Ask the Author: Andrew Dickson
Answered Questions (15)
Andrew Dickson
Ha! Good question. If I had any sense I'd get out of the whole wannabe king business and set up a golf resort ... But what's interesting is that Shakespeare makes it essentially inescapable: as soon as Macbeth is told of the prophecy, he says, "If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir". Basically no matter what he does, his fate is decided. Spooky!
Andrew Dickson
Thanks for the question. I guess for the obvious reason that it's the first thing the reader encounters, and if they don't like it, they're not going to read on! I thought long and hard about how best to open Worlds Elsewhere and tried about ten different options before choosing the final one, which was a description of a performance I saw by an Afghan company at the Globe theatre in London. It's tricky to get right. That said, every bit is tricky -- beginnings, middles, and ends. You have to trust your instinct sometimes.
Andrew Dickson
I'm a big fan of the concept -- translations into whatever language (including English) can only help give people access to the texts, I think, and if it's commonplace to translate the plays into Afrikaans or Zulu or German or Hindi, why not contemporary English? Sure, the original lang is fascinating and rich, and one hopes that audiences would go on to explore it, but as a way of connecting with people who feel intimidated by Shakespeare or that they can't understand him, I think it's a brilliant idea. Btw, I wrote a piece the other day for the Wall Street Journal arguing (a little mischievously) that Shakespeare is better in translation ... http://www.wsj.com/articles/szekspir-...
Andrew Dickson
See my answer below -- it tends to be whichever one I've seen last ... But I confess to having a thing about the late plays, or the romances as they're sometimes called: Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest. They're such striking, powerful pieces of drama, full of reconciliation and renunciation and love.
Andrew Dickson
The more diversity the better, is my basic thought! Anyone and everyone should be able to perform Shakespeare's plays, no matter their background or gender or ethnicity; there are no rules. The theatre of Shakespeare's own time was deeply non-illusionistic -- boys played girls, there was very little in the way of scenery, so it was a theatre of the imagination. It's funny that in a way it's taken 400 years for us to catch up. Shakespeare was way ahead of us.
Andrew Dickson
Not a deleted scene, exactly, but I love the first printed version of Hamlet from 1603, which is sometimes called the "bad" edition because the text is so muddled. Here's a speech you might (or might not) recognise:
To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever retur'nd,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
It gets worse ... Glorious, isn't it.
To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever retur'nd,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
It gets worse ... Glorious, isn't it.
Andrew Dickson
It's a big question as they're very different plays. I guess you could say Hamlet is told more from the perspective of the younger generation -- Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes -- whereas Lear seems to focus on parents, chiefly Lear and Gloucester, and a world which seems to be leaving them behind. But of course in both plays those themes are interlinked, as the families are broken yet interlinked: Hamlet is struggling to escape the ghost of his father (literally), while Lear and Gloucester both experience enormous suffering because of their children. I always find Shakespeare's mothers interesting, because they're so often absent -- we don't even know the name of Lear's wife (we presume she's long dead), while Hamlet has an enormously complicated relationship with his "aunt-mother", Gertrude. There's a very good (if somewhat Freud-heavy) book by the American critic Janet Adelman on the latter issue: it's called Suffocating Mothers, if you want to check it out.
Andrew Dickson
Hey, that's a really good question. I guess we'll never really know -- he's not around to tell us! But I'm struck by the fact that, while our world is very different to the one Shakespeare knew 400 years ago, so many things remain the same: political intrigues, family conflict, racial tension, civil war, love ... It's fascinating that the plays continue to speak to so many people, no matter the situation they're in. It's not that they're timeless, exactly -- maybe more that they have a knack of being timely, no matter which times we're in.
Andrew Dickson
The only thing that qualifies you as a writer, I think, is whether you write: it's a verb. You become a writer by writing. The world is full of novels and plays and non-fiction works that people won't ever get around to writing, so just by putting pen on paper or fingers on a keyboard you're ahead of the game. You won't be very good at first -- none of us is very good, in the grand scheme of things -- but you have to keep going. It's like something muscular, you have to exercise and tone it. Even if you can only find just 20 minutes at the beginning or end of the day, write a diary, read critically, make notes ... anything. Only by doing that will you find out what you want to write, and only by doing *that* will you find a subject that gets properly under your skin.
Andrew Dickson
It's difficult to choose just one, because I had so many interesting experiences in many countries. South Africa was very hard -- it's a tough place to write about, as well as challenging to travel around -- but I met some very inspiring people and learned a lot about culture under the apartheid regime. India was logistically very hard (no one ever answers your calls, especially in Mumbai!), but the culture is so rich and complex, as well as the country being so vast. Even after multiple visits I've barely scratched the surface. The American West I have to say I love -- digging around odd corners of California for the history of Shakespeare in the Gold Rush was enormous fun, partly because the material is so fascinating, and pretty much new to me.
Andrew Dickson
My favourite plays always seem to be the ones I've most recently seen! If the production is good, then you tend to think, "gosh, I'd forgotten that, how interesting", and it zips right to the top of the list. I admit to having a thing about the late plays -- in Worlds Elsewhere they seemed to crop up everywhere and on every continent I visited. I find them enormously moving: there's something about their blend of mystery and magic, the renunciations and (perhaps) reconciliations, the way they're so smart and self-conscious about the nature of art and artifice. If I had to choose one play, it would probably be The Winter's Tale. But I did watch it in London just the other evening, so see above ...
Andrew Dickson
Deadlines usually help! I trained as a journalist so I'm used to writing under pressure. Writing Worlds Elsewhere was somewhat different because the writing needed to be denser and more textured, but it was a useful discipline just to get on with it every day, and have a target (I aimed for 1000 words a day if I could). Most days you hate it, occasionally you love it, some days you feel like you haven't a single interesting thing to say or can't remember a single adjective ... You just have to keep doing it. A playwright I once interviewed, who suffered from terrible block for a few years, said that you should never take your ability to write for granted -- you have to work at it, exercise it like a muscle.
Andrew Dickson
I'm being a bit cagey about this one because the idea isn't fully formed, but it'll be another book with travel in it, and which is about America. One of these days I might even get time to think about it for longer than fourteen seconds at a stretch ...
Andrew Dickson
A bit difficult to say because -- perhaps like all books -- the idea really came from many places: a Soviet version of King Lear I watched when I was in my early 20s, which made me realise how political the play was; seeing a German Hamlet in Berlin, which was like nothing I'd ever experienced in a theatre; and talking to a Taiwanese director about why he felt that Shakespeare was intrinsically Chinese! Hundreds of different conversations, and months of sitting in libraries. I started thinking about the project in 2010, but it took me two years to buy a world map, and start plotting the Shakespearian journeys I could make.
Andrew Dickson
Oooh, tricky! Thanks for the question. I learned so many things -- I hadn't realised that there are now more professional performances of Shakespeare done annually in Germany than there are in the UK, or that (probably) more people attend Shakespeare festivals in the US than anywhere else globally, or that there are more reinterpretations of the plays in Indian cinema than in the English-speaking world ... I think I was most surprised by how important Shakespeare seems to be to many different cultures worldwide, and how those cultures have made him their own. Sometimes the darker sides of that were surprising, too -- I hadn't realised how the Nazis were so deeply into Shakespeare, and that they tried to claim him as a German writer.
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