“I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked!”, or: how to make the worst of your career

I impulsively chose this line from “Macbeth” as a headline, I think, first of all because it is such a great example of what is so special about Shakespeare to the present day – but even more so compared with contemporary plays like the “Spanish Tragedy”. That he makes it his business to know his characters so well that it is almost uncanny – and gives uncannily good actors the chance to know them even better. Reading these other tragedies from the period confirmed my impression that Shakespeare induced naturalistic acting – in fact, “invented” an early form of method acting even BEFORE actors could figure out how to use it. Somehow I am convinced that, without Shakespeare, great British actors like Martin Freeman wouldn’t exist - who was seriously concerned that he couldn’t figure out if Bilbo had had sex! Seeing what he did in “The Hobbit”, I take it that this was just about twenty percent joke and eighty percent truth. And Richard Armitage wasn’t joking when he answered the question what colour Francis Dolarhyde would paint his toenails … I could be wrong, of course, but if they were joking it was about the big mystery of method acting which is obviously so difficult to take seriously. How should you know HOW you know? This kind of answered the question from my last post - why they know so well WHAT we have to see - but just by replacing it with another question …

I imagine Macbeth to utter this sentence instantly, as a gut reaction, when the worst news gets confirmed. It is just what he would do – what he WILL do in the end! – when everything else fails. It wouldn’t even occur to him to stop at any point, even though he has his “Nothing moments”, frequently – as when he envisages to be permanently deprived of sleep. But, in the end, his reaction to them is as accurate as it is practical. He ACKNOWLEDGES the fact and then tries to CHANGE it. There MUST be something he can do to be able to sleep again! Even if it means meddling with the “frame of things” and changing the order of “both worlds”. It might sound lunatic and appalling – certainly is meant to be! – but it is just how somebody like Macbeth WOULD deal with this. He is a soldier - probably the best in Scotland, so it isn’t just overestimating himself when he thinks that he should be king. (As, by the way, do the other thanes who CHOOSE him!) And, as a soldier, he is well acquainted with Nothing. He is used to death lurking at every corner, but he knows HOW TO DEAL WITH IT. He certainly needs to be clever, he cannot afford not to analyze, to misjudge his enemy, because, if he did, he’d already be dead. And his “Nothing moments” are equally specific.

Except one. In fact, there is one moment where he stops. It is when he learns about the death of his wife and falls into a very short, very deep depression. When he analyzes life in the way Hamlet does. It might be interesting to think their relationship FROM THIS MOMENT – though we never do this. Nobody would do it, least of all Macbeth himself. It is too heartbreaking … There are certainly SOME things we cannot deal with – like being utterly and finally alone - but there are also always other, more pressing, problems … What drives TRAGEDY is our relentless struggle to keep Nothing out of our lives.

Macbeth certainly is one of these people who already HAVE the kind of career others envy. Somebody who never had to deal with “To be or not to be”. And he doesn’t even know how lucky he is because he has something very few people actually have, and, if they do, usually take for granted: a great, functioning, relationship with his partner. Even though “everybody” seems to think otherwise I always imagined Lady Macbeth to be very attractive and clever – kind of like Keeley Hawes played her in the “Shakespeare Retold” – fiercely loyal, of course, and they are still in love with each other! There is this issue about offspring - there always is something - but I don’t doubt they would have carried on splendidly if the incident with the weird sisters hadn’t occured, she always taking care of the tricky and disagreeable issues, loving it … There is tragic potential in not knowing what you have, that’s for sure! – I already mentioned on behalf of the RSC’s “Macbeth” that “we” like winners. We usually imagine them to be like us – or rather us to be like them! – because we have “deleted” Hamlet. Again: thanks to Andrew Scott for reminding me!!! But I STILL like Macbeth much better than Hamlet … And it is so common to think that, if we FINALLY were rich, or famous, or got promoted to this position we always thought should be ours, all our problems would come to an end. One of the deeper reasons why I find “Macbeth” so fascinating - and have always thought of the play as this timeless analysis of human careers - is how mercilessly it disabuses us of this idea. The moment “we” have won is the moment the REAL trouble begins. I couldn’t know, but I imagine that, when the initial exaltation has passed, the winners find themselves still with half a lifetime or more before them of carefully managing success, of imminent failure and great opportunities for disastrous mistakes. It may, in fact, be nicer sometimes to be the loser that unexpectedly finds the grain the other hens higher on the pecking order have missed …

