“To be or not to be”, and Woody Allen

O, this will be the ultimate NOVEMBER post! Though I think that in November, of all months, one SHOULDN’T be thinking about the Big Nothing. There will be enough time for it in December, to counteract Christmas. Anyway, I get a feeling that Nothing will take me a long way …

More precisely, this post, and my next posts, will be about some of these moments in “Shakespeare” where Nothing breaks into people’s lives. As, for example, “To be or not to be”. (I decided to give it a capital “N” because the Nothing I am referring to is rather a powerful presence, almost God-like.)

As I wrote, Nothing had been lurking in the back of my mind for quite some time, but “To be or not to be” added a new quality. It made me aware that these moments are incidents of crisis that may occur in everybody’s life. And that pattern enabled me to find more and more of them … Accordingly, a biographical approach presented itself naturally, with “To be or not to be …” as the first step of getting acquainted with Nothing unexpectedly revealing itself. The first of these moments which are some of the most disagreeable in life - where everything is suddenly very clear, though anything but encouraging. And my experience is that there are rather more of them when we are still young, or at least still of an age where we “count”.

Even though they are so disagreeable I am obviously thinking of them as really important moments of crisis – and change! And, somehow, it appears to be helpful to approach them IN READING. I think that some of my most important and intense reading experiences – which I remember much better than most biographical issues - have been about them. Books like “Madame Bovary” or “La nausée” by Sartre certainly have been. Maybe it is just that stories GIVE meaning to the apparently meaningless cruelty of life, but I don’t know …

They certainly are INTENSE moments, which is probably the reason that we cannot ignore them - or what makes us WANT to deal with them in the first place because they present a challenge. I rather think that wanting to play Hamlet is not just a “career thing”. It certainly is about competition, for some actors more than others, but there is always this challenge to deal with the tough “human matter”. And thinking about playing Hamlet made me aware of an important thing about method acting which I hadn’t been able to figure out, though, as I see now, the solution came to me some time ago when I tried to describe what Christopher Eccleston did with Macbeth. On the occasion of “To be or not to be” I became aware that I MYSELF understood because I HAD BEEN THERE – as, I am certain, lots and lots of people have – just not great actors approaching what’s supposed to be one of the peaks of their career. As difficult as it may have been: deep down they must always have known what they were doing, and why they were doing it. To put it crudely: HAMLET IS FOR LOSERS. People with successful careers, however difficult, are just the OTHER kind of people. The kind that certainly has their own dire predicaments, but not Hamlet’s, and certainly not mine. This is one of the reasons why the bits from the McLean interview about how Christopher Eccleston approached Macbeth biographically were so interesting for me – together with the information that he didn’t much care about Hamlet – though he played him! – but always wanted to play Macbeth.

As to method acting, to have some kind of genuine experience to fall back on is certainly helpful in many cases, sometimes probably not at all, and, of course, often impossible. But the reason why these great actors I am constantly referring to are so good is because THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING. This refers to countless techniques how to do things so that the audience would SEE what they are doing, and which, of course, I know nothing about. What I am referring to is this mysterious ability of knowing exactly WHAT we must see. What they must do to make the audience RESPOND to their character, like Simon Russell Beale’s well-calculated “Not mad” moment, or Christopher Eccleston persistently LOOKING arrogant until even I understood that I wasn’t SUPPOSED to like him! (With some actors it is particularly difficult for me not to like the character they are playing because they always make them so genuinely interesting.) Or, of course, Andrew Scott saying “To be or not to be” AS IF it had just occurred to him. It is quite possible that Derek Jacobi, or David Tenant, or whoever I saw playing Hamlet, understood Hamlet - and most of his sophisticated lines - better than he did. But he was the one who managed to do the right thing with them which made ME understand them by activating their human content FOR ME. I think it was him and Christopher Eccleston who made me definitely understand why my relationship with actors tends to become so unduly intense.

(It is good to know why – IF all goes well - I am going to London for one night in January to see Ralph Fiennes in “Anthony and Cleopatra”. (Still don’t believe it until I’ll be on that plane …) And why I finally put the unmentionable “Thor” films on my wish list just because Tom Hiddleston played Loki in a way that I understand him. I always wanted to understand what Loki is about, and, dealing with Mats Mikkelson’s Hannibal, already got the idea that he might be about NOTHING. The big Nothing behind our bottomless terror of being bored. (In fact, the FIRST Nothing moment I remember, growing out of childhood!) Tom Hiddleston finally proved it to me, spelling out his fundamental sadness. Without him, I would have lacked proof that it is humanly possible to be so sad and mischievous AT THE SAME TIME.)

Where my blog is concerned, before Hamlet there already was Woody Allen to make me understand one or two things about losing. Who made me consider and concede that I am one of the losers in the first place. I think it is the most uncomfortable and humiliating truth about my own life, but I also understood why it was important for me to look it in the eye. There always was this really important issue of humbleness – “Demut” as one of my favourite concepts in my mother tongue, maybe even BECAUSE nobody uses it anymore. Unlike “humbleness” which doesn’t seem to have gone extinct as a moral standard. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with either of them because they are just about KNOWING who we are and where we stand. And I became convinced that one can get a “head start” only from a position of truth. One can be as great as Christopher Eccleston at what he is doing and still be humble. Like him, I see it as one of the most important ingredients of genuine success - success based on quality! - because without it this degree of accuracy cannot exist. Without knowing exactly what you CAN do there is no getting better at it. And, even though I could never have been a winner, there are always qualities that make me myself and enable me to get what I REALLY need. Like winning, and almost everything, losing is relative. And I am still getting better at being me because I have understood that this is my only option. The point is just NEVER to give in to what Passenger analyzed with poetic precision: “If you can’t get what you need you learn to need the things that stop you dreaming.”

