Toby Robertson is directing Hamlet for the first time in his career.  There is a saying that if a director and his Hamlet agree, the play can be rehearsed in three weeks.  Which is what he has.  How does he approach the task?
      Robertson is notorious for his flexibility as a director—another way of putting that would be that he is ready to change his productions up to the last minute, that he is never satisfied with what he already has.  And, unlike some classical directors, he is not much given to theorisms about the play.
      ‘I try to give the actors as much freedom to explore as possible,’ he explains.  ‘We don’t go around talking about it.  We do it.  Some of the things that you plan in the study simply don’t work on the stage.  Other things can only be discovered when you are out there.  We may spend all morning rehearsing a scene and still not have set it. And I don’t mind a hoot if, after all that, the actors go and do it differently tomorrow.  You are working with thirty people, all of whom have personalities which the director can feed off.  I could say, “Move here, do this, do that,” and the actors would do it blindly, but they wouldn’t have a reason for what they did.
      ‘In the end I have a power of veto—it must not become direction by a committee.  But I prefer not to have to use it.  I try to set a pattern for them to work within.  This is an actor’s theatre.’

      A typical rehearsal day begins at 9:00 a.m. with Toby Robertson, accompanied by Bach on a cassette in his office, dictating to his secretary the changes he made in the much-changed text at yesterday’s rehearsal.  Some lines were cut, some were restored.  ‘I do a rough-cut of the text before we start—obviously the four-hour Hamlet is not for us—but I make the final version in rehearsal.’
      Shakespeare’s text, as finally published in the Folio of 1623, was cut in performance.  Two different Quarto versions exist, published in his own lifetime, giving a variety of cuts and the modern director has to pick and choose between the three versions. Typed and bound in the standard form used for film and theatre scripts, stapled into a soft brown cover, it might be a contemporary play—except that the cut-out title window on the front reads ‘The Tragedy Of Hamlet Prince of Denmark.’
      On this particular morning, Toby Robertson has had about four hours sleep, after attending another Prospect opening, of St. Joan with a separate company, in Bath the night before.  By 10 o’clock the actors are drifting in and assembling in the dressing room behind the stage where instant coffee is dispensed for a 50 pence contribution a week.  By 10:30 everyone has climbed the endless backstage stairs to the rehearsal room at the top of the Old Vic for the morning movement class.
      This is partly a keep-fit measure, partly a way of training the actors’ bodies to move with elegance on the stage.  Donald Fraser, the musical director, sits at an old upright piano in the corner while the movement director, William Louther, a former Martha Graham dancer, takes the class.
      The company sit cross-legged on the floor in bare feet, wearing headscarves and woolly caps, grasping their ankles, bobbing their foreheads to the ground, rolling their heads to the strains of a Beethoven sonata.  It is obvious from their hollow backs which of them are trained dancers.  But after a few mornings the class has helped give the company an identity.  They have stretched and grasped for breath in unison and it binds them together.
      On stage that morning, the scene being rehearsed is Laertes’ leave-taking from Ophelia, with Polonius’s long and familiar catalogue of advice—‘This  above all, to thine own self be true’—followed by this interrogation of Ophelia about the advances Hamlet has been making.  Until you have sat through a morning of it, you do not realize how many ways there are of playing a scene of no more than a hundred lines with just one table and a bench for props.
      Most of the direction consists of asking questions.  Is Polonius giving sincerely good advice or is he revealing the deviousness of his own character?  How can you convey that he is not to be trusted and still allow him to get his laughs?  How afraid is Ophelia of her father?  When he pooh-poohs the possibility of Hamlet really loving her, does she obey him dutifully or resentfully?  And anyway does she love Hamlet or not?  And so on.
      ‘Nuances, nuances,’ says director Toby Robertson after three or four playings-through.  ‘Laertes has gone.  The house isn’t going to be the same.’  He advances on Ophelia very menacingly with Polonius’s line:  ‘What is between you?  Give me up the truth’ and involuntarily Ophelia backs away.  ‘That’s what I want,’ he says, suddenly dropping into conversation again.