Underneath it all there is, of course, no other kind of text so intimately connected with Nothing as tragedy – though its protagonists do their best not to acknowledge it, even might be totally ignorant – or dismissive – of their part in their own annihilation. This is self-evident because tragedy always ends with death. But good tragedies have their Nothing moments not just at the end but embedded into their story. As, at least in fiction, there are always deeper reasons for disaster these stories tell us a lot about Nothing – and why it might even be useful or necessary for us sometimes to admit it into our lives. It isn’t as simple as that, though, because tragedy begins when what shouldn’t have happened already HAS happened. It is also – as Richard Armitage said with deadly precision on behalf of “The Crucible” – about WHAT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN. Macbeth cannot escape his doom because he cannot escape who he is. Nobody can, as - one would think! - nobody should have to. More precisely: What appears dangerous and stupid to others might just appear as the only viable option to the protagonist at this moment. The logical step to take. I mean: Isn’t it REALLY STUPID AND IRRATIONAL what Macbeth does??? At the same time it APPEARS kind of inevitable. Why is this so?

Maybe the “beauty” of “Macbeth” is mostly in the PRECISENESS of the argument: “We” don’t become guilty because we are bad – we turn out bad because we became guilty. As his wife – who certainly is the person that knows him best! – persists, there is a lot of good in Macbeth, even real kindness, which is almost impossible to imagine when we see what comes to pass. But SHE must have seen it. And his argument about not killing Duncan is flawless – until his wife breaks into it, relentlessly playing him by taking up his deepest fear. Which is - as Christopher Eccleston pointed out – to do with his masculinity. What happens to Macbeth is also the reason why – in fact! – every man should be insecure about his masculinity. Just FOR HIS OWN GOOD – so as to be able to take a step back and THINK about the issue, not just accept that it is what utterly defines him. But this is easier said than observed – especially if we are not male. It is hard to understand WHY Macbeth should be insecure about his masculinity, respectively TERRIFIED of somehow losing it. But this is where HIS NOTHING is – the Nothing that shapes his fate. He just CANNOT step back and consider that it might be possible - just once! - not to act “like a man”. Which means just going forward, grasping the opportunity that will get him “everything”. It is fascinating how the irrational becomes perfectly logical IF we understand that Macbeth must feel that he is nothing if he is not a man. And how beautifully Shakespeare unfolds this in the argument between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, my favourite bit of the play! I shouldn’t be surprised that it is also the great, hidden Nothing moment of “Macbeth” – but I am!

As I think that the point of tragedy is to make us understand the irrational and accept the unacceptable – so, in fact: “human DNA”! – there is probably no “hope” for Macbeth. (If he could just go back on his own “time-line” …) He is already doomed because of who he is. It just might be useful sometimes to think WHY we want something so much. If it really is what will make us happy, or if we might just be utterly terrified of something we cannot even admit to ourselves. If I analyzed this moment correctly it might contain the explanation for my basically unfounded impression that Macbeth never really WANTED to be king. Not like Richard III who ENJOYS having power, certainly gets his kicks out of it. Right in the beginning of the play he presents his “career ambitions” as a way out of a boring and humiliating position. He knows WHY he is doing this, certainly has given it some thought. To Macbeth it just suddenly appears to be where his career must inevitably lead: first Glamis, then Cawdor, then King. As soon as this is clear, THERE IS NO POINT in asking if it is what he really wants, it is just the next logical step to take. How could he BE A MAN and not do that???

I DON’T think that it is an easy question to answer, but is this REALLY what “we” want: to become more famous, or powerful, or wealthy, or whatever it is for us? Or shouldn’t there rather be another reason - some kind of promise of REAL fulfillment - for doing what we do? Just something more sustainable than our FEAR of being Nothing …???

“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 …)

„To be or not to be – THAT is the question“

Now, finally! It feels like a year or so has passed since “Macbeth” … There was a lot of change, and I realize that I have still no idea where this is going. To say that I like this would be to lie, at least in part.

In fact, a lot had happened before “Macbeth” which got suspended but which I knew would not “go away”. When I wrote that the “ship” had launched on the occasion of seeing Andrew Scott as Hamlet I hadn’t been wrong. Some of this added power I think I used for “Macbeth”, but there was something important that happened with “Hamlet” and which I never got to write about. Something to do with AUTHENTICITY which I discovered through my “lightning approach” of “Hamlet” as a key concept of my reading. (See my post from June 12^th.) I already observed that the “doctoral thesis” part of my blog has been neglected in favour of the therapy and fictional relationships part, and had this idea of assembling all the key concepts I had used, and to examine how they are connected. I already started this, implicitly, reading “Macbeth” where I used the new concept of TEXT PRODUCTION and, recently, REFERENCE TEXTS and “TIMELESSNESS”. The next two posts, however, will be about “To be or not to be” and other “nothing moments” in Shakespeare – something extremely personal and subjective, no doubt. But they will also contain important reference material for the “thesis”.

