Worlds Elsewhere (5 page)

Leitner was only saying – rather politely – what many of his countrymen held as an article of passionate faith. While London and Stratford had been fiddling and fudging and failing, caught in politicking and money worries and rampant committee-itis, in the German-speaking
Sprachraum
the tercentenary had been nothing less than a phenomenon. Cities from Frankfurt in the west to Königsberg in the east hosted lectures, panegyrics, odes, recitations,
tableaux vivants.
In Düsseldorf, the Goddess of Immortality entered into dialogue with Shakespearian characters before crowning with laurels an image of their creator. In Weimar, a pioneering
Königsdramen
cycle of the English history plays – rarely revived in England itself – was mounted under the patronage of Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach. At the Burgtheater in Vienna, an epic pageant on Shakespeare's life ended with Queen Elizabeth I crowning the poet's bust with a wreath, as angelic spirits frolicked joyously in the air. While Stratford couldn't even get
Hamlet
into production, over ninety performances of Shakespeare plays were mounted across the German states during 1864 – even more impressive when one considers that Germany would not become a unified nation for another seven years.

Reviewing the festivities, an industrialist from Dessau, Wilhelm Oechelhäuser, stated brusquely what Leitner had only hinted: the country that truly honoured Shakespeare was no longer the one in which he was born. Denouncing the British tercentenary as a
‘complete fiasco', he wrote that ‘even the smallest German university towns honoured the genius with more dignity than did that pompously staged and miserably concluded central festival in Stratford'. ‘The English Shakespeare cult' was decayed, he sneered; Germany was now the only country that could do the poet's memory justice.

A new phrase,
unser Shakespeare,
had entered the language. Its translation is simple: ‘our Shakespeare'.

ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE YEARS
after the tercentenary, almost to the day, I was scrambling up a hill in northern Poland, trying to see if
unser
Shakespeare went back any further than 1864. It was here, apparently, that Germany had first made Shakespeare's acquaintance.

I had first come to Poland in 2011 to report for the
Guardian
on the building of a new Shakespeare theatre in Gdańsk. When I'd arrived it was to little more than a field of splintered rubble and icy mud. The scheme had been on the cards at least since the millennium, but the contractors had got little further than clearing the site and digging a medium-sized ditch.

Professor Jerzy Limon of Gdańsk University, whose brainchild this new ‘Teatr Szekspirowski' was, did his best to entertain the visiting English journalist, crunching around the wind-whipped site in order to show me where the main stage would be –
right here!
– and where the audience would sit –
over there!
Still, it was obvious that the projected opening date, in time for Gdańsk's annual Shakespeare festival in August 2013, was beyond even his considerable powers of invention.

Searching for a story to put in the paper, I realised – far later than I admitted to my editors back in London – that this was not the first Shakespearian theatre to have been built in the city. I was dimly aware that English actors had toured across mainland Europe in the early years of the seventeenth century, but what I hadn't known was that they were said to have constructed a playhouse in Gdańsk some time between 1600 and 1612. This was squarely within Shakespeare's own lifetime, a period covering nearly all his mature plays –
Hamlet,
roughly, up to his final works for the stage,
Henry VIII
(1613) and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
(1613–14). The very site was under our feet, Limon assured me; though long since demolished, evidence of the building had been
found when they excavated foundations for the new theatre. It seemed to check out. I wrote the article.

Even before my visit was over, I knew I would have to come back: the idea of English actors tramping through the Baltic states, living on the hoof, performing at fairs and royal courts, taking Elizabethan drama out into the world, was too compelling to ignore. If Shakespeare's plays really had been performed in Gdańsk, it would be the first time they had definitively been staged outside England, and within the playwright's lifetime to boot. Forget enticing legends about
Hamlet
and
Richard II
in Sierra Leone: here, surely, was where Shakespeare began to go global.

What I had discovered in the interim about the German adoration for an English playwright had only sharpened my eagerness to return. While 1864 may have been the year the concept of
unser
Shakespeare gained wide circulation, it was here in the far north, two and a half centuries earlier, that Germany's relationship with Shakespeare first took root. Though this had been Polish territory since the defeat of the Nazis, Gdańsk /Danzig had always had a Germanic identity – the city was German-speaking and for hundreds of years had been as intimate with powerful German principalities as it was with Warsaw. If my story began anywhere, I suspected it was here.

Eighteen months after my first visit, I got in touch with Limon and asked if I could return to Gdańsk and see where his theatre was up to. He enthusiastically agreed.

So here I was, on top of a hill. Gradually, I gained the summit. Snow lay in sooty scurfs by the path, and the earth, still half-frozen, was an unwashed brown. Above me there was a cross: two hulking trusses of unfinished steel, sixteen metres high. The sky was the blue of raw silk, scratched with cat's claws of white. Breath clouded in front of my face in ragged powder-puffs. My lungs felt bruised by the air.

Far below, the town looked dainty, almost too perfect – a confection of needling spires and steeples, scattered among a forest of sharply etched triangular roofs. One by one, I ticked off the landmarks: the double-hatted steeple of Gdańsk's main church; just in front, the Hanseatic spire of the town hall, scrolled and corbelled, closing to a sharp point. Its clock was almost legible in the pewtery morning light. Visible on the horizon was a thin trace of sea.

Wriggling off a glove with my teeth, I yanked a creased paperback book from my pocket. It contained a black-and-white reproduction of
an engraving of Gdańsk made in 1620, soon after the English actors raised their theatre here. It was a panorama of the city taken from a vantage point somewhere to the south-west, labelled in parallel Latin and German:
Dantiscum,
Danzig.

