepage's Elsinore is a technically complex tour de force - a multimedia drama on a moving set, with Lepage playing all the characters.

Wilson's Hamlet: a monologue, directed, designed and performed by Wilson himself, is a one-man show - but one that needs twenty backstage staff to bring it to life.

Vividly reconstructing each of the three productions, the author offers a dyamic combination of casebook and critique, complete with 16 pages of production photos.

1

The Play without the Play

‘ . . . for look where my abridgement comes’

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

Departures

Within the space of a year, between 1995 and ’96, three extraordinary shows were produced by three celebrated figures in world theatre: Qui Est Là, directed by Peter Brook, Elsinore, directed by Robert Lepage and Hamlet: a monologue, directed by Robert Wilson. Each was a version – at least in part – of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. None of them treated the play in anything like an orthodox manner. Lepage and Wilson both ‘starred’ in their own one-man shows (Lepage wasn’t quite solo, since he worked with a double). Wilson’s monologue was the more spare, relying on striking stage imagery and a sophisticated sound design. Lepage’s show was a feat of technical bravado, using revolving screens, slide and video projections and live computerised treatments of voice and image. Brook’s production was a glimpse of possible stagings of Hamlet within an audacious framework: the performers discussed the play in the light of the theatrical approaches of five eminent European directors (Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Craig, Artaud and Brecht) and a thirteenth-century Noh master named Zeami. Five years later Brook followed through and staged a full production of the play. Each practitioner’s show was eagerly awaited. Each created a buzz.

I live in London. I saw Hamlet: a monologue and Qui Est Là in Paris, and Elsinore in Brussels. I further encountered the shows and various personnel involved in their staging in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Quebec City. I mention this to highlight the cosmopolitan nature of the productions and the particular niche they occupy. I was a member of the audience for professional purposes, writing about each show for an Arts page which would occasionally report theatre events from abroad – those so eye-catching that reviews about them circulate even in countries which the productions are not scheduled to visit (Qui Est Là and Hamlet: a monologue have not been staged in Britain). Publicity departments (and to an extent newspapers) are happy to pay expenses to enable the coverage of theatre which is recognisably international. These are not large-scale shows in the sense of Miss Saigon or Cats, which enjoyed long runs in London’s West End before being cloned and reproduced in theatre capitals around the world. The three Hamlet-variations are in their way no less global – but they give out a more exclusive allure. Each is a one-off, a unique approach to a classic text by an influential director. Each trades upon an identity as art – or rather, as ‘artertainment’: art-house theatre which appears sexy rather than obscure.

This really is select work for an international clientele. I didn’t see any of the shows ‘at home’ until Elsinore came to the National Theatre in London. I had to become a tourist. But then the theatre companies themselves were tourists, moving from one culture-capital to another. Qui Est Là played a longish run to its Parisian audience at Brook’s base at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, and Hamlet: a monologue opened at the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas, under a co-production arrangement. That said, none of these shows would have been made (or made in the way they were) if they had not toured internationally. And here the identities of the three directors function like a marque. Their theatre is a near-global commodity, stamped with their respective names. We can of course say the same of Shakespeare.¹

The frisson offered by each production lay in the apparent radicalism of their approaches to Hamlet. Here was an iconic text of world theatre seized upon – at around the same time, strangely – by three of the western world’s most brilliant theatre-makers. You might agree with the view of W. B. Worthen that directors turn to Stratford’s most famous son not to get at some authentic Bardic truth, but to ‘authorize their own efforts by locating them under the sign of “Shakespeare”.’² It is certainly a neon-bright sign. To be fair, neither Brook, Lepage nor Wilson claimed to be uncovering the heart of the original text, but Shakespeare’s name was indeed displayed to suggest the weight and significance of their respective projects. As Peter Brook said, ‘Our group of actors, which is an international group, coming together round the play that is perhaps the best-known play in the world, can’t fail to find that this evokes all sorts of immediate questions of theatre.’ Lepage and Wilson might have been inclined to say something similar. ‘Immediate questions of theatre’ are raised by all three productions.

