lol, "a bit of editing".
As far as I'm concerned, I find it fascinating to type his words down -even if someties it gets hard to understand the meaning. Not only are his ideas interetesting, the vocabulary he uses is also formidable.
I, too, don't think he had any sort of script, but he must have had some of the questions (partly, because you can clearly see he exposes his thoughts) prepared , so he probably prepared the general answer for some questions. With that kind of play there are questions that cannot not be adressed, so I suppose it would make it easier to prepare.
But then again, I suppose that he and the rest of the cast, and the production team had thought about it all prior to making the show. (Oh, wait, I'm paraphrasing Ben here).
Anyway, here's part III

One of these, like several other productions, the decision’s made to cut things out of it, for some things drop off, they drop off Eda, frankly miss him, not really, were there a dynamic that you shared about how this should be done because the speed of it is remarkable, to be remarked on, the speed at which you move, the speed at which the things suddenly move, so in that aspect the driving-through, there’s a reas- there’s an urgenc-, there’s really - there’s a fascinating contrast between the urgency of the action and the consideredness of the thought. The thought, in most of the soliloquies, is considered, and it’s not heard, it’s a rumination, it’s round this planet going around the earth, but the action is always (noises to indicate the action never stops, there’s always something happening). You must have agreed that between you.
 
Not really, no, I mean we sat down in the – I’m loving it, I’m not disagreeing with it, in doing the action, I enjoy it, it’s a long, it’s an extraordinary ask of a night, but it’s great, great, great fun to be involved in. When we sat down and first talked about the play, obviously years ago, I asked her to direct it, funny it was sitting in Regent’s park talking about it, and actually she said “do you have a Hamlet in mind –hope she doesn’t mind me sharing this – I mean, do you have a way, a thing that you want to do with it?” and I went “No I want to discover it in the rehearsal with you and a cast” so I kind of gave her a little bit of cut branch, I suppose, to…just extraordinary imagination and talent and, of course, as the designs evolved and the cast evolved –you know I had my improvement in read through and talking about this and this piece here that’s not there and I’d really like to keep that in or can we move that there? But it was an evolving conversation as well, it was so…None of us signed off from any of it until probably our press night this Tuesday when we went “okay. We’ve got a show that we’ve rehearsed, we know where the beats of the action are, we know when the intentions change within those beats of action, we know who these characters are through researching our ideas about them, our backstories based on research we did on the world of the play and the way in which we’re approaching it, so –I know we don’t have laptops and mobiles but- in some modern sort of the world, it’s not set 400 years ago or even earlier as Shakespeare intended it, but it’s something that’s relevant to now”. And from that we’ve crafted a framework which is going round and round and it’s still being investigated in, but safely within parameters that are agreeable between the cast and the production team and the extraordinary crew, so…Yeah. It’s a bold thing, but I think it’s the best thing. If you come knowing how you want to say these words, you don’t discover them every night, you don’t have fresh thought, you can’t make links you haven’t made before, you can’t go on a journey from the first time you say these words to the public to the last time.
 
Does the audience influence the way you say these words sometimes?
 
No, well, if I’m really honest sometimes you can have fire audience thinking it’s dangerous as an actor to do that, it completely takes you out of what you’re concentrating on which is a very specific moment by moment building of this person and his thoughts. But when it does, it’s all sorts of things, I mean I’m not gonna lie, there’s so much direct communication with that body out there that… Yeah. There are times, there are times, and it’s interesting what it does, it can propel you into an urgency to be even more direct and so, I’m just saying this to you, I’m not dressing it up at all, I’m not, I’m just having this thought and I’m sharing it with you. There are other times when there are a cough or two and you kind of, you know, wait a bit, so there’s some consideration but you know it’s a dangerous, it’s a dynamic every night, it’s a great dynamic.
 
The appearance of the ghost is key. How did you, how did you feel about the way you approached that?
 
 How do you mean?
 
Well let me put it in a different way, were you worried –
 
The ghost in the 21st century?
 
Yeah. Were you worried about that?
 
Of course, I was. And I mean we’ve talked about it, about bells and whistles and holograms but then –
 
Can I bust in your thoughts?
 
Yeah, maybe you should tell me what your thoughts are about that after I’ve done it for a few months.
 
No, no, no, it’s just that I think there are still ghosts they’re just inside our heads. I mean we’re full of ghosts, full of people who are dead and come back, I’m not talking at all like “Oh I am in touch with…” none of that at all, it’s just that our minds are full of ghosts. Our parents, and lovers, and friends and…So the idea of having other presences in our minds is what is part of our minds.
 
