Production Archive

Out of chaos comes order, at least so we like to think, when as poets we take random lumps of experience and shape them with words into some sort of coherence; when as managers we take scruffy little units of productivity and mould them into teams of efficiency and corporate loyalty; when as politicians we strive to fit the inner vision on the outer scene by lopping off the awkward bits of the latter. But such idealism is subject to crude reality, to the incapacity of a changeable and definitely not ideal world to cope with perfection. So, when James Joyce, who was crammed full of ideas, put 1+2+3 together he guessed that they did not really add up because, when all is said and done, in Hamlet, the very work of art that purports to conjoin the artist (Hamlet – remember, he never actually does anything), the manager (Polonius, Colin to his friends, who is obsessed with systems) and the politician (Claudius, who has a penchant for poison and other people’s property) into a sweet and satisfying completeness, something smelt very wrong. Like that sentence, it just went on too long. To cut a long story short, it was stolen property, bereft of its essential integrity, wholeness, symmetry, radiance and that little moment of blinding light. Art tainted with politics. So your man steps in, personally, in an attempt to reassert the primacy and integrity of the artistic process by reconstituting the identity of Hamlet (Shakespeare’s spiritual son) into its proper shape as Hamnette (his wife’s spiritual daughter) and to discover whether the principle that determines its shape is comic or tragic. With art, you see, as with management and politics, you never know until the end of the story whether to laugh or cry. We have, then, epic conflicts that resound through every degree of concreteness and abstraction: mother and daughter, husband and wife, innocence and corruption, justice and ambition, order and accident, art and politics.