“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

I could mine Hamlet for quotes for ever, but one line has never been my motto: 'Brevity is the soul of wit' (see my Twitter feed if you don't believe me). Why Hamlet this morning? Well, because I went on a school trip to see it at the RSC in Stratford on Saturday. Students and colleagues all saw the matinée performance directed by Simon Godwin and starring Papa Essiedu in the title role.



The setting was still 'Denmark' but clearly in the present, and the rotten state was African: virtually the entire cast was African or of African origin, as were the music, accents, materials, furniture and politics. Over-elaborate military uniforms were the order of the day for Claudius and his subalterns, or shiny silk suits and brightly patterned fabrics.

The acting was superb without exception. Essiedu played Hamlet as sulky, sarcastic, sexually twisted and slyly mocking. Tanya Moodie was superb as Gertrude: a touch of Winnie Mandela about her, regal, morally adrift but determined to hang on to power. Cyril Nri had a tough job as Polonius: foolish old man or obsequious courtier who knows how to survive shifting power. The scenes with his daughter Ophelia (Natalie Simpson) are often played as evidence that he's a droning old bore, but this time his paternalistic advice seemed genuine and heartfelt. Simpson was just wonderful as Ophelia: it's a problematic part, moving from carefree teen to maddened victim but she made it comprehensible and moving. The other interesting casting choices were a pair of white actors as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: James Cooney and Bethan Cullinane. They started out as Hamlet's old university mates, looking like a pair of Inter-railers, then very convincingly got sucked into his uncle's machinations initially out of concern but before long due to self-interest.

Visually it looked superb: all the light and heat of a tense African capital, though I was less convinced by the overly-complicated stage set, all moving panels and clever mechanics which seemed a bit distracting. The rather obvious paintings and graffiti used to convey Hamlet's madness also seemed a bit unnecessary too. My clever friend Hilary suggested that Basquiat was the model, and she's much cleverer than me.

However, I did have one problem with the production. I can imagine it working brilliantly in an African capital with an African audience because the African setting could easily be interpreted as a political intervention. I did feel slightly uncomfortable sitting in an almost all-white crowd in the heart of the UK watching a play about superstition and political decay set in Africa. I confess that I don't know what Denmark signified to Shakespeare's audience, but popular stereotypes of Africa as a place of political violence and superstition were fully reinforced by this play's staging. It's not the casting: this cast was just brilliant and would have been brilliant wherever and whenever the play was set. Maybe I'm just an over-sensitive liberal or putting too much emphasis on the difference between the cast and the audience but it did feel slightly like conspiracy and superstition were being exoticism rather than recognised as a fundamental part of European culture.

That aside: it was a wonderful performance. Highly recommended.

The other thing I did this weekend was co-host a meeting to propose a Literature Festival in this city. Well over 50 people turned up so it looks like it's happening. What, where and who is yet to be decided but these are merely details. Now we just have to form a committee (oh god, another committee) and find some money. It's going to be in January because a) there aren't any other literary festivals in the winter and b) there's nothing else to do. The plan is to have a small number of well-known people but to really make it a festival of local literary activity: workshops and so on rather than just sitting there listening to visitors from the world of Literature. We don't want to imply that Literature isn't going on here, or is the preserve of other kinds of people. We shall see…

Getting some culcha

Hello all? I trust you had a weird and wonderful weekend. I had a very cultural one: a concert of modern classical music, and a trip to see Hamlet. Stoke City beat West Ham in the FA Cup quarter-finals (it was like watching Brazil) and the only wrinkle was Wales beating Ireland in the rugby.

The concert was mostly very good. I'd accidentally managed to get one of the best seats available (on the aisle, front row of the first circle near the centre), so I could see and hear perfectly and had plenty of legroom. The crowd was very mixed: lots of old folk who come to anything classical, and huge groups of music students and other young trendies who see Reich et al. as the originators of ambient, techno and pretty much anything that's interesting in pop. 

On the bill was Thomas Adès's In Seven Days, and Steve Reich's 1970s classic Music for 18 Musicians. In Seven Days sounded absolutely lovely, and I'll definitely buy it when it's available on CD, but I wasn't convinced by it as a cutting-edge piece by one of the world's greatest living composers. It took in a lot of Stravinsky and Debussy (excellent), but it wasn't hugely individual. I also thought that performing it with a massive screen showing mostly abstract images was a mistake. The piece was meant to be about the creation of the world, but once you've got what's essentially a huge TV, the music becomes the accompaniment to the images. As the images were mostly of the screen-saver variety (no marks, I'm afraid, to film-maker Tal Rosner), they diverted my attention from the music without making any profound claims on my intellect. It's possible that the music would have felt a little more weighty without the images.

The Steve Reich was just plain amazing though. It's a long piece in which changes in rhythm and melody sneak in slowly and subtly. On stage were four grand pianos (sometimes played by two people at a time), several glockenspiels and marimbas, four amplified wordless singers, a cellist, a violinist and two clarinettists, plus shakers and various bits. The players move around from instrument to instrument - singer to piano, pianist to marimba - as the piece dictates. At one point, three people were playing the same marimba at huge speed. So it's a performance piece as well as an exercise in pure minimalism, and the players thoroughly deserved their standing ovation.

I posted the opening the other day: here's the thrilling sixth section.



The other trip was to see Hamlet, which I've never seen on stage, by Northern Broadsides. The setting was 1940s: not sure why, but the costumes were utterly ravishing. Wish I had a range of 40s suits…

I was left in two minds about this. Most of it was excellent, but there were problems with pacing and acting style. Hamlet himself was a little too shouty, and there wasn't much light and shade in the last acts, so it felt sometimes like a cruder revenge tragedy than it really is. I did enjoy it, but did feel like they didn't trust us enough to take it more slowly.

Today in history

Pepys (1633) and Handel born today. Keats (1821) shuffled off his mortal coil (that's a Hamlet reference, kids). 

I read Paul McAuley's The Quiet War yesterday. It's good, solid space opera, in that it debates all the problems facing us (environmental destruction, the ossification of democracies into oligopolies, genetic engineering) by sticking them into a near-ish future and playing with the possibilities. McAuley is part of the hard-sf genre, also known as 'mundane SF' - scientific realism and a pretty downbeat assessment of our chances.

If you look down on SF, you're missing a genre which deliberately tackles all our social, scientific, philosophical and moral problems head on. Perhaps you're lumping fantasy in with it - and that's bad.