Well, for a play is about memory, about past, about death, it makes complete sense that there is a manifestation of that and I think, even though certain people within the plot also witness the ghost
– Horatio, myself, Barnardo but not, interestingly, Gertrude – it’s still, it’s very much what you say, the potency of how present a raw and recent absence can be, and though someone in flesh and blood is not there, you can still smell them in clothes, hear them in music, in sensory perceptions you have of the world that are still very real and then of course they are within your head like you said, there are… It’s the fabric of what makes us alive now, it’s what’s come before us and to ignore that is the danger, which I was talking about in the transgenerational trauma.
 
Absolutely. The two most powerful links we have to make, with our memories and the imagination. And Shakespeare objectifies that.
 
He does and I mean, to an extraordinary level, he also takes it into the theological realms of heaven and hell which do play a part in this, you know the ghost disappears into a ground. And there is some – there is very strong God-thinking in this play, whether it’s I can’t actually do it, whether I really do believe the hypothetically or at least within the bounds of religion, if I stab a man to death whilst he’s praying, I will send him to heaven, because he is praying.
 
And also, you’ll send yourself to-
 
Hell. Yes, exactly. And not really avenge my father.
 
No, and that is cons- a deep consideration which happens just like that, and he’s bound to take pause there.
 
Well he also then talks about, at the beginning when he talks about God he says, he uses God! as an exclamation the first time we hear him say Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God! It’s like an appeal, how weary self-flattered unprofitable, you know you’ve left me in this. I can’t counteract you edit, I have to live it out, but there’s nothing for me to enjoy, to love, to feel any more in this world, I’m bereft without my father in it and with everything that’s happened after his death.
And then in to be or not to be, it’s completely extrapolated from, God doesn’t end to to be or not to be at all so he evolves into a man talking about can I actually do it, can I take a knife and do it? And he realises even in thinking about what might come after death, it’s not even the act of doing it that scares him, it’s the result of his actions, so he can’t. But God doesn’t come into it. He doesn’t even think about his own damnation. It’s extraordinary. Shakespeare just toys with humanity and religion.
 
He talks about from “bourn from which”…
 
“The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns”
 
The point is that, interesting isn’t it, because if he is in the, under the sort of canopy of Christianity which was the perimeter of thought, then there was somebody who did return. And that’s the point. Christ returned. And he puts up alongside that. Yet before he’s talking about resurrections and mortality –
 
And also after he’s saying he’s had an experience of the ghost of his father – but as we said, the ghost can be a manifestation of many internal things, despite it being witnessed by other people. I think that the people who do witness it, interestingly, are all of one generation, and that’s the only, again, the sort of foul crime that mirrors the transgenerational trauma : it’s skipped one generation, he’s not haunting Claudius, he’s not haunting Gertrude, he’s haunting someone who he feels con- through telling, through confessing and then take action on those perpetrators.
 
What do you think these foul crimes he refers to are?
 
Down to these days and nation, war. War. It was a very bloody period of history. I think that’s what he’s referring to. And while he had a kind of grudge watch which basically was, you know, it was a standoff between a king and a king, I mean that must have been one hell of a battle, and to then survive that – I think the man goes to sleep in his orchard because he’s physically, spiritually and utterly corrupted by what he’s experienced of life, in death, in war. So he goes to his orchard, by custom, always in the afternoon, and I don’t think he sleeps much. I think he sits there staring at the sun through the trees and then maybe has five minutes – Claudius’s waited in there for a bit of time before a crept in there with a murder weapon…
I think that a man who’s gonna be as tortured as that goes in his limbo between whatever it is, hell, well, hell, he’s in hell.
 
Well it speaks directly to what people are discovering about post battle trauma that are now deeply explored.
 
Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
 
And yet again, Shakespeare’s sort of there.
 
Well Shakespeare’s through the whole work, it’s extraordinary, well I mean, look at the history, it’s rife with the trauma of battle. If you follow Richard III for example, or through the Henrys to Richard III, you see the evolution of somebody who is brutalised by witnessing his father’s and brothers’ slaughter into being this ally of hell, really.
 
And then there’s this extraordinary notion that Hamlet puts on this antic disposition – where do you think that came from?
 