Holding the book out, I attempted to line up history with reality. Even in blurry miniature, it was a remarkably accurate facsimile. St Mary's church – legendarily the largest brick-built church in the world – was there, its forked steeple unmistakable, as was the town hall. The defensive wall had long gone, and in place of the unpaved road depicted in my engraving there was now a six-lane highway. To the left, there was a whole other city of teetering spires and towers: the cranes of Gdańsk's renowned shipyards, cradle of Poland's anti-communist movement. I could just about see the hulls of ships in dry dock and on them glittering pinpricks of light – welders, I supposed. Every so often a crane moved, a spider-leg patiently adjusting its foothold.

But on the whole, despite the welders and the shipyards and the highway, the image in my hand and the scene beyond slipped into each other surprisingly well: identical, almost. Only the colours – roofs toffee-coloured, a gleam of verdigris – looked new.

They had at least filled in the ditch. In fact Gdańsk's Teatr Szekspirowski had progressed much further: what had been little more than an open site in the centre of town now contained a sleek concrete structure, perhaps a hundred metres long, with a shallow fly tower poking above the roofline. Stark grey, lacking its dark cladding of chocolate-coloured brick, it looked like a naval frigate that had slipped its moorings at the shipyard and drifted up the Motława river.

Limon seemed barely older, still full of boyish enthusiasm. He stood waiting by the perimeter fence, his high-visibility vest harmonising oddly with his bottle-green tweed jacket and gleaming brown leather shoes. Despite the unruly flourish of white hair, he looked as youthful and earnest as ever. But his manner was graver and the lines under his eyes firmly etched. It had been a tough few years, I gathered. He smiled lopsidedly. ‘In a way of speaking.'

As we queued for our hard hats, he filled me in: the first firm of builders had run up delays and been removed from the project. There was a running battle to try to recoup expenses. A seven-month pause
while new contractors were arranged. And with the weather as unseasonably cold as it was …

We looked down into a drainage channel filled with greenish-grey water and broken ice. It was roughly where a corridor in the backstage area should be.

The complex would not now be ready until September 2014. But Limon seemed to take perverse delight in this adversity. ‘Bureaucracy, always bureaucracy in Poland. It is our abiding sin.'

As a young English-Literature academic at the University of Gdańsk in the early 1980s, Limon had engaged in modest dissidence against Poland's Soviet puppet government, burrowing in the town archives for evidence of Gdańsk's historic links with the west. He published a book about troupes of actors who visited the city from Germany and beyond. Once communist rule was over, he began to hang around on Gdańsk's punky and burgeoning fringe theatre scene. In 1993 he helped organise the city's first Shakespeare Day, which evolved into a fully fledged international festival, staging performances in improvised spaces across town and the nearby cities of Gdynia and Sopot.

Throughout that time he had a quiet but relentless ambition: to erect a permanent theatre devoted to Shakespeare, as physically proximate to the seventeenth-century playhouse as he could. For some people, the fact that the site had since become the car park of the Gdańsk branch of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, Poland's KGB, would have been discouraging. For Limon it was a provocation. There would be a nice irony in dispossessing a fleet of government-issue Polski Fiats and Syrenas and erecting a temple to the Bard. Eventually, he got his way: the spooks were forced to park their cars elsewhere.

The first thought had been to raise a replica somewhat like the Globe in London, but Gdańsk's climate – snow on the ground for four months a year – had militated against it. Instead Limon and his architect had opted for a modern space, more flexible, which gestured at Elizabethan amphitheatres. It would have tiers of boxed galleries surrounding a thrust stage on three sides, which could also be adjusted into a proscenium arch as required. A subtle blend of new and old. The secret weapon was a sliding roof, which could be opened during the summer months for the full Globe-like effect.

Impatient to play with his new toy, Limon had already hosted
Hamlet
while work was at a standstill, with a small cast of live performers and video projected on to the exposed concrete walls.

‘You should have seen the show,' he said admiringly. ‘Transgeneric. Very powerful.'

He was bursting with other plans: summer-long education projects, a new university department teaching arts administration. Not neglecting Gdańsk's links with Britain, he had cajoled the Prince of Wales into being patron.

If I'd met Limon under any other circumstances, I thought, I would have taken him for a dangerous fantasist. But all around us was the evidence of what a little fantasy could achieve.

As I walked back, I turned over Limon's scheme in my mind. Had there genuinely been a theatre built in this city during Shakespeare's lifetime, or was this – like the involvement of the Prince of Wales – merely an astute piece of marketing? What kind of theatre was it? Built by whom? There was talk of the archaeological finds being displayed in the new building, but, with the backstage area still doing a decent impression of the North Pole, that was unlikely any time soon. Limon had offered to accompany me the following day to the town archives, where I hoped to glean more about Gdańsk's Shakespearian past and the strolling actors who braved the Baltic.

Inside a faceless modern complex around the corner from Solidarity headquarters, we were shown into a cramped and drab office. On the table were tight beige bundles of documents tied with legal tape. Limon proudly pointed to his signature on the front of one. It was dated 1976. Only three other names were on the list.

Donning white gloves, we creaked the bundles cautiously open. Inside were letters, some in German, some in Latin, some a mixture. I peered at one, done in a businesslike italic hand: late-Elizabethan? early Jacobean? A professional scribe, that was for sure. The ink was clear and dark, the paper looked almost new.

On the reverse was the signature of Elizabeth I, a vaunting construction nearly three inches high, with an extravagant pennant on the summit of the ‘b' and more wiggly underlining than would be permitted in a teenage girl's schoolbook. Ploddingly, I worked out the date: December 1566,
Regni vero nostri Nono,
‘the ninth year of our true reign'. Shakespeare would have been two and a half.