This is the story of a man, who may have been two men, plus another man, plus a man who may have been historical, or modelled on the other man.
“Confused? You will be…”
I’m not usually huge on one-man shows. I’ll admit it. A performance has to be pretty damn gripping, and the material has to be very strong, to carry a show with only one person on the stage. But last night I went to see a one-man show: The Man Who Was Hamlet, both written and performed by one George Dillon. (His publicity says he has been doing solo shows for twenty years but he hardly looks old enough; my friend and I had a conversation afterwards, hypothesising that he could “conceivably be a young-looking 40, he could have got started at 18…” Turns out that if you piece the info together he’s probably eight years older than that, and has been working with Berkoff intermittently since 1986. Ninety minutes of lunging, prancing, fencing, rolling over and dying, and he was still standing at the end! Except for the death bit. I clearly have to get fit.)
The show’s apparently been wowing audiences in Edinburgh for a couple of years – I can see why – and is now doing a little tour. It’s currently at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, as part of their Steven Berkoff Presents… season. (On another aside, that’s two Berkoffs for me in only a week! Last Sunday our man unveiled a bust of EA Poe on the front of the Fox Reformed wine bar in Stoke Newington Church St – the site where young Edgar, aged ten, was fostered and educated by Mr Allen while his family travelled – as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. My friend and I were so close we were practically in the photographs.)
But the play’s the thing – and what a play. A monologue life review in the person of the 17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, doesn’t sound perhaps all that exciting. But make that earl a rake and spendthrift, courtier to Queen Bess, player in the burgeoning theatres, the aristocrat closest to the writers of the day – and the most credible candidate in the Shakespeare identity parade – who killed a man in a fencing accident while still in his teens – and it becomes a different matter.
Incidentally. Edward de Vere had a house in Stoke Newington Church Street, sadly no longer standing, right next to where my dentist is. He died there and is said to be buried in Hackney. But George Dillon shamefully leaves this salient point out of his play.
The play never says that Oxford wrote Shakespeare. A difficult feat, to put it in the first person and sidestep the main question, but as I said, there’s a lot of parry-&-thrust. The words are a clever amalgam of Dillon’s, Shakespeare’s, and indeed de Vere’s. The Shakespeare lines are ingeniously woven in and even form a framework for the character development of the protagonist; there is a bit of business when young Edward imitates his guardian, the Queen’s advisor Cecil (later Lord Burghley), giving his “dull man’s philosophies – a [sneers] politician’s philosophies…” which include things about not lending to your friends in case your own fortune be forfeit, and being true to yourself at all times so none can impugn you wrongly, etc – very cleverly done, and of course in his career at court the maturing Oxford must adopt these politicians ways… it’s VERY well done.
It is written in Elizabethan form, in wonderful iambic pentameters that go in and out of prose, and in one or so cases I wasn’t sure if I even heard a sonnet. There is one point when, imprisoned in the Tower and speaking very strong poem about his lover Ann Vavasour, he has to do an awkward line break/rhyme/sense thing, but my friend didn’t notice it. She’s an actress, not a poet.
It has struck me before, by the way, how much more intimate the actors are with Shakespeare than the poets. The poets love him, revere and fear and all that – but the actors inhabit him. It’s a little shaming to the poetry world, I always think. Certainly, poets distrust actors when they start trying to recite verse, because they invariably start acting it – taking the power away from the words and diverting attention to themselves. (Witness Fiona Shaw’s Waste Land, for example, though I know several people who loved it). (And more on that soon.) Poetry is made to be spoken, but it’s hard not to think it’s a sign of our current poetry-nervousness that when people really try to do it, they suck all the oxygen out. No one knows what to do with it… Shakespeare is different because his plays were written to be spoken as plays, and in the least poetically conducive, most rollicking scenarios.
This little one-man show is also rollicking, in exactly that sort of Elizabethan way. (It’s also, as it should be, a memento mori. There are three props: a book, a sword, and a skull.) There are some big laughs, not least on the two occasions when the earl travels through “er – Warwickshire…” and meets a yokel with a large, egg-shaped protuberance on his head. Dillon acts out the yokel (both as a piping child and later as a young man, with churl’s voice), to roars of laughter form the audience. He also does a brilliant little turn as the Pope, excommunicating the Queen. (The Queen herself is a major character, gorgeously portrayed. In his way, George Dillon is the Queen.)
There is a very funny sub-story about his rivalry with Sir Philip Sidney (similar to the rivalry with Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love), which is brilliantly done once again, but – in the only missed trick I could find in the piece – it just fizzles out, just at the point when Sidney is killed in battle and gains glory and honour – just at the point where – but no, no spoilers. But it could have been both a dramatic and a very comic moment.
As for the central character, our earl, he is utterly brought to life – wielded up from death to play his play, and then returned to it and given a real personality. I wouldn’t say the play says that Oxford is Shakespeare, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t. It gives us a metaphysical conundrum, with the threads of argument woven in rather than untangled. It’s a gorgeous jeu d’esprit, and an intensely clever piece of work, and if I were you I would go see it forthwith.
Baroque in Hackney 