The play is extraordinary with madness, you’ve got a sort of senility or desperation to hold on, to control in Polonius. You’ve Hamlet saying I’m going to feign a madness. And you’ve got Ophelia’s deep, completely under the water, immersed, lost, madness, I mean she is mad, she is not pretending, that’s a woman who’s been destroyed by events and is brilliantly performed by Sian in our production. And also, too, I think very much Gertrude in elements as well, and then Claudius with his grief. It’s going further and further, deeper and deeper into madness, and using Laertes, to weaponise Laertes who then, at the end goes “This is wrong, this is all wrong, I’m about to do this to him, I’m doing this to him, I’ve just done this to him, this is all wrong it’s his fault”, you know, it’s all madness.
I think Hamlet’s antic disposition is interesting, my personal feeling is that there’s one very specific encounter with death in the shape of Yorik’s skull. Yorik was a court jester he remembers very fondly, somebody who could, in modern powers, roast a table of royalties, who had a kind of free passage, free pass, let’s say, in a very strict world and hierarchy to point out the faults and idiocies of those in power. And I think comedians and clowns within Shakespeare, I think that to experience that as a youth, he realises that he can retreat behind that mask of seeming zaniness and just slowly disrupt the court, and I think that’s what he tries to do, ‘cause it ripples. First of all it’s through his actions with Ophelia and he knows that’s gonna get back to Polonius, then it’s with Polonius who’s still –even if he’s a hangover from old Hamlet – very much in connectedness with the court of the new king, Claudius. So he edges closer and closer and it’s only when he has the kernel idea of the play [END OF PART III], that’s when he goes “right, now I can actually present this idea, weaponised with actors to the king.” And he feels he’s safe here. And Claudius thinks in straight lines, and Hamlet just riddles, curls him all through the play, it’s not just his own thought process any more, he doesn’t speak sense to Claudius at all.
 
 Note : why do I notice things that also pertain to the character of Sherlock (and the show in general) in everything he said?
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Last edited by Lilythiell (October 24, 2015 2:40 pm)

Nothing's wrong with me !

Here's part IV -three more to go (very possibly doing at least the fifth tonight. I am on fire!)

What is he doing when he’s going by directions there, isn’t he, what is he teasing out, ‘cause he’s up to something when you – I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it, but – isn’t this reverting or taking on, let’s say the marshal on the aspects, the war aspects which you take on in your antic disposition –
 
Yes, because it’s a country weaponising, there’s this huge military industrial complex which is creaking back into, well creaking, it’s going to overdrive, it’s making the night join labour with the day. It’s non-stop, 24h melting of ammunitions, it’s this big show of power, basically, and this sort of peripheral thing that’s going on. Hamlet sees this thing of domestic absurdity, diplomacy, being sent out to Fortinbras and old Norway and this militarisation thing can be disrupted by infantilising him, by creating something that is derogatory, which is this toy-soldier thing, this idea of making all the potency of a nation flexing its military might, it’s ridiculing it.
 
You’re mocking it, aren’t you?
 
Absolutely.
 
And you think he’s playing for time, there, do you think he’s using that in order to try to come to terms with what he’s thinking about but can’t yet –
 
We save time, but – There are many, many ways at looking at what the time scale is in this play, and I think that between seeing the ghost and the play within the play it could be a matter of a week, maybe? A couple of, a few days? It doesn’t have to be that long. So you think about the enormity of what he’s been asked to do by the spirit of his dead father, and he’s the only one who shares that conversation, no matter who else has seen the ghost, no one else is actually in direct communication with him. So it’s a procrastination, I think it’s a safe way, it comes to him quickly because I think it’s something that he’s seen, he’s a fay with acting, he knows what that is, he’s a fay with the craft of it and the skill of it, and he’s also a favourite clown in, and the brilliance of how a fool can navigate those in power and needle truth into them without it ever coming back on them. I don’t think he’s playing for time, I think he’s very considered.
 
When the room of generals have their great processions, being in their great glorious processions, there was a man beside them telling them that you’re only human. And you’re talking about you’re being partly in that position –
 
I think so, I think there’s a reason why he’s the court jester, he could have been something else, I think that’s quite a specific thing, a specific choice on Shakespeare’s part. There’s a moment of memento mori, it is irrelevant who it happens to. It’s a very specific choice of importance to this character – he’s someone who reminds him of his childhood and he’s acting out a lot of his childhood through this toy fort which was probably gifted by some noble in favour to young prince Hamlet.
 
When the players come in, it took me quite a long time to work out, I mean not in this production, but actually what he’s going for, he’s thinking it through, he wants proof – this is big, killing somebody himself, going to hell inevitably for murdering somebody else. He wants more proof, that a human could be like that, this is part of his laboratory, he wants to have a look at this. And in the course of that, Shakespeare says the most remarkable things about fiction and about art, about the way the imagination can turn reality into a fiction in order to make it real. Our brains can do it as well, this is even more extraordinary. We can see a real person, with nobles and so on, waiting. And he says that, it’s an axe, but it’s not an axe and yet he convinces him that it’s wood, and he confines it to the dreams of passion to force his soul into convincing us that he is like that, although it isn’t him. Hamlet wants to force his soul, doesn’t he?
 
