Hamlet (eBook)

Preface

Performing Dialogues of Race and Culture

There is a dangerous growing tendency to think that certain conversations have been had, that there are certain subjects and issues that we don’t need to talk about anymore because we ‘know about them’. It is a point of view that I am encountering more and more especially around issues of racism, sexism, homophobia and class prejudice. It is a perspective that views those issues as stagnate, unchanging and one-dimensional and ‘known’. This inevitably leads to a complacency that portrays these issues as things that happen away from us and outside of our educated and sophisticated circles. Performing dialogues of Race and Culture, is a Kingston University Drama department project that seeks to counter that perspective through various events, readings and conversations, highlighting the need to understand how these issues continually impact on our lives and how theatre and performance can help us to view our world. It is an initiative engaged in fostering dialogue and debate between students of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and theatre industry professionals exploring issues of diversity across all aspects of performance. As Patrick Wright emphasizes ‘stories play a prominent part in the everyday activity of making sense,’1 and that is something that these series of conversations will explore.

Hamlet: 2016 Black Theatre Live Production

It was not a nationalistic, inward-looking Bard who named his theatre on the Southbank ‘The Globe’, but an innovative writer and cosmopolitan theatre impresario who recognised the theatre as an intercultural, transnational space for creative opportunities of exchange and dialogue. Jeffery Kissoon’s production of Hamlet with an all-black British cast recognises Hamlet as a powerful, global cultural text uniting both the past and the present and going to the heart of the British experience of the twenty-first century. Questions about identity, history, power, agency and accountability highlight a modern condition where old certainties and narratives are exposed creating the conditions for a new critical consciousness.

Kissoon’s production of Hamlet is crucially a reimagining, a re-inscription which engages in W.E.B. Dubois’ cultural strategy for disturbing the conventional, acceptable politics of representation. In the first pan-African conference held in July 1900 at Westminster Town Hall in London, Dubois along with Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams had argued that an integral part of the resistance to imperialism and racism was the need to ‘have us [black people] recognised as a people’2 and to address the erasure of African history. In 1922 the African (Gold Coast) Nationalist J.E. Casely-Hayford, highlighted not only the rich histories and cultures of the Africa continent, but against a Eurocentric historiography that had erased much of the African narratives. Casely-Hayford proffered a radical and provocative statement that ‘even before the British came into relations with our people, we were a developed people, having our own institutions, having our own ideas of government.’3 This was a theme that would be expanded on by an array of writers and political activists4 such as Walter Rodney in his seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), highlighting the highly developed societies and states in Africa, ‘Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia, Morocco, the Western Sudan, the interlacustrine zone of East Africa, and Zimbabwe…each a leading force on the continent,’5 before they came into permanent contact with Europe.

The idea of a different history or the understanding that there might be other stories to be told from diverse perspectives has and remains a driving force for equality and diversity politics and theatre itself. This of course can be challenging and uncomfortable (see Kissoon’s perspective on Othello later on), but hopefully provides an opportunity for dialogue and for new understandings. As Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott argues, some continue to see ‘Caliban as an enraged pupil. They cannot separate the rage of Caliban from the beauty of his speech when the speeches of Caliban are equal in their elemental power to those of his tutor. The language of the torturer mastered by the victim.’6 Hamlet is a seminal theatre text, which continues to ask questions to each new generation at a particular historical moment. The Black Theatre Live production of Hamlet continues in that tradition. The production illustrates a rich social and cultural history of translation, adaptation and exchange in British theatre and also between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean in an Africa-Atlantic history. In doing so it challenges notions of power and agency and presents interesting points of departure into identity, nation and representation.

In conversation with…

Jeffery Kissoon and Mark Norfolk

As a performer Jeffery Kissoon is one of the outstanding actors of his generation whose work especially with Shakespeare’s texts has challenged convention and provided new interpretations with his understanding of Afro-Asiatic origins and of the black diaspora. As a director he has continued to bring his creativity and invention to new work and to classical adaptations. Playwright and filmmaker Mark Norfolk creates work that dismantles Eurocentric and linear narratives and expands the black British aesthetic of dramatic story telling through profound explorations of the human condition. Both Kissoon and Norfolk have had unorthodox pathways that reflect shared experiences vital to their successful theatre and film collaborations but also in reflecting the wider black British experience. For all their work and national and international recognition both have continued to work outside of the mainstream of theatre seeking to finance their own projects. This as they discuss is not by choice but through necessity.

Do you think Hamlet’s uncertainty reflects the black British experience in any way?

JK: It is possible to say ‘yes’ to that question, but I think we need to think more about it from Hamlet’s perspective. Is Hamlet uncertain? He knows what he has to do if he believes the ghost who tells him to avenge his father’s murder. He knows he has to kill his uncle. The problem is that instead of just picking up his blade and killing Claudius he thinks about what happens to him after death. His uncertainty throughout is linked to the belief in the afterlife, it being a Christian world in which the play is set. This belief makes people stall as to the actions that they’re supposed to follow. Religious belief stops a lot of people from acting. In Hamlet’s world he wants the truth. So the uncertainty is either a self-denial or the denial of the facts that denote the truth. To be certain means you must act. And if you are certain and sure, you will act. So how does that relate to black people? The uncertainty is that basically, in my opinion, we are not empowered. We’re fragmented into being individualistic. So if that’s Hamlet’s dilemma in seeking truth in order to act, then perhaps that’s the bottom line of the black nations all over the world, including Britain.

What does Hamlet’s father represent?

JK: Hamlet’s father represents stability, surety, knowledge of self. His father is everything that Hamlet has always admired. His father is saying, ‘Remember me, remember the harmonious life that we lived, remember the golden age that I represented, the golden age of Denmark. Remember the black world when everything was harmonious, peaceful, rich, perfect.’ So the ghost represents a past that is no more because now, since Claudius, we’re into corruption. Death hangs over everything. Love is totally annihilated, destroyed. In this play love is sacrificed. The betrayal of love, for me, is the biggest theme running through Hamlet.

What do you want the audience to take away from this production?

JK: First and foremost, from the theatrical experience, a wonderful story of Shakespeare’s language being well-spoken and clearly understood. What you will see is a lovable young man who is eventually destroyed because of the circumstances in which he finds himself: a good kid goes bad. A good kid becomes dangerous, finding himself trapped between heaven and hell.

Do you think things are better or less complicated for this generation? If so, what’s changed?

JK: That’s not an easy question to answer. I think on a certain level things appear to have changed. You could say there are more opportunities. But when you really get down to it what you’re really seeing is, ‘If I can fit in and become like the established system, then perhaps I’ll be okay’. But if you’ve got other things to say, then you will be marginalised. They don’t want to hear your voice.

JK: When Shakespeare wrote Othello, he was reflecting what everyone was thinking at that time. Iago was speaking to the audience, all those asides, ‘I can lead this black man by the nose. I’ll show him to you’. At first, it’s like a stand-up comedy. They would’ve been killing themselves laughing at the jokes that Iago came up with, ‘An old black ram is tupping your white ewe… making old rubber lips at her.’ They’d be killing themselves in the pit. They love that. That’s why he wrote it, in my opinion. And they’re with him until they see something that really doesn’t taste good. And prickles. And this is because he...