THE RSC'S 2016 HAMLET REVIEW

 

Rerooting the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC's) 2016 Production

 of Hamlet to the Ghanaian Setting: 

A Scholarly Review

GODFRED, NANA KRUENTSI OGOE

Mary Baldwin University, Staunton VA

Presented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at Royal Shakespeare Theater, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. January 01, 2016. Directed by Simon Godwin. Directed for screen by Robin Lough. Designed by Paul Willis. Lighting designed by Pual Anderson. Composed by Sola Akingbola. Fights by Kevin McCurdy. With James Cooney (Rosencrantz), Bethan Cullinae (Guildenstern), Paapa Essiedu (Hamlet), Griffiths (Laeters), Byron Mondahl (Professor of Wittenberg), Tanya Moodie (Gertrude), Cyril Nri (Polonius), Natalie Sampson (Ophelia), Clarence Smith (Claudius), Ewart James Walters (Ghost/Gravedigger), and others. 

                            (Fig 1: Clarence (Claudius) in Idi-Amin-like military uniform)

In Nour El Gazzaz’s review of the RSC 2016 production of Hamlet, they make strong assertions—that “the play remained culturally empty with only the simulacrum of a West African nation” (70) and that “colorful costumes and Kente cloth were not enough” (70) to depict the play’s setting; however, I argue that Gazza’s argument is flawed, and, by itself, a misrepresentation of the unity and power dynamics (in West Africa) in which the costumes represent. In this review, I argue that the RSC set Hamlet in the Ghanaian setting in order to bring to light Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's politics and legacy. This review, focusing on the Kente and Claudius’ Idi-Amin-like uniform, rests on the assertion that the production is not “empty” of its setting and its purpose.

Michael Billington contends that the play draws “a fascinating parallel [..] with Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who on returning to Africa in 1949 after studying in London, dwelt obsessively on mortality”. Unlike El Gazzaz, who seems unfamiliar with the play’s setting, Billington traces the play’s, in his own terms, “opening image”— “Hamlet getting his degree at Wittenberg University, Ohio”—to Nkrumah “who [..] return[ed] to Africa in 1949 after studying in London”.

                    (Fig. 2: Essiedu (Hamlet) receives his degree at Wittenberg University)

                        
                                   (Fig. 2a: Essiedu (Hamlet) receives his degree at Wittenberg University)

Even though Billington gives no performance clue about the production’s use of costumes, it is my view that his conclusion is not independent of the Kente costume; thus, the origin of Kente (Ghana) actually informs him of the play’s setting, so he then traces the “opening image” to “Nkrumah”. He also states that the play’s “focus is less on politics than on the predicament of a prince who finds himself an outcast in his own land”. I take a different stand on this observation, holding on to the notion that Claudius' military regime is what makes Hamlet “an outcast in his own land”.

Ali A. Mazrui argues that Nkrumah’s political “views remain profoundly representative of Africa” (“Between Development and Decay” 43). His “greatest admirer was [..] the Prime Minister of Uganda, Dr. A. Milton Obote'', whom Idi Amin “the villain of domestic decay” (57) "took over power in 1971” (1973: 50). Mazrui notes that Obote knew “it was not merely Nkrumah who was intended to fall from power” in 1966, so he “suspended the Constitution [..] to declare February 24 as ‘Heroes Day’ in honor partly of Kwame Nkrumah,” (“Nkrumah, Obotoe, and Vietnam” 37) whom Lt. General Joseph A. Ankrah overthrew. This is what Godwin’s play parallels, using the Kente and Idi-Amin-like military uniform. When Claudius first appears onstage in this Idi-Amin-like uniform to console Essiedu (Hamlet), when he stands away from his throne placed in front of the wall designed with blue “Kente, the Asantehene's choice as the royal fabric” (Smith: 36), Essiedu (Hamlet) distances himself from Claudius’s military-speech-like consolations exhibited in the lines (“[..] of impious stubbornness”/ “‘Tis unmanly grief”/ “Why should we, in our peevish opposition”,/ Take it to heart? Fie!”,/ “From the first corpse till he that died today”, etc.) by still embodying the agony of rejection all over his body, and bringing forth his inherent troubles caused by King Hamlet’s sudden demise.

