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Tim Carroll's Introduction to The Hamlet Project
Last year I worked with the young actor Alex Hassell on three shows: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and The Storm. I thought, once those were out of the way, that I was rid of him, but a few weeks ago he contacted me with a proposal.
He and his friend Tim Evans, also an actor, had become fed up with the passivity of the actor’s lot and had decided that they wanted to ‘get something going.’ What struck me was that they weren’t simply talking, as one might expect, about staging a production, or even about forming a company; they wanted to create a kind of actors’ forum.
This would be a flexible and informal group bound together by a desire to train, develop and investigate. The group might well stage something, but only as it arose from the work. Alex, from working on the aforementioned shows, and Tim, from seeing them and hearing about the way they had been rehearsed, both wanted me to be involved in the venture. In fact, they said, since what most interested them was to explore further the roads that my methods had opened up, their aim was to persuade me to take on a major role: if not leader, at least patron saint.
Well, now, as you can imagine, I have no objection to being set up as a guru, however fallaciously. But I don’t think this is really what they had in mind. As we talked, it soon became clear that it would be neither possible nor desirable for me to lead all the group’s work: not possible because I work abroad a lot; not desirable because an informal, experimental group should keep all its options. On the other hand, as I know from the Globe, a group will travel much farther and more boldly when everyone feels, as we did there, that they are on a mission. It is no good setting off without any aim in mind.
I told Tim and Alex: I can immediately think of avenues that I want to pursue. The question is, do they have anything in common with what you want? What do you personally want to get out of this?
Their answer seemed, to me, to be twofold: to be able to continue developing as actors; and to be part of a group where everyone has a real, ongoing stake in the work.
Now, these urges are familiar to many actors, and none the worse for that. Many actors feel that they left drama school before their training had finished; some feel that it never really started. And many actors grow tired of being expected to feel a passionate esprit de corps for a new bunch of strangers every few months. There have been many attempts to solve these problems: the Actors’ Centre runs classes, and in New York there is a thing called the Shakespeare Workshop which is attended by actors of every stripe who want to stop their muscles dying of atrophy. Ensemble companies exist, too, and in most European theatres the norm, of course, is the permanent acting company. To most British actors it sounds too good to be true: a secure salary, paid holidays, as many as ten roles in rep at any one time – they’re even pretty understanding about time off for filming…
Except that isn’t what we are talking about here. If it were possible, it might be worth daydreaming about –a converted barn in Kent! My own company! Football every lunchtime! - but it isn’t. And in any case the country I know best, about which I was talking then, provides a much more important paradigm, one which is more truly in line with what we (yes, we: no point being coy) are trying to set up here.
When I first went to Hungary twelve years ago, I was taken to see a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was told that it would be very special. I had already noticed that the rehearsal had a special start time: midnight. The director was a young guy who had been kicked out of the biggest company (they didn’t like his attitude) and had decided to put together his own show. For the Dream he went to all the biggest names in Hungarian theatre and signed them up (he’s a persuasive chap). The problem was, they all worked for different companies, where they were fully committed. X would indeed love to work with Y, but never got the chance. No problem, said the director: just come over when your shows finish and we’ll see what we can do. We needn’t kill ourselves, since we have no opening night to work towards; we’ll just keep meeting until we have something interesting to show, and then, when we can, we’ll show it. When they first did show it, after a year of rehearsals that fluctuated wildly in frequency, several thousand people came along and they had to perform twice: once at midnight and once at 3 AM.
Why do I tell this story at such length? Because it illustrates the freedom that comes with having nothing. No money, no theatre, no production – and no limits. I have, in fact, often told this tale as part of my answer to young directors, when they ask me for advice (I know, I know). I say: the one thing you have is time, so use it.
But that’s not the only reason why I tell the story. It also illustrates what, listening to the guys, I felt would be a crucial ingredient if the plan was to work: an intention to produce something. The people who did the Dream gave themselves plenty of time, but they knew that there would be a show at the end of it. The more that Alex, Tim and I talked, the clearer it became to all of us that the project needed the focus of a production. It’s all well and good saying ‘Do you want to be part of our group, we’re going to work on developing our skills under the general guidance of TC’ but without such a focus we could all see that it would be difficult if not impossible to keep such a group cohesive and motivated.
But what project? This is where serendipity seemed to be playing a part.
If you are reading this, you will quite likely have heard about my Hamlet in Budapest. The potted version is this: inspired by my time at the Globe to see how far one could go with spontaneous, audience-responsive playing, I directed a production in which every part (except Hamlet) has been learnt by at least two actors (sometimes more). At the beginning of each show the actors learn, by a lottery, which part(s) they will play. In the show itself all the props (swords, skulls, flowers etc) are improvised from objects brought by the audience, and all the music is culled from CDs also brought by them. The audience are in the same light as the actors, and even the playing space is dictated by where the spectators choose to put their seats. The aim – and, I am happy to say, the result – of all these conditions is that each performance is unique and unrepeatable. Not perfect: each show has moments that fail to come off, as it has moments of beautiful inspiration. The ratio fluctuates according to all sorts of factors, some capable of being adjusted, others simply unavoidable consequences of the set-up.
I could talk all day about the show, and how or why it does or doesn’t work. But this is getting towards epic length already. I hope there will be time later for the full discussion. For now what matters is that I feel I have in no way exhausted the possibilities of this kind of work (nor, of course, of Hamlet). I am keen to find out where else it can go, and to see what British actors and audiences might make of it. It immediately struck me, listening to the lads’ proposal, that our two ambitions might dovetail perfectly.
