To Be or ? Elliot Levey’s Jewish view of Hamlet
Now playing Polonius at the RSC, actor Elliot Levey draws parallels between Judaism and Shakespeare's play
I’m writing this from the RSC’s rehearsal room in Clapham.
We’re three weeks into Hamlet.
I have just watched an extraordinary scene where Jared Harris’ Claudius – wrestling with his guilty conscience for killing the king – clumsily attempts to pray for forgiveness. And I am suddenly transported back in time to my childhood shul in Leeds. Not because I was regicidal – anti-monarchical thoughts came later – but despite my religious upbringing, I was simply hopeless at prayer. Claudius just can’t pull it together either. The act of praying embarrasses him. He feels self-conscious. Fraudulent. He says: “My words fly up but my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
And that was me. Standing next to my dad. Davening the Amidah. The whole congregation facing east towards Jerusalem, and however fervently my lips whispered those familiar words, my heart was empty and a cold self-consciousness seemed to jeer at my efforts. It’s not that back then I had rejected God, as I would as an adult, but that my inability to communicate with him made me feel lost. Lost and faintly ridiculous.
I had genuinely considered becoming a rabbi until this overwhelming wave of awkwardness at shul started to gnaw away at me. Nothing pushed me further from connecting with divinity than the moment when contemplative access to the Presence was most expected. When the Ark was opened, or we turned east. I just couldn’t do it. I looked at the congregation and envied the ease with which they davened. And so I stopped trying. I attempted to switch off my mind and just say the words. Follow the advice of the opening line of the Amidah – “open my lips and my mouth shall praise” – and perform a literal lip service. You’ll forgive the Biblical allusion when I tell you my heart turned to stone.
Like Philip Larkin’s visitor in Church Going, this house of prayer seemed too serious a place to be unserious in. If I was going to dissemble and say things about the ‘Lord God Almighty’ I really didn’t believe, it seemed inappropriate to do it in his own home. And so this pious little boy stayed away.
I asked my dad if I could go to the Lubavitch shtiebel instead – Shomrei Hadass. A run-down Victorian town house in Moortown on the Harrogate Road. I was exhilarated by the seeming lack of decorum. The passion, the joy. But who was I kidding? I was never going to fit in there. The service may have been more vibrant and the atmosphere more relaxed, but the problem remained the same – connection to the words recited. My doubt-ridden inner monologue would drown out the whispered words on the page. The niggunim I loved – the chanting, the swaying, the celebratory improvisation of it all – but when it came to actual prayer it was the same, maybe worse. These guys believed that the act of prayer was the prayer itself. Saying the words was what mattered. They had turned prayer – or so it seemed to me – into a sort of magical incantatory experience. It baffled me. It was as if we were being called to act the state of prayer. Don’t think about the words, just say them and their meaning will resonate. With God? With the congregation? With oneself? I think I was being told to stop thinking. And just act.
Hamlet is a play about acting. And the inability to act. He can’t bring himself to action – and revenge his father – and so he decides to act mad. Hamlet “puts on the antic disposition” and arguably becomes mad in the process. Were those Lubavitch guys right? Didn’t they have a similar psychology in mind? Act devoted and devotion will come? Act the role of the believer and a believer you will be?
As Hamlet tumbles deeper into the abyss of procrastination, he even questions the nature of acting itself. He instructs the players how best to perform a speech. How best to convey authenticity. Judaism, too, has its own instructions for those about to pray – Mishnaic advice on how best to prepare oneself for prayer.
Like an acting company doing a warm-up before a show, the Siddur has preliminary prayers to get you in the mood. Foreplay prayer. The Shema, for example, has a little amuse bouche pre-prayer to whet your mental appetite: “Teach us that the mind, whose seat is in the brain, together with all the sense and faculties be subjected to prayer.”
Jewish tradition has long recognised that prayer can be a struggle: Kavanah is the concept of ‘intention’ or ‘sincerity’ or ‘direction of the heart’ during prayer. How best – as it were – to get into character. Perhaps if I’d known about this as an awkward boy, I’d have pursued my career as a rabbi? As an avowed atheist, however, I can now say with some conviction:“Thank God I didn’t.”
Hamlet runs until 29 March.http://rsc.org.uk
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