This Majestical Roof

Shakespeare's Globe: May 6, 2011.

Friday night at the Globe Theatre (Shakespeare's Globe), we all watched Hamlet, the Dane, in a spare and energetic production that opened on the Bard's birthday a couple of weeks ago.  It was off-putting, at first, that the same actor playing Claudius played the elder Hamlet's ghost, the actor playing Horatio played also Rodrigo, etc, and all played instruments at one time or another, but this gave the work a sinew we soon appreciated, and the pace kept our minds off our weary legs, standing as we were in the "yard" for nearly three hours.  I was told later that someone had fainted behind me and had to be carted out, but I never noticed.

"this brave ore-hanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire"

To stand there for the entirety of Hamlet is to drink it neat.  The language needs no glossary, the tragedy and its balancing dark comedy were plain to us.  And more than this, it all seemed new, as if we were hearing it for the first time.

After Horatio commended Hamlet to his flights of angels and Fortinbras delivered his lines on the stage littered with bodies, we all stood there breathless, unable to applaud.  This was as it should be: Fortinbras then began a beat with stamping feet and this evolved into an athletic dance, joined by the rest of the company,  each springing back into life in the order they had succumbed to blade or poisoned cup.  The door back into our own time, into living reality, was thus thrown open and we stumbled out onto the bank of the Thames with its many bridges alive with trains and busses.