On the 20-21st November Ridiculusmus presented a sharing of work in progress in the New Adelphi Studio, at the University of Salford
"Yes, a sharing of our process would be fine - more specifically an excavation of work and political systems through the eyes of the gravediggers in Act V scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, drawing on David Graeber, Marx and popular culture to critique our institutional failings, hypocritical cultural mores and political inadequacies" - (Jon Haynes email, October 2023)
After the visit to Salford University, the show was premiered on 1st December at the Shaubeuhne Lindenfelds, Leipzig
In the post show discussion with students on the University of Salford Comedy Writing and Performance degree programme. One aspect of work that we considered is the job of performing. And, inevitably, because Ridiculusmus are very good at getting to the heart of an issue, once you start looking at this single scene through the lens of labour, the whole of the play of Hamlet is revealed as a treatise on closely related fundamentals: thinking, working and being.
HAMLET To be or not to be that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? (Act III Scene 1, l.56-60)
The footnote in the New Warwick Shakespeare school textbook advises that "it is unnecessary to judge the consistency of the speech as if Hamlet were flesh and blood, rather than a mutable identity, serving a dramatic purpose." (1969, pg 49a).
So for Shakespeare, Hamlet is a character, in the role of a Prince and for the reader or audience (which might include Shakespeare back in the day), Hamlet is an actor, a character, a reflective artist and an idiot. He is both hero and clown. His question is universal. We all consider it with varying degrees of concentration.
The school teacher, looking up from his copy of the text book, might ask "When does Hamlet becomes suicidal?" and "Is he mad?" and "What makes him decisive?" I remember the exasperation of not knowing the answer to any of these, or rather, the pressure of being asked to pin such things down. The teacher argues that Hamlet cannot be suicidal: he must be buoyed up by the decision to present The Murder of Gonzago, a play by a touring company. Via the play, he plans to send a message to the Claudius the King, and therefore he cannot be contemplating suicide. Rather than reading Hamlet's mind, I prefer to understand him as a vehicle. Like the touring company is a vehicle.
Pause while we picture their van zooming down a corridor of reflective mirrors.
In the subsequent gravedigger scene the clowns attempt to reply to the big question ('To be...' etc). It's interesting that these performance figures are almost lacking in character. In the Ridiculusmus version they have character, accent, a typology perhaps, but we don't need to know much about their world. They are symbols. Clowns are usually laughed at for their mechanical antics, their function, often set against the action of the play. They represent basic desires more than psychological character. Their antics with 'spade and mattocks' (a kind of pick-axe), their situation - some business in a graveyard, their conversation - about Ophelia's suicide and its status with regard to burial - is logical, emotionally removed, and functional. If it wasn't for this essential interaction between the two clowns we might not bother to find out how they got to the graveyard. Why is one digging and one looking after a pony? Why is it not the other way round?
Years after a successful career in comedy in which he claims he has "seen all the jokes", Ade Edmondson is still bothered by Waiting for Godot. A touring company came to his school and lodged an idea or problem in his head that has given him something tho think about all his life. He asked to take the script of Beckett's play to the island. Similarly, the actors who came to my school got me thinking. They performed in front of our precious raised proscenium stage, with its very serious grey curtains. The actors seemed more real than anything that I had seen performed on that stage, although it helped that Vladimir sprayed a lot of human spit on his audience every time he spoke. "I bet they travel in those costumes", I thought.
Shakespeare contemplates the state of being from the perspective of a writer, a performer, and an actor - and in particular, a clown. And, I propose, in the clown scene, two acts after the famous existential question, Shakespeare has buried an answer:
Question (Act 3 Scene 1)
To be or not to be, that is the question..
Answer (Act V Scene 1)
an act has three branches: to do, to act, to perform.
Shakespeaere's answer to whether or not to be is that it depends on the available condition: to act, to do or to perform.
Michael Kirby's On Acting and Not-Acting (1972) examined Performance Art 'Happenings' and a theory of being in the matrix of presentation and representation. The performers, he noted , "generally tended to "be" nobody or nothing other than themselves; nor did they represent, or pretend to be in, a time or place different than that of the spectator ...there is a scale or continuum of behavior (sic) involved, and the differences be- tween acting and not-acting may be quite small."
And so he analysed the continuum, beginning with the presence of a stage hand:
"When the performer, like the stage attendants of Kabuki and Noh, is merely him-
self and is not imbedded, as it were, in matrices of pretended or represented char-
acter, situation, place and time, I refer to him as being "non-matrixed"' (Ibid pg 4)
At the other end of the scale is the complex acting of Grotowski's actors in The Constant Prince, in which the actors are not over acting, but many ideas and emotions are exercised through highly developed techniques all at once, creating a dense or complex cluster of affect.
The ontological state of being has three related conditions then, and they are witnessed on a continuum. Each one is either transitive and intransitive, potentially. They are all both constative and performative. They define a state of being which in the post show discussion we said was possible to witness in Ridiculusmus' production Alas Poor Yorick.
To do
Some of the acting in the scene has the quality of unself-conscious doing, in the sense admired by Phillip Gaulier and Jaques Lecoq: the kind of doing you notice when you see a workman digging a hole. The action is not usually self-conscious and it is functional.
To act
There is acting - taking on a role. Here Hamlet holds Yorick's skull and remembers kissing his lips. The lips and the living person are just a memory, that he has to clothe the skull with. Hamlet distances himself. A man, imagining another character, saying what was there, what style of expression, and how he moved. Using the double consciousness defined by Marvin Carlson, they recall and act out, they inhabit a role of another and express themselves at the same time. The actor in the role of Hamlet holds the prop skull of the jester character at arm's length. The image couldn't be more firmly underline the idea that material being activates persona and character.
To perform
And there is performing - a more conscious process of doing in order to shape and activate subsequent affect or actions. So we see the two gravediggers pose for a selfie.
In this contemporary citation of Shakespeare, David and Jon, the characters in the scene, the actors before the audience, halt the action and capture the moment. In the Comedians Roundtable ('Comedy Actors Roundtable: Sacha Baron Cohen, Jim Carrey, Don Cheadle & More' in The Hollywood Reporter Youtube Site <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz0bjLk9rUo> ), Jim Carrey talks about the selfie as stopping time; a fan meets a celebrity actor, asks for a selfie, and while the photo is being taken, the people around very often freeze. The actor is 'captured' and taken out of the flow of his everyday life, captured not-acting, to be exhibited. To upload or not to upload? That's up to the fan and the regulation on his blog site.
References
BBC Radio 4. Desert Island Discs. 'Adrian Edmondson, actor, writer' 22/9/2023. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qlz2>
Grose, K. (1969). The New Warwick Shakespeare. Hamlet Prince of Denmark. London:Blackie.
K. Michael. 'On Acting and Not-Acting' in The Drama Review: TDR Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1972), pp. 3-15 Cambridge University Press.