      The two deputy stage managers sitting in the front stalls tell him it is 12:15 and there are extra dancers waiting to be auditioned.  They have been making notes.  Every time the scene is ‘blocked’—tried out—the moves are notated on the prompt copy.  The left-hand, blank pages of the script are pencilled in with a sketch of the stage furniture and a description of the moves made by each character on the stage.  It is done in pencil because at the next run-through it may be different.  The rubber is used more often than the pencil at this stage.  While one DSM notes the blocking, the other is ready to prompt the actors—he is ‘on the book.’
      There is a system for writing down moves in a set of shorthand symbols.  The stage is mentally divided into areas:  up-stage (back) and down-stage (front), centre stage or left and right (stage left and stage right are the opposite of the audience’s left and right).  Each section can be described by initials, thus: ‘u.c.l.’ means ‘up-stage centre left’ and ‘d.c.r.’ means ‘downstage centre right’.  So the line: Pol x d.c.r. means that Polonius crosses to downstage centre right.
      Left and right can also be written P and O-P, standing for ‘Prompt’ and ‘Opposite-Prompt’, because the prompt corner is traditionally stage-left.
      Blocking is extremely tiring.  They have changed the moves five times already.  ‘It drives you mad,’ mutters Marje Williams, the DSM, rubbing it out all over again.
      It is now 12:30 and there are four tin-lids spread along the front of the stage bulging with cigarette ends.  Paper cups of cold coffee stand about on the edge of the stage and beside the front stalls.  ‘I think that’s going to work frightfully well,’ says the director, as they finally break off and Polonius lights his pipe for the umpteenth time and returns to being John Nettleton.  Thank goodness it is Thursday and payday.
      In the course of the first week’s rehearsal the position of ‘To be or not to be’ has been altered twice.  It has been tried as a soliloquy right at the beginning of the first court scene, and has been delivered straight to Ophelia sitting at a table.  The entrance of the players has been blown up into a big set piece of dancing and tumbling and then cut right down again because it was holding up the action.
      The graveyard scene has also been played many ways.  Instead of a trap-door the grave is to be a sarcophagus ‘trucked’ (wheeled) on for the scene.  How is Laertes to drop Ophelia’s body and jump out of it to grapple with Hamlet?  The grave will have to have a carpet in it.  Perhaps also a bag of potting compost for the grave-digger.  How is the grave to be got rid of in time for the next scene?
      Where should the interval be placed?  During the week it is moved twice and ends up back where it was.
      By the Saturday morning, Toby Robertson is ready to try a run-through—or ‘stagger-through’ as he puts it.  Before it begins he stands on the bare stage, backed only by its start brick wall, to address the cast sitting in the stalls.  ‘Give yourselves to your fellow-artists and something may happen.  Leave it to me to say “That’s working” or “That isn’t.”  I want to see if we have a good skeleton there.
      So, without books or scenery or lighting, in jeans and T-shirts and bare feet, they try fitting together all the pieces they have been rehearsing separately.  It takes three hours. At the end the director gives ‘notes’—the first set of many to come.
      He is quite tough with them:  ‘I do find too much of the Shakespearean voice and manner.  You are doing it too heavy and pomposo.  You are probably busy thinking of your lines and moves.  But unless you play naturally, we lose the nastiness of that court at Elsinore.  There really is rank corruption there. We want to shock them with its corruption and brutishness.  It needs to be tougher, nastier, grasping, evil, coarse, ruthless and hard’--he is haranguing them, it is quite a speech.
      Then he relents somewhat:  ‘There are lots of extremely good things—a lot of good relationships which I’ll talk to you about separately.  I don’t want to give detailed notes now except to Gravedigger—I think you’re only about 38, perhaps 40, not older.  Horatio—just because you’re not passion’s slave I don’t think you should become too melancholy.  Everybody—now we must refine.  There’s a lot to do and only two weeks to do it in.’
      The cast disperses into the Waterloo Road on a Saturday afternoon, which is most people’s time off.