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The readiness is all

Martin Kusej directs "Hamlet" on the Perner Island

The 'Shakespeare on the Perner Island' series continues with 'Hamlet' directed by Martin Kusej (Photo: Marlies Henke)

At the start is a murder. The elder Hamlet, king of Denmark, is killed by his brother Claudius. Shortly afterwards Claudius marries young Hamlet's mother Gerturude and has himself crowned new king of Denmark.

At the start is a suspicion, the word of a ghost. Hamlet, returned from Wittenberg, learns from his father's ghost a truth he can confide to no one. This is the truth of the parricide committed by his uncle the reigning king; it cannot be accommodated into the scheme of things, it is unutterable. He is sole possessor of this truth and fully aware of its precarious quality; and to escape having to doubt his own sanity he opts for insanity. The rôle of madman is well chosen. All madmen are in possession of truths which are incapable of being communicated, which cannot be formulated in what might be considered a rational sequence. Words, words, words. In the game of language Hamlet's truth retains even for him a strangeness, more remote than Hecuba's fate to the player.

Alongside madness it is the theatre which can express Hamlet's truth. It can manifest itself only in distortion, in the medium of metaphor, in a mirror. We know how utterly without consequence the manifestation through theatre can be: the king gets up and leaves the room. At the same time the unexaminable, unregulatable truth of the madman and the unverifiable and incontrovertible assertion of the theatre endanger official truth and undermine its self-assurance. It is because Hamlet's truth is so without securities, so 'unheard of' as to be expressible only in the idiom of madness and the theatre that it is so menacing - not simply for the man who rules unlawfully but for the language of power, which will not acknowledge it.

Hamlet is no self-tormented ditherer, no intellectual condemned to a brooding incapacity for action, no melancholiac intoxicated with death, although he himself repeatedly sees himself in these terms. By the time the play is over he has, after all, if one can accept that as proof of a capacity for action, run his sword through three men. The words with which he heads for the showdown: 'The readiness is all': may also be regarded as a programme for a time in which no programmes are available any more. The tense alertness of Hamlet, his swiftness and unpredictability, his agile shifting from level to level of language: all these make Hamlet dangerous. The readiness is all. The question of what one must be ready for does not have to be answered in advance. But one cannot fail to take the opportunity.