I already put a great deal of thinking and work into “Hamlet” some time ago, and, from my present point of view, very little came of it. But the important thing is that I got started. It appears a bit ridiculous to me: all these actors who want to play Hamlet before they have kids and Lear before they might have to retire from the stage. Nonetheless I seem to believe that Hamlet and Lear really ARE that important – not just for an actor’s career, or to know your Shakespeare, but, ultimately, because of the great human stuff they contain. And I think it galled me that I didn’t “have” Hamlet. Lear, actually, isn’t that difficult to understand, and I had had Simon Russell Beale and Ian McKellen to help. It is great, by the way, that I really need the right actor for the human stuff to unfold. It is even kind of funny sometimes how easy the impossible suddenly becomes.

“Hamlet” is in fact a text with which I have a very long, very unsuccessful reading relationship – which mostly consisted of NOT READING it. It started with Derek Jakobi’s Hamlet in the old BBC cycle of plays which I saw - with German subtitles?! - when I was fifteen or sixteen. Now I like him a lot for his uncompromising approach of weirdness, but at the time he probably just convinced me that Hamlet is weird and not worthy of my attention. And he was much too old, of course, to play Hamlet, even at the time – which were all the actors I have seen playing Hamlet, from Kenneth Branagh (in his film) to Benedict Cumberbatch, including, in fact, Andrew Scott. (The solitary exception was Ethan Hawke in the contemporary film adaptation by Michael Almereyda (2000) which worked so much better than any theatrical production I have seen just because of the right age.) It is kind of inherent to the character, though, because he has some of the most difficult lines that Shakespeare has written (and which, of course, get lost in a film). But Andrew Scott was the only one of these actors too old to play Hamlet who was able to find the knack of not APPEARING too old. He put all these failed readings right in a wink, so that it felt as if I had always known this: Hamlet isn’t weird, he is JUST YOUNG. He is in shock, and grieving – for his own screwed-up life more than for anybody else … I think Andrew Scott finally made me shed this notion that stubbornly clung to “Hamlet”: that the play is somehow unnecessarily complicated, kind of “blown up”, and ultimately pointless. No doubt this was the secret synopsis of my unsuccessful readings, and the reason why I needed more than a little persuasion to approach the play again. But I believe I already knew that I was wrong. There might have been quite a different reason for my reluctance which came very much as a surprise: a potential of REAL discomfort about the human stuff in “Hamlet”.

Becoming more involved with theatre again lately, I repeatedly experience one of its benefits compared with what I am getting out of written fiction or text “on screen”. It is something that, strangely, appears to happen independently of seeing the play live in the theatre or in the cinema: the experience that there is nowhere to hide. For some reason I cannot do what I always can do with movies: raise some kind of protective shield to prevent the human stuff from getting too close. I will always remember how I experienced this difference for the first time – consciously at least – in 2015, when I left the cinema after having seen “The Crucible” (recorded from the Old Vic) in a state of bliss about how incredibly perfect it had been, savouring an experience I never had before and probably would never have again. And then, the next day in the afternoon, without warning, it crushed me … I like the memory – now! – but at the time it wasn’t pleasant. I remember how ANGRY I was – how helpless that something like this could happen because of a play! I didn’t even know what had happened, and I still don’t. It’s all just theories …

(In fact, I have been through a number of theories. At the moment I got the idea that, basically, it might be something very subjective and personal about how I LEARNED to read certain text. I know that theatre as well as tragedy have always been very important for the way I learned to think and feel – and they have always been connected. So, theatre is the only place where I ALLOW for this to happen, where, deep down, I WANT it to happen. Like probably many people, I could write a post about crying in the cinema though I don’t have a lot of actual experience. I remember only one instance of it, ages ago, in “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and one of almost crying recently in “The Desolation of Smaug”. In fact, I hate crying in the cinema and am always trying to distance myself from the kind of “tragic relief” that goes with it. Watching the “Hobbit” films I experienced that I actually DECIDE if I want to cry! (And since Ken Stott almost crossed me in this I like every tiny bit of what I have been able to acquire of his work on DVD, or seen in the cinema …) But I know that this is NEVER going to happen when I am in the theatre. I will never cry in the theatre – though all kinds of great and disagreeable things I don’t yet know might happen there - because, in the theatre, tragedy is FOR REAL. I obviously find tears self-indulgent and believe that I would never cry about real “catastrophe”.)

