When waking up with a hangover, the last thing you need is to wander into your kitchen to find it looking like a warzone. Who knew a batch of cupcakes would create so much mess? Much mirth was had at last night's NaNoWriMo kick-off party, so much mirth in fact that I must apologise to anyone subjected to any of my drunken ramblings after my third pint. It was a great turnout and there were some excellent Halloween costumes on display, photographs of which will no doubt haunt us all to our graves. Spooky stuff indeed.

What's even spookier, however, is my current inability to escape from a certain Prince of Denmark; you know- the one who's lost his rose-tinted spectacles. I should rewind a couple of days to my trip to the RSC at Stratford-Upon-Avon to see the David Tennant / Patrick Stewart production directed by Gregory Doran, who also did the excellent A Midsummer Night's Dream I saw there in the summer. The production was really superb, and surprisingly funny - it wrung moments of humour from the script that were wholly unexpected and startling at times. For example, the line of "You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal. Except my life, except my life, except my life"  - played in other productions I have seen with total solemnity - was turned in its head by Tennant's mimicking of old Polonius at the end. The direction played to Tennant's strengths at putting on a truly manic disposition. I for one will always now associate the scene of Hamlet's hurried dispatch to England with Tenannt taped to an office chair, wheeled from the stage with a cry of  "Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!" Stewart was excellent too, but the night was really stolen by Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius, who played him not just as an irritating interferer but as a doddery old fool, rambling on and on and frequently forgetting himself. 

Having spent a lot of time reading the play lately, following the two Factory Theatre productions I saw in the summer, I found that the play just kept on opening up new layers, like a infinitely-folded origami flower - you could go on peeling forever and never truly reach the shape of the paper at the heart of it. I've found myself wandering down the street in the mornings thinking about whether the lack of religious imagery in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy is a sign that Hamlet's stalling over his uncle's death, first on the grounds that the ghost may be a devil's trick and later because his uncle is apparently deep in prayer, were merely just excuses