Variations

In case you’re not familiar with one or more of this trio of directors, here are some common observations.³ Peter Brook perhaps needs the least introduction. Born in 1925 and based in Paris since 1970, he is widely thought of as ‘the major British director of our time’.⁴ His recent work has attempted transcultural fusion (Conference of the Birds, 1979 and The Mahabharata, 1985), the figuring of neurological processes (L’Homme Qui/The Man Who, 1993/94 and Je suis un phénomène, 1998) and reappraisal of the qualities of ‘classic’ theatre pieces (Beckett’s Oh! Les Beaux Jours, 1997, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, 1981, revisited in 1988, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1990). His theatre seeks to plunder a variety of sources in order to tap what is ‘transcendent’ or ‘universal’. This is accompanied by a quest for purity where the stage features nothing extraneous. Brook’s actors present themselves in play, and simultaneously in communion with what might be described as a graceful sense of human potentiality. This is spiritual in its implications, evoking as it does the registers of Zen-like masterliness through humility. Theatre, for Brook, is a means of drawing audiences into transcendent structures which are always mythic and metaphorical.

Born in 1957, Robert Lepage is a notorious internationalist, jetting from his native Quebec to cities in Japan, Sweden, England and Germany, although he has reoriented his work in Quebec of late. He is adept at using improvisation as a basis for creativity, whether in his one-man shows (Vinci, 1986, Needles and Opium, 1991, and Elsinore) or in the work which he has developed with other actors, notably The Dragon’s Trilogy (1985-87), Polygraph (1988), Tectonic Plates (1988-91), The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994-97) and The Geometry of Miracles (1998-99). The starting points for this work might be multiple and disconnected, but Lepage moulds them into a form of theatre which trades in thematic and visual connections and which exploits the stage in order to create striking transformational effects, often using the most ordinary objects and technologies. This, then, is a theatre of the imagination. Lepage is a pioneer of mixed-media performance, in particular involving video and slide projection in his shows, and he talks persuasively about the production of theatre for an audience weaned on television and cinema.

Robert Wilson, born in 1944, is a director-scenographer-lighting designer, unquestionably a magus of the visual. His achievement has been to concretise on stage a brand of spectacular neo-surrealism. On seeing Wilson’s Deafman Glance in 1971, Louis Aragon famously wrote to the dead André Breton, ‘He is what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us.’⁵ This has laid Wilson open to charges of emptiness and decadence, as if the work were nothing more than fancy images. In fact his radicalism lies in his formalist daring. He has staged shows longer than most (KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE presented at the Haft Tan Mountain in Shiraz, Iran in 1972, lasted for over 168 hours) and has resisted more than any other established theatre artist the claims of representation (shows which are clearly about something) in favour of those of pure presentation. Wilson is noted for his collaborations – with Sheryl Sutton, Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, Jessye Norman, Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, Tom Waits – but he is also held in high regard as the definitive theatre auteur, painting with space, light and movement in order to manifest his own idiosyncratic vision. He sells his two-dimensional drawings and paintings, and works additonally as a sculptor and installation artist. For many his pre-linguistic understanding of shape and visual dynamics are unsurpassed in theatre.

All three have things in common. None is what we might describe as a ‘jobbing’ director, waged to produce other people’s plays. Each has forged a career out of a very personal signature, making outcomes which are ‘Brookian’, or ‘Lepagean’, or ‘Wilsonian’. Each is the subject of extensive coverage in the broadsheets and in scholarly publications. Each has established his own base for research and development. Each devotes more time than is usual to workshopping and rehearsal. So in the first instance this book is about the work of three distinguished and distinctive individuals.

Theatre directing, as we understand it, is a late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century phenomenon. Directors didn’t used to exist at all. Of course there would be someone calling the shots – a playwright or actor-manager, usually, often working for a patron. The role of the director as someone who marshals the work of specialised colleagues – a technocrat of the stage – has emerged relatively recently. The director is now functionally embedded in modern theatre, although the march of collaborative and devised theatre might once again reformulate the prevailing hierarchy of production. For all that they are treated as auteurs, Brook, Lepage and Wilson are expert facilitators of the work of a range of collaborators. That has always been part of the director’s role, but the difference here is that these collaborators really are co-creators. This means that the composition of a piece of theatre does not reside quite as readily with the playwright-director duopoly. Changed responsibilities make for innovative theatre-making, because the very moulds and presses are different.

So this book is also about theatre direction at a time when directorial practices are in a state of transition. It is, more modestly, about three approaches to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play has commonly been seen as the gateway through which an actor passes to a more exalted realm. In the latter part of this century, in England alone, Olivier, Burton, Pryce, Branagh, Rylance and Fiennes (to name but a few) have presented their interpretations of the role. Hamlet is now not just the actor’s challenge sine qua non, but the auteur’s.