So, basically, Andrew Scott convinced me to take Hamlet seriously for the first time, just because he managed to make “To be or not to be” AUTHENTIC – as if it happened there and then, on the stage (or rather in miniature on UTube!) FOR THE FIRST TIME. In “Shakespeare”, these unsettling experiences usually occur in a very controlled and conscious way, so that I know what is happening already when it is happening. Accordingly, this time I was in a position to OBSERVE what happened when authenticity struck, and could judge immediately what a world of a difference it makes. If anybody had asked me before what “To be or not to be” is about I would have said without blinking that I had no idea. And this would have been a lie. Not a conscious lie of not wanting to say it, but an unconscious lie of avoiding the issue. To say that I didn’t “get” Hamlet would have meant that I didn’t WANT to get Hamlet – and this might even have been the REAL reason for trying to dodge the play all along. In truth, I suddenly found that I knew only too well what he was talking about, but I AM NOT GOING THERE (AGAIN)! NO WAY …

And I even KNOW now that it is not just me! I know this because I made the test. Inadvertently, by the way. It was also something we talked about, briefly, when I met Claudia who was at least as delighted with Andrew Scott as I was. I explained to her what had happened, that I suddenly understood Hamlet when Andrew Scott spoke these lines BECAUSE I HAD BEEN THERE. And she thought about it for a brief moment and said that she had been there as well. Of course I couldn’t make the test as easily with other people because you first have to build this trust to be able to speak about things like this in a matter of fact manner, and they would have to know “Hamlet” … But, nonetheless, when the first person to whom I explained it understands me LIKE THIS I don’t think this could be a mere coincidence.

Of course I have been there! As far as I remember I have been there only once, but it certainly was some kind of state of depression I was in, not just this moment that I remember. I think it is important that Hamlet SERIOUSLY considers the option of being dead, and of killing himself, WITHOUT making any concrete plans how to do it – or any kind of serious attempt on his life. This is the next step which only very few people take. He is just VERY CERTAIN at this moment that it would be BETTER to be dead than to live under the circumstances, and he is very certain about what the circumstances are. I never understood Hamlet before that because I considered him to be some kind of weird adult, somebody probably in need of “fixing”, not what he still is: a child. An adolescent still on his way to manhood, sheltered by his parents who love him, studying at Wittenberg where he likes it, probably having great friends there and a lot of fun. A lot of exciting input and great perspectives about what holds this world together. (I remember this state of mind!) Knowing everything, but without any responsibilities other than about himself BEING A GOOD PERSON. And he has just fallen in love for the first time … And then, very suddenly, he finds out that the world is not like this at all. NOTHING is as he thought it is. As he thought it would be. Of what seemed so good NOTHING is left. The people he loved and trusted are dead or proved unreliable. And there is NOTHING anymore he really wants to live for … And my impulse was, of course, to deny this. Hard to believe now that it could have been AS BAD AS “Hamlet”. Certainly it wasn’t as disruptive. Of course, as tragedy originates from the stage, it tends to be hard, fast, and disruptive. But I think that the sudden and full realization that NOT A SINGLE ONE of these dreams would ever become reality was just as bad.

I frequently find that “Shakespeare” becomes most personal, most uncomfortable, and most interesting when it is about these “NOTHING moments”. “To be or not to be …” certainly is one of them, but I have kind of collected them – consciously - since Simon Russell Beale’s “Not mad!” And, unconsciously, probably a long time before that. I realized this about a moment in the “Spooks”, where they used Shakespeare quotes frequently, mostly in a questionable and pompous manner. But there are also a few genuine “Shakespeare moments” which, if you manage to get past the adhering bullshit, hit you like a punch in the stomach. One of them was the moment before Lucas North jumps off a tower block, and where he says: “I AM NOTHING!” This must have been a long time before Simon Russell Beale and “Not mad!”, but already then it FELT like “Shakespeare”, being one of these moments where the bullshit and the cliché is penetrated towards the unsettling content that lies at the bottom of these stories. Which are mostly NOT about what “the job” MAKES of people but what it TAKES AWAY from them. A bleak discussion of what makes us human because, basically, if they are trying to hold on to ANY of this, it’s usually death and destruction. And worse. There IS worse, by the way, which I noticed much later when I recognized this moment in “Othello” (see my post of September 21^st 2015). I think it was then that I became aware of my long and intimate history with “Nothing” in and outside “Shakespeare” and got the idea of writing about it. Now, with “To be or not to be”, another impressive sample got added to the list – in fact, seen biographically, one of initiation to “nothingness” as a human condition. The others - like “Not mad!” - we only understand much later in life. And - always suspecting the worst! - I get a feeling that there might be a lot more …