I say perfectly because, it seems to me, each solves the problem of the other. What is the biggest problem facing a group like this, assuming it wants to aim towards a performance? The fact that the personnel never remains the same. Not a problem as long as you just want the occasional refresher class, but a killer, surely, if you want to put something on? How on earth can you schedule an opening night? The answer is simple: by putting on a show that actually insists on shifting personnel.
When I rehearsed Hamlet in Budapest, I often found that some of the actors were unavailable. I didn’t care: I just rehearsed with whomever I was given. Because I had four Horatios, two Poloniuses etc., there was always something I could work on. In this, as in almost every other respect, it was more like training a football team than rehearsing a cast. If a player is injured, the team trains anyway. After all, they might still be missing him when the match comes, so they’d better be able to play in any permutation. My Hamlet system dictates that there will be rotation of the team; rotation of the squad might as well be part of the training process.
I’ll stay with the football analogy (bear with me) to introduce some other key notions. To begin with, what is the essential difference between the preparation of a football team and that of a cast? Surely it is that the football team is preparing for a game in which they don’t know what the opposing team will do. Now, clearly, there are unpredictable factors that can affect a theatre performance, but mostly a cast can stick to the plan and soldier on through them. A football team that did that would be thrashed, however individually skilful they might be. What they must do is develop their skills as a team, and try to reach a point where they can respond to any situation that might arise. This is true of the best theatre ensembles, and it is the defining aim of my Hamlet project. Of course, neither kind of team simply trains randomly, developing any and every skill indiscriminately. They train in accordance with certain principles, many of which are common to both: being in the moment, not dwelling on mistakes, remaining aware of everything around you, accepting offers, hiding or revealing your intention as the situation requires, variation of tempo and so on.
What, then, are the differences? Surely there must be some? What about each character and his/her motivation? Footballers don’t have to formulate and agree on any one attitude to such things, do they? No, they don’t. But nor, I would say, do actors, at least not in this model. This is where the practical difficulties of a loosely-affiliated group actually help my way of working: if we were all together all the time there would be a strong temptation to forge agreement among all the (e.g.) Ophelias as to what sort of person she is, why she does what she does, etc. If one thought of this approach as indispensable, then whenever an actor missed a rehearsal you would have to go back through all of it in order to bring everyone up to the same page. But my approach would be that of the football coach: he doesn’t make everyone duplicate the training session the injured player missed; the returning team member simply joins in with whatever work is being done today. It is understood that he has missed some practice and will therefore be a little further from match sharpness.
How much an actor needs to decide, or think, or agree with a director on such things as character, motivation and even narrative are, it goes without saying, questions that one could debate at great length. It’s a debate that, if we get this project off the ground, I am sure we will have, and I look forward to it. But it is only fair to point out that the project itself will radically circumscribe that debate. The reason it will do so is one of the reasons I am so passionately attached to this method: it has a kind of built-in veto on interpretation. Not that I have anything against interpretation per se; I just don’t really think it’s our job.
And herein lies the solution to another apparent contradiction in this proposal: how can one have an actors’ forum that is both catholic and, at the same time, has an unmistakeable direction to its work? The answer is that the manager of a team can afford to bring in a new coach to take training one day without the team feeling that they are being confused or led off in a different direction. The new coach may have a different philosophy: this is called a refreshing change. Likewise, a director invited to work with our group for the first time might have a very specific interpretation; why should this be a problem? I can’t actually imagine a session or rehearsal that could seriously scupper our preparations to play, for one simple reason: everything gets thrown away. This is the principle of the show, and therefore of the rehearsal: whatever happens, however brilliant, it happens only once. Whatever insight is gained into character, no matter how blinding the revelation, it is not discussed again and nothing is built on it – except, inevitably and healthily, in a subterranean way.
So that’s the thinking that has led me to the point where I can write this:
We want to form a group which will begin meeting in January. The first few sessions will be led by me, with my colleague Natalie Abrahami (who assisted me on my last two Globe shows). Thereafter, sessions may be led by one of us, but might just as well be led by other directors, actors, or whatever. These sessions will probably use or focus on Hamlet, but even those that don’t will, I’m sure, contribute to our ultimate aim to create a team of players who can perform that piece. (I did think, initially, of moving to a different play – e.g. a Chekhov – but I soon realised that Hamlet is both the one that I want to do and the ideal material for this kind of work.) I can imagine, perhaps as early as next summer, having a core group of actors who have trained enough, and learnt enough text, to launch our first attack: an intensive two-week training period leading to just one or two performances, somewhere interesting, with a randomly selected cast. (I would even aim with this group to have every part including Hamlet learnt by several actors.) If, as I feel sure would happen, we then wanted to play again, we could do so whenever enough actors were available. Another great thing about the system is that you can play with a cast of ten or thirty or anything in-between, depending on who you have free. This also means that players can join the team as and when they are up to speed; you can sign up now without worrying that you may later become unavailable. In my pipe-dream version of this scheme, everyone will have plenty of opportunities to play, and everyone will miss several shows, as the Hamlet project becomes an ongoing, drop-of-a-hat, guerrilla campaign, to be followed in due course by other shows which take the exploratory mission off in entirely new directions.
If you decide to come to our first session, and if you then decide to keep coming, you can do so for any reason: you might want to be part of a team that will play risky and exciting Hamlets; or you might want simply to take a class with an artist you like. Either way, I hope we can make the work stimulating and inspiring for everyone, and that everyone will feel that they are contributing to the group’s work.
Tim Carroll
August 2006
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