Yeah, because what he’s seen in the craft of this actor is an ability to express a truth, and he realises at that point that he hasn’t expressed the glaring truth that his uncle killed his father. He realises then that it can’t be that, well it is of course basically because he’s a coward, he doesn’t have the guts to do it, so he winds himself up and realises he’s just ranting, it’s cathartic for him in a way, he hasn’t after he said O vengeance O scream O vengeance  because of the kind of richness of the language, propelling him towards this idea of truth and how this human being has to be destroyed because of those qualities in being remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. It stops him in his tracks and he realises “oh no, no, no, just because I’m doing what an actor does, doesn’t mean I’ve changed my uncle, I have to do something to change him, to see whether this is perceptible and then I will do it, I will do it, ‘cause I’m fed up with who I am”, it’s not about the world. Well that’s the change, I think. It begins with O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I. It’s the first moment he turns his thought on him. It’s not about the world being poisonous, vapours or disappointing in its potential about what a human can be or it’s not about the disgust of what’s going on in the court with an uncle marrying his mother and a father who’s recently died, it’s not about his inability to take his own life because of a fear of something after death. It’s the first time we’ve heard him say “this in on me”, and then he braces himself, winds himself up because that’s not good enough to fly around in a rage, I have to do something, think, think, and the idea is there for him and it’s this weaponisation of theatre, it’s to present a parabol –a parallel to his uncle and see what his reactions are. But even then he needs his best friend to watch, just out of harm’s way to sort of know it’s not just him reading into his uncle.
The need for certainty is fuelled by the fear of his damnation and not doing right by his father.
 
If you hadn’t done Hamlet, would you feel that you had missed the greatest challenge?
 
Very possibly. Having now done it, very possibly. I never started out with a bucket list of great roles that I wanted to play. Of course, there’s been a lot of people coming up to me with the idea of it. It was more of a concept voice outside of my head than in my own head saying “Hm, you should give this a go”.
Having done it now I can understand now why people a year and a half ago when I said I was going to do it were like “Ooh, you’re doing Hamlet? Ooh. Good luck!” It’s huge, it’s just huge!
 
And the biggest part in Shakespeare.
 
Yeah. Well, I’m not one for counting knives and ours’s cut quite a bit, but I think it’s the biggest as far as expectations go, definitely, within Shakespeare, and a rightfully service, just an enormous amount to encompass and- But my answer would be, having done this challenge, I would have, I’d be gutted to think I never had the chance to do it. It’s the most nourishing, extraordinary experience.
 
Orson Welles said that this a play by a genius about a genius and it was the only play about a genius that the genius ever wrote. He wrote Macbeth and Othello, but this was the genius in full stretch. 
 
I can see why he said that. I think there is great genius in a lot of other characters though, Iago being one. Portia.
 

Thanks so much for transcribing this, Lilythiell!  So much work, and I'm so grateful. 

Yes, two more to go, indeed, Harriet! I'm taking a break because of real life -but fear not next part will be here in a couple of hours 
Although I'm having so much FUN doing this, I wonder...

... fastest transcriber ever...

I may be on the side of the angels, but...

Last edited by Lilythiell (October 24, 2015 7:16 pm)

And also observations, I mean they’re all founders, there’s no more than seventy references to Globes in Shakespeare, each one of which is accurate.
 
Which meets with my point about disease because disease is rife in this play because of mortality rates –he’ll deal with death and illness all the time, whether it was in his company or people he knew, and you’re right about that and its manifestations beautifully, and he writes about the troubles of the soul but really visceral, real, earthy, directly relatable, sensory perceptions of what our reality is, as well as the more poetic extrapolated hypothetical, ideological, moralistical Church or God-orientated thinking it seems and you know his methodology’s beautiful in its abstraction, but there’s real directness because he was a man of his world, utterly.
 
