on the monologue (but mostly about hamlet)

An observation on stagecraft, for the aspiring actor: the monologue is an actor talking to himself, not the audience. The audience is beyond the wall he breaks to talk to himself, that self that is otherwise sequestered and beyond his waking life. Consider John Ashbery’s poem:

Life must be back there. You hid it

So no one would find it

And now you can’t remember where.

The monologue is the actor remembering where. Hamlet finds and transcends his audience with a kind of relief that he does not find with Horatio. This is because he is speaking to that dim shadow of his soul, his sequestered inner self, which is the only being who can understand him fully. The monologue is not some ancient contrivance mined from Elizabeth England with no modern equivalence. In the television show Fleabag, the actor’s camera-direct glance heavily implies a monologue — or rather, it implies the visual architecture of a monologue. The audience is the pastor, the actor the confessor. The exchange is like honeycombed light through a netted partition sliding back, and forth, and back, and forth. It is the regular exchange of vulnerability and emotional epiphanies. The audience understands their own grief, pain, or shame as the actor endeavors to remind them: this is what grief looks, or pain, or shame looks like. Do you, as an actor, recognize it in yourself?

A greater achievement of the monologue is having the audience understand something beyond just the personal excavations of you, the actor. If you can deliver a monologue, and the audience achieves a dimension where they become you, rather than merely understand you, that is the true achievement. Hamlet is sick of his own cowardice. He vaunts Pyrrhus, Laertes, other resolute men who take resolute action, unconstrained by cowardice. Other men are great, not he. He does not (or cannot) witness the breadth of his own intelligence. He is unaware of his talent for people-minding, for friendship, for honesty, for empathy. But the man is incredible. The man could be a king. The audience witnesses these things, and we wish dearly for his wretched self to witness them too. The audience then realizes that I am he, he is me, and that my cowardice is human, just as Hamlet’s is, and New York suddenly feels as unlivable and rotten as his Denmark feels to him. I am heir apparent to a world that cannot save me. I become Hamlet.

Alex Lawther in Robert Icke’s New York production of Hamlet this year helped achieve this ‘becoming’ for me. Consider one of Lawther’s decisions – make sure the audience becomes complicit during your monologues. When you say “he himself might his quietus make/ with a bare bodkin” run two sharp fingers across your left wrist, as if you were splitting it open. Speak the famous prose monologue as if you were James Taylor in a Massachusetts asylum, Van Gogh in his fields, Shakespeare himself after he lost his son Hamnet:

I have of late, but

wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all

custom of exercises and, indeed, it goes so heavily with

my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems

to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy

the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this

majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it

appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent

congregation of vapours. What piece of work is a man

– how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form

and moving; how express and admirable in action; how

like an angel in apprehension; how like a god; the

beauty of the world; the paragon of animals. And yet to

me what is this quintessence of dust?

[The prose monologue ‘What a piece of work is a man’ performed by Andrew Scott as Hamlet. Directed by Robert Icke for The Almeida Theatre in 2017 and recorded by National Theatre Live. Icke also directed Alex Lawther as Hamlet in the New York transfer of the production this summer; Lawther and Icke talk about their approach here, where they discuss Hamlet “meeting the audience.’]

An addendum to Lawther’s (and Scott’s) decision as actors – help remind the audience that words like this, in this order, with this logic and structure and precise incandescence, were midwifed out of a pen four hundred years ago, but were meant to be spoken on stage. Convey to your audience that this monologue, with its availability of metaphor, and the humanity resident in its sadness, is meant for your actor’s tongue alone. The writer has gone to such lengths to make you comfortable, given you such leeway for interpretation, that you must own it, and own the stage, as if the words were your own. You get to say this majestical roof fretted with golden fire and to imagine yourself gazing up at an airy wooden O on a London riverbank. You get to feel nobility! You get to feel the suddenly stretching sinew of your muscles, the quickness of your youth, your sharp mind, like the tawny predator playing in long grass heated by the sun.

And then you must make it all dissolve. You cannot find humor in anything; you cannot bring yourself to stretch those muscles, sore from disuse atrophy. Dull irritation enervates you occasionally, but it is the sterility of your soul that only registers. You must convince yourself that despite how much there is to love about yourself, and about others, everything is shit, and to shit we all shall return. You get to be human. You must say quintessence of dust and make a tabula rasa of all this nobility. But throughout this very human reversal of mood, of state, of health - your body must retain hope. Your body must remember the hope hidden in golden fire and brave o’erhanging firmament, or the hope coursing through lines like how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. The bleakness must always have an enemy, and that enemy is hope. For all the Campbellian posturing of modern-day storytelling – the battles of superheroes on alien planets, air pilots gunning down other guns in flying saucers – everything still comes down to Hamlet, to a candle, a human being straining to stay alight in the windy dark. Can you do this? Can you be human? Through Hamlet, you can be. His monologues are for his inner soul, and the audience is merely a double for his inner soul. So speak these monologues trippingly on the tongue, without tempest and without tameness, so that me and my friends seated in the audience can try to be human too.