I think why misunderstanding Hamlet is so easy and so common is because of two things that we usually get wrong. First of all, it is about the notion that live has to be fair, and, second, that, if we lose, there has to be something wrong with US. There certainly often is, but, as I already wrote, there is NOTHING WRONG with Hamlet. Basically having accepted losing, I wonder what is so difficult to understand about the obvious fact of limited resources. Live CANNOT be fair because a world where there is everything everybody needs or wants is not possible. And Hamlet is just in a position where there is nothing there for the taking. Nothing OF WHAT HE REALLY WANTS is currently available to him. And the deep sadness – and deep truth - behind Woody Allen is that this is the COMMON state of affairs, not – as we are constantly led to believe! – the exception. Basically, we are all losers, apart from the FEW who won!

The deeper reason for the misunderstanding is probably that this truth is anything but helpful.

What is so great about Woody Allen – the reason why he “got” me even though I tried to escape – is how well and truly horribly he describes what ensues. If Hamlet wasn’t tragedy – if he hadn’t died! – he would have grown out of it. And Woody Allen describes like no other how “we” are doing this. How we end up spinning these stories and lies that will form our lives. Make them bearable, and make us WHO WE ARE. I think I never really did THIS – couldn’t, as I have always been obsessed with the truth. I chose the more “sustainable” option: learning to appreciate what we HAVE (… and never wanted in the first place!) This was neither Woody Allen nor Shakespeare but “The Spooks”. Again one of these moments that shocked me – already approaching old age as it was. Dear me, but now I know why!

Now I think that it saved me that I confronted this predicament before it was too late. In my case, it was about understanding that there HAS TO BE pain and sadness BECAUSE beauty and perfection ACTUALLY EXIST. That there actually IS something I cannot do without, and that I had to DO something to make it available to me. I remember the PANIC when I realized this – the genuine fear of failing if I had been unable to figure it out– and I want to! This was the challenge of “Sonnet 5” almost at the beginning of my blog. I took up the challenge of beauty to enjoy its impact ON ME, and I still do, relentlessly chasing what I need because I KNOW what I need. And this is good. I think that Shakespeare himself discovered sonnets as a chance to do this, basically dealing with the predicament that there might be something – or usually someone - absolutely essential which we cannot possess “in the flesh” but cannot let go either because it is the one thing that will grant fulfillment. Rather pathetic, certainly, for people who can get it for real, but I’ll never know anything about it. If it even exists - in a way that is not relative. Sonnets certainly are NOT relative.

What is so genuinely depressing about Woody Allen is that he is telling about a LIFETIME -  or several lifetimes - of losing. As many writers do, by the way, Americans in particular, probably because “their” tales of winners are so especially persistent. Losing as the death sentence in a place of seemingly unlimited resources. For Europeans they always seem to have been limited in comparison. Nonetheless, “we” losers are legion, but we have to stay under the radar. Accept that nobody will be the least bit interested in OUR story. Winning is the only option if you want to be seen and talked about. But what happens THEN - when you have won? This, in turn, is the TRAGEDY of Macbeth …

“Hamlet” is supposed to be tragedy but, in fact, is a lot of other kinds of texts BEFORE it becomes tragic. Dover Wilson already emphasized the mystery character of the play, and I think there is a lot to it because the closer we look the more we find how little we really know … (One of the mysteries I always come to touch when I am talking with Claudia about it: What does Getrude really think, or know …?) It has to END as tragedy because Hamlet has either to kill or die, or both, but there isn’t any tragedy “built into” the play, almost. Not like “Macbeth”, because TRAGEDY IS FOR WINNERS. You have to actually have won to be able to fall. And the hallmark of winners – the OTHER kind of people - is that Nothing IS NOT AN OPTION. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have to deal with Nothing sometimes, but they won’t become intimate. Macbeth confronts Nothing for brief moments when he anticipates being deprived of sleep or a friendless old age, cursed and hated by everybody, or has to cope with his wife’s death. But he doesn’t dwell on it, he cannot afford to. There isn’t even TIME for “such a word” – never will be! Time – or lack of time! – and tragedy are probably still more intimately connected than I thought …

There actually is much more about the kind of “deep” Nothing exemplified by “To be or not to be” in the COMEDIES. I think this is basically what intrigues me about them. For example, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” certainly is a comedy because there will be two marriages at the end. Nonetheless it contains two of “my” most heartbreaking tales about losing in “Shakespeare”. One about FINALLY not getting what you want, and one about discovering that what you wanted more than anything is not what you thought it would be … What kind of a marriage will this make? I am fairly sure that I am not lying to myself still when I persist that I don’t want what I don’t want.

(to be continued …)