Like a vaudeville punchline – the rhythm, the repetition, the structure so repeatable, it has been repeated for centuries. Classic comedy. Classic Shakespeare.
And for me, a woman without much religious instruction, it actually taught me a little something about Herod. I learned who Herod was by way of this ham over-doing it actor going past the bounds of what is reasonable.
And I just love the sound of this line. Just the sound of it.

Most of the time, I’m a big believer in non-violence.
You know, I’d go for negotiations before the punch in the mouth.
But situations like this, I might be able to get behind. Terrible acting? Definitely whipping is an appropriate response. Not from the actors, or directors, or anyone inside the process – but from the audience? I’m okay with this as a response.

But actually, it’s rarely the actors that deserve the whippings (though they are often insufferable.) It’s usually the creators of the piece, or maybe the producers who could do with a public beating. Like, who thought this was a good idea? Who will take responsibility for this drek? But, of course, I only ever enjoy the idea of it for a moment before I really think it through.

I guess what I like about the idea for a moment is the idea that an audience could care enough about a performance or a play to get up the energy and focus to give someone a whipping. Even standing ovations feel half-hearted in many theatres, like they’re standing because they should, or because they paid too much money to NOT make themselves enjoy it.

So, no, I don’t think I’d whip the passion tearing fellow who o’er does Termagant. Nor would I whip the director for pushing him in that direction. Nor the producer for putting things together in such a cock-eyed fashion.

I guess that’s one of the reasons we dispensed with whipping as a means of civil enforcement years ago. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument for something much too complex. But I do wish we all cared enough to want to whip.

This passion is something that can be torn, that can be ripped into rags, that can split and break and be reduced to tiny tatters. I picture passion as a bit of silk, a sheet, perhaps or a bit of lingerie. It is something to be cherished, to be stroked and enjoyed not something to be ripped to pieces like yesterday’s newspaper for the gerbil cage.

A passion can be secreted in the pocket of your dressing gown, revealed to only the chosen few, or waved over your head if you’re feeling public about it. A passion can be wound round your heart, nestled between your breasts, draped across your lap.
A passion should be treated with respect – not balled up and destroyed.

O dear American Actor, PLEASE heed this advice! I have seen so many shows that were nothing but shouting, where the arc of the show was, as far as I could tell, not-shouting to shouting to louder shouting to the loudest shouting and finally resolving to uncomfortable silence. Smoothness would be a welcome change of pace, my friends. Temperance is not often talked about in praise of performers – I’ve never read a review that praised an actor for his temperance. But I value it more than almost anything else. Generosity and temperance, give me those performers. You can keep the shouters.

I will take this as my mantra from now on. I do try to use all gently. To use my body gently. To use the people I encounter gently. There were so many years in which people were pushing me to be harder, to be rougher and firmer with people. It ran counter to my intuitions but I would try to do as I was told. I wanted to be right.

But I’ve been on the planet long enough now that I no longer care about being right for others. I’m much more interested in being right for me. And using all gently is right for me. And it somehow touches me to think about it, to imagine aiming at this idea instead of the old models of pushing violently, of using things and people roughly, storming through the planet and the world on it with a “Get out of my way” energy. It might not be possible to achieve the things I want with gentleness. . . but I’d rather achieve nothing with gentleness than achieve something with violence or force. It would be an empty victory.

There are moments, when you first start acting, in which you really do have no idea what to do with your hands. I can remember standing onstage, fully able to recite every word of my lines but utterly confused about what to do with my body. I have memories of my arms hanging by my side, seemingly 12 times bigger than usual, unwieldy and foreign – like someone had replaced my arms with two giant malevolent worms. Controlling those worms felt almost impossible – I felt I had to move them very forcefully to move them at all. It was as if the signal from my brain was full of static and in order to get the message out, it had to be repeated and exaggerated – sometimes it overshot the mark. I think this must be what happens to those people who saw the air too much. The signals have filled with static, the worms take over and they end up making absurd, disconnected gestures instead of their normal human ones.

Mouthing a speech makes me think of a baby, chewing bread, gumming it, really, since he has not teeth yet. It’s like taking a text and turning it into mush. Except that mouthing also calls to mind an overarticulation, a wrapping one’s mouth around words wider than one needs to – like someone fake biting instead of actually sinking your teeth into it – the way we pretend to eat the hands and feet of children we find adorable.

And now, of course, mouthing has come to mean saying something without voice, without sound, moving one’s lips and teeth and tongue in the shape of words but never voicing them – which is surely not what Hamlet means here – but does have the rather charming quality of somehow connecting up all these ideas into one funny mouthing idea.

While a lot of this is very good advice – speaking the speech, trippingly on the tongue. . . it does seem that Hamlet has given this entire company a bunch of line readings. It is funny that this speech, this advice to the players, is used so often as actual advice when there is really nothing that will kill a performance more quickly than being read a speech and then told to do it the way I did. The “just do it as I did it” technique has never worked, as far as I know. I mean, Hamlet is not a director, he’s a prince, so he’s not really meant to be giving useful advice to the players, is he?

There is a world of Shakespeare studies that proclaims that this speech is Shakespeare’s advice to his own players – that somehow it’s in the play as implicit criticism of all the actors in the company. But surely reciting a speech as it was pronounced to you didn’t work in Shakespeare’s day any more than it does now. And while not sawing the air too much with your hand is generally good advice – and of course, suiting the action to the word, the word to the action is a good idea, I am suspicious of anything said by a character in a play that begins with generally bad theatrical practice. It feels important to remember that this is Hamlet’s speech to the players, not Shakespeare’s. We have here a Prince of Denmark telling a group of traveling players what to do. The Prince of Denmark has written, perhaps for the first time, a bit of theatrical text. He is an amateur playwright, seized suddenly with a page full of advice for the professional artists suddenly charged with delivering the work. I think it’s important to take any advice he gives with a grain of salt.

It’s funny, after so many farewells in this scene, that he doesn’t use one when he actually leaves. This is the exit line instead of the multiple ALMOST exits previously.

This line is, in its way, many repetitions. It’s the most efficient “Go to a nunnery” sentiment – it repeats that idea, and repeats an exit. And, in a way, it perhaps sets you up for another fake-out. Previously, when he went to leave, he came right back. Is there some vaudevillian trope to be played here? Some physical return and exit again after this line? Or playing with the expectation that he’s set up that he’ll tell Ophelia she should go to a nunnery, making as if to leave and then coming back to say more stuff.

That sense of being toyed with might be enough to send me into tears. Maybe that’s how Ophelia gets to this next speech – out of sheer frustration of “Is he staying or going?”

It does feel as though stasis will tend to win. Single people tend to stay single. Married people, even if they split, will tend to stay married. I’ve been in a relationship for coming up on five years and I still feel sort of single – I think like a single person. If I imagine losing my partnership, it feels as though I’d just return to my natural state of individual-ness. I’m 40 and spent most of those 30 years on my own, with a few brief interludes of relationship. I know how to do it. Probably better than I know how to be in relationship.

For many of my friends, though, they default to relationship. When they lose one, they slide quite easily to the next.
We tend to keep as we are. Even though the nature of things is to change.