                                           [Fig. 3: Claudius consoles Hamlet (Essiedu]

                      

                                 [Fig. 3a: Essiedu’s (Hamlet) embodying the agony of rejection]

                                [Fig. 3b: Essiedu’s (Hamlet) embodying the agony of rejection]

            [Fig. 1: How Clarence (Claudius), in his consolation of Hamlet, furiously and militarily embodies “From the first corpse till he that died today”]

Again, as Essiedu (Hamlet) unintentionally and continually spits in his speeches to both Claudius and Getrude, and as mucus keeps running from his nose as he speaks, the memories of Nkrumah, “the Messiah, [...] who ‘saved’ Ghana from colonialism” (Yakubu: 263) and painfully lost his throne due to coup d’état, is evoked—Essiedu (Hamlet) brings that same feeling of Nkrumah’s loss, through his (Essiedu’s) irrepressibly emotional responses felt in almost all his lines: “Seems, madam! Nay it is! I know not seems” [to Getrude (Moodie)]/ “there are actions that a man might play/ But I have that within which passes/ These but the trappings and the suits of woe”, etc. In short, Claudius’s Idi-Amin-like uniform recalls Ankrah's injury to Nkrumah, as the Kente, onstage, maintains Nkrumah’s heroic memories. 

Kente, as George Worlasi Kwasi Dor describes, is “the exquisite multi-colored Ghanaian cloth” with “embedded symbolic and utilitarian values”; it functions as the sacred “tool for articulating social and cultural constructs and codes of power, family, communal unity, and politics” (8). The production projects this sense with the Ghost (Walters) when he, dressed in Kente, comes out of the trapped door (or hell) to speak with Essiedu. As he beckons Hamlet and moves to stand at the position where the throne should be—by the wall designed with Kente (although the light makes the Kente unseen)—the Ghost’s (Walters’s) regains his ultimate power, within this familiar position, to charge Hamlet who will “articulat[e] the social and cultural constructs” lost in Claudius’ regime.

                      (Fig. 3: Ewart James Walters (Ghost) in Kente)

For the Ghost to appear in a blue Kente, it leaves Essiedu (Hamlet) with no doubt of the Ghost (Walters), when the Ghost (Walters) recounts his death, because he knows this blue Kente and it is the basis for him to believe the Ghost: it is the symbol of his father’s admiration and the representation of the “codes of power, family, and communal unity”. In Fig. 3, Essiedu (Hamlet) appears as one who has no ambivalence about the Ghost’s identity, so he calmly sits to discern and meditate on the message the Ghost (Walters) puts before him.

As Malika Kraamer would say that Kente was the “‘political dress’ in the Kwame Nkrumah era” (100), so Nkrumah “promoted” and “transformed” it into the national dress of Ghana'' which served as a “mental decolonization” (107), the production builds on these conceptual metaphors, considering that, appearing in his Kente, the Ghost (Walters) still adheres to his truly political culture and style. For Essiedu’s Hamlet, the Ghost (Walters) is still the one he knows, since his Kente is exactly the one on the wall and behind Claudius’s (Clarence’s) throne and represents the legacy of his father, the Ghost (Walters).

Again, as the production retains the Kente on the wall, behind the throne, and even surrounds Claudius and Gertrude’s portrait with the same Kente, the production brings into the sense that Claudius (Clarence), the dictator, seems to maintain King Hamlet’s ideologies, in the same way that Nkrumah’s ideologies and his legacy still remain with successive leaders (including the military), as Yakubu notes, “all other leaders have for the most part tried to emulate him” (264).

                    (Fig. 4: Nkrumah and Ankrah)

                (Fig. 4a: Ankrah emulates Nkrumah’s Nkrumah’s wearing)

Kramer also notes that “everybody was copying what Kwame Nkrumah was doing” (104). In this regard, when Essiedu (Hamlet) mars with paint Claudius (Clarence) and Gertrude’s (Moodie’s) portrait in the blue Kente at upstage left, Essiedu (Essiedu) questions Claudius’s (Clarence’s) true identity, on the grounds that he is a white-black angel who pretends to be “copying [..] Nkrumah” (in this case, King Hamlet). Essiedu (Hamlet), after he mars the portrait (Fig. 5), seals his action with Hamlet’s initial, “H”, to give a formal notice of his termination of Claudius’s reign as King.