In the second half of the play, we have this sort of mutilated landscape with armies, devastations, and wars, rumours of wars going on there, and Hamlet is changed. Can you tell us how, and in what way Hamlet has changed?
He’s had this sort of profound experience where partly through his own daring but also through about sixteen coincidences going his way, he’s managed to navigate himself out of his custody, realised that he’s been sailed to his death in England, forged a note whereby the people sending him to his death are sent to their death, then some pirates turn up and he’s managed to grapple into their ship and, having taken away from that boat become their prisoner but treated royally because he is royal and obviously because there was some kind of economy there, we don’t get the full discussion but they’re gonna be served a good term, and he then sets back naked on the Kingdom –I think the nakedness, of course it’s a riddle to unnerve Claudius, of course it’s like “Ha! Didn’t think I’d be coming back, did you? And guess what? I’m naked” The nakedness I think confuses Claudius more than it does Hamlet, to me he’s naked in his intent: he’s coming straight for him like an arrow, there’s no bullsh*t, there’s no – I mean saying he’s naked, he’s the biggest riddle he’s gonna get, he’s coming at him with a gun, or a blade, whatever the motive for revenge, the act of killing him is, because not only does he have his father’s death to motivate him, he now has the direct order for his own execution to motivate him.
And it’s extraordinarily modern, this is a network of kings plotting people off from one another, in the form of an extraordinary rendition, it’s the incidents we’ve had recently in our culture with terrorism. In a sense, Hamlet does try to terrorise the state with his actions in the court, he’s killed a courtier and he’s upsetting the marriage of his parent before he’s shipped off to England to be despatched. This man who’s seen, I think basically what’s happened in all that, is that he’s seen, he’s looked into the distance in a philosophical way, he has seen some – he has seen parts of death himself, he’s seen parts of the undiscovered country because he’s faced the reality of his own imminent death, forced on him rather than being contemplated in suicide. And that makes him into somebody who feels he can take charge of his fate to some degree, but at the same time realising an awful lot of it has been deemed just blind sheer coincidence to go his way. So he’s riding on this wave, but there’s a profound maturity to him, so when the court then takes control of him again, after the graveyard fight confrontation, he submits to it because he feels whatever’s going to happen was always going to happen. And we can try to interfere with this as much as we can, but the inevitable event of death, of just fate, the next thing to happen, it comes.
And then you get into this realm of extraordinary Buddhist acceptance of causal happening really, it will fall out, so let be, just stand back, and accept, and he just gives himself to his fate.
I think he knows it’s not necessarily going to be a death match, but if you’ve come back, fought with someone whose sister and father you’ve killed, who’s then been sent out by a king you want to kill, you know who’s killed the king your father, to a fencing match, the most traditional formalisation of violence a court ever had…Well, something’s up.
And I think that this idea of the court receiving him as “no, this is an entertainment, things have calmed down now after the incident at the funeral”, but it’s still ridiculously uneasy, which is why that terrain is on the stage, it’s there, and it destabilises people when they separate from the violence and try to ignore it, it’s the stains as a metaphor for Laertes and Hamlet who are thrown into killing one another.
 
There’s a madman who’s sent away because he was mad, so the rumour’s got maybe taken in that direction, that propaganda we’ve got to get rid of him because he’s mad, he’s dangerous to the state, we’ve got to get him out.
 
One of the reasons he engages with the grave digger is to try and find out, what he realises is he hasn’t been recognised, what the word on the street is, and what’s the rumour in the tavern about this mad Dane, what world am I coming back into? And he’s very careless in the way he comes back, in any version, you know he’s met Horatio, there are letters involved, all these people outside of the court to get hold of Horatio to make sure they meet at a certain place at a certain time. He’s very much coming to the palace through the back door. So he is on a trajectory from – he stared death in the face really and immediately with the warrant, with being on that ship, with escaping the pirates. He’s come back with a real, grounded, mature sense of purpose.
 
We have with this great, this amazing political philosophical play, and then pirates turn up! It’s great!
 
It’s wonderful! It’s wonderful! Just when you think –
 
Well, there you go! Throwing in some pirates, he’s terrific.
 
I wish I had a time machine, to ask “when you wrote him out of the play, when you wrote him off to England, did you ever think Crap! How do I get him back? I need a slingshot of fate –pirates! That’ll do it! They’ll sail him back”. But you know, it’s easy to mock –
 
I’m not mocking, I’m delighted!
 
I think that’s the thing though, some people do raise their eyebrows at that, but I just think it’s remarkable, the level of playful invention involved in that, and of course yeah going back to a man of his world as well, there would have been pirates, then as there still are now, a very real thing in a world where everything was determined by fate at sea, so why not pirates? Why not?
 
[END OF PART 6]
 

Wow, wow, wow, thank you so much! Reading this will be my Sunday afternoon occupation, thanks again! 

Last edited by Harriet (October 25, 2015 10:55 am)

I finally had the chance to watch this interview this morning, I haven't had very good internet speed for a while so had to wait until the new month started. I looove listening to Ben talk about Hamlet and Shakespeare and, well, anything really

Shakespeare's not naming his play after you! Tee Hee.