The coincidence of the first three approaches to the play – the Hamlet-variations – seemed too good to miss. What made three of the leading directors in international theatre turn to the same play, with the same dismantling intent, at the same time? The productions found some of its topics – incest, madness, fratricide, contemplation and play-acting – especially modern. Taken together, they suggest a late-twentieth-century fascination with the existential and psychological strands of the play, and with the business of being theatrical. The contiguity of the three productions also allows us to say something about the processes by which they were made, and about emergent practices in theatre-making. Brook’s full production of the play squares the circle and offers a nice point of comparison.

In writing this book, I set myself a simple initial objective: to find out how the variations on Hamlet were created. It is easy to mystify theatre-making, assuming that the writer and/or the director is a genius, or that actors have a gift which makes them more sensitive than the rest of us. I don’t seek to deny the special talents of the individual directors nor the skills of fine actors. But theatre-making is a job of work, and like any work it involves management and organisation, sets of decisions, relationships between individuals and systematised processes of creativity and production. A shrewdly-handled creative process is more likely to produce an effective outcome, even in this mercurial business. I wanted to uncover the various steps of rehearsal of each production, cast light on the shaping input of a range of collaborators and discover who did what, when and to what effect.

Needless to say, I found that the traces of rehearsal work were already blurred. But I was able to get close enough to see the outlines of different sorts of theatre-making which had interesting overlaps. Each production, for instance, was developed through a collaborative, partly improvisatory rehearsal process. Each required extensive development time, much of it in the rehearsal room physicalising ideas or instincts. Each process prizes the operation of intuition. And the work of all three practitioners brings us especially close to a ‘theatre theatrical’ as opposed to a theatre which is a medium for playtexts. Of course theatre usually involves configurations of body, space, voice and sound, in time, for a gathered audience – elements which are all quite other than literary. But in general over the last century the playtext has dominated as the authority for the things which are staged. Words come first, and actions (which do not necessarily speak louder) serve to underline them. With Qui Est Là, Elsinore and Hamlet: a monologue we are in the presence of something rather different.

The three shows were made within the workshop-space and on the stage. They were worked up with collaborators (actors, stage doubles, co-directors, designers, lighting and sound designers, musicians). They are stained with the sweat and grease of rehearsal – except that this is more than rehearsal, it is the making of something entirely new out of that old warhorse Hamlet. Let’s be honest: none of the three productions really, centrally, stages the play. Instead they perform their own modernity. In so doing they subject Shakespeare to the (modern, selective, ruthless) creativity of accomplished theatre artists. Their drastic insistence upon theatricality first and last is all the more piquant if the starting point is that resonantly Eng. Lit. text, Hamlet.

Has Shakespeare therefore been ‘betrayed’? Bardolators await round many a corner, eagle-eyed for anything which smacks of upstartish traducing of Shakespeare’s foundational text. On the other hand, such is the saturation of Shakespeare-performance that companies and directors can only guarantee the currency of their work by offering a definitively new staging. The current economy of Shakespearean production makes auteurish innovation inevitable – and simultaneously marks out the genuinely innovative production for controversy. Each of the three directors paid scrupulous regard to their authorial source, although in ways which also appear to license them to take the most extreme liberties with his work. According to Wilson, Shakespeare is a ‘rock’. For Lepage, Shakespeare’s text is so dextrously made that ‘you could walk on it with golf shoes and it survives.’ Peter Brook has built a career on radical stagings of Shakespeare, but he is tart in his estimation of the Bard: ‘In rehearsal and privately one uses very severe words in relation to Shakespeare, who on one hand one admires more than any other author, and on the other hand one doesn’t hesitate to say, “This is unbelievably boring, let’s cut it”.’

Hamlet went under the knife in all three productions. But to what end? I confess that my interest here is less in the object of textual surgery, and more in the techniques by which the surgeons carved it up, and in the new bodies which they produced. Of course, Brook, Lepage and Wilson were not the first to approach Shakespeare with a gleam in their scalpels. They follow a long line of text-slashers – some more cavalier than others, but a good n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Play without the Play
• 2. Qui Est Là • Peter Brook
• 3. Elsinore • Robert Lepage
• 4. Hamlet: a monologue • Robert Wilson
• 5. Hamlet • the director’s cut
• 6. Point of Return
• Appendix: Brook’s The Tragedy of Hamlet
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright Information