                (Fig. 5: Essiedu (Hamlet) mars with paint Claudius’s dignity and validates his deed)

 And since Essiedu (Hamlet) carefully mars the portrait, by preventing the Kente from being soiled, it is his acceptance of the Ghost (Walters), his father, as one who is culturally pure and loyal with their society’s customs.

It should be, of course, noted that if Claudius could kill Hamlet the King when he was asleep, Godwin draws a deeper analogy to Nkrumah—using costumes, not textual clues—whose interest with “internationalist concerns” found him overthrown by his own people who had named him as “messiah”. Textual clues do not permit this, but through the Kente and its complementation with Claudius’s Idi-Amin-like military uniform—as seen in Claudius’s administration—this is the meaning that the production brings into awareness, looking at how Lt. General Joseph A. Ankrah overthrew Nkrumah and his administration but still found it necessary to continue his (Nkrumah’s) Kente wearing, the symbol of his (Nkrumah’s) purity and political legacy. Significantly, since “each weft design” of a Kente cloth has “a name” or “the myth of Ananse” (Smith: 36), “the composition of the warp and the color and variation of the stripes” (36) of the Ghost’s Kente falls within Fig. 15, 17, and 22 of Smith’s identification of the mysteries surrounding some Ghanaian Kente. Smith names Fig 15. as "Somebody wishes [wished] my death", Fig. 17 as “Money calls blood” and “Death has no fixed date”, and Fig. 22 as “Don't kill my house and then mourn for me in public”. This production, perhaps, draws these mysteries surrounding the Kente to purposely portray Clarence’s Claudius as “the villain of domestic decay”—he kills King Hamlet and maintains his (the dead’s/King Hamlet’s) legacy, the Kente, as if it is there for his (the dead’s) remembrance. In this production, King Hamlet’s antagonist (Claudius) is exactly as I define him, “Lt. General Joseph A. Ankrah, the Ghanaian Idi-Amin”.

In conclusion, Godwin’s Hamlet mimics the nature of politics in the 1960’s of Ghana. The display of unity and power dynamics under Nkrumah’s administration is what the production leans on heavily in order to “honor” him (Nkrumah), for his political ideologies “remain[ing] profoundly representative of Africa”. Kente and the Idi-Amin-like uniform do not make the play—as El Gazzaz thinks—-“empty” of its setting, but it is an artistic representation of the friendship shared between Nkrumah and Obotoe, who both were overthrown by a military power. They—the Kente and the Idi-Amin-like uniform—are, also, satirically discursive tools for questioning Lt. General Joseph A. Ankrah’s military regime. In this regard, the production uses these costumes to establish the commonalities between African leaders, and at the end, praises Nkrumah who, although was betrayed, remains the “messiah” in the minds of Ghanaian people.

 

  

References

 Billington, Michael, "Hamlet review - Paapa Essiedu is a graffiti prince in RSC's bright tragedy," The Guardian, 23 March 2016.

 Dor, George Worlasi Kwasi. “Ephraim Amu’s ‘Bonwere Kenteŋwene’: A Celebration of Ghanaian Traditional Knowledge, Wisdom, And Artistry.” African Music, vol. 9, no. 4, 2014, pp. 7–35.

El Gazzaz, Nour, "Review of Shakespeare's Hamlet," Shakespeare vol. 17, no. 1 (2021): 69-73.

Kraamer, Malika. “Beloved, Ignored, and Contested: The Politics of Kente in Ghana since the 1960s.” Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices, edited by JoAnn McGregor et al., Indiana University Press, 2022, pp. 100–28.

Mazrui, Ali A. “Between Development and Decay: Anarchy, Tyranny and Progress under Idi Amin.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 1980, pp. 44–58.

Mazrui, Ali A. “Nkrumah, Obote and Vietnam.” Transition, no. 43, 1973, pp. 36–39.

Saaka, Yakubu. “Recurrent Themes in Ghanaian Politics: Kwame Nkrumah’s Legacy.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 1994, pp. 263–80.

Smith, Shea Clark. “Kente Cloth Motifs.” African Arts, vol. 9, no. 1, 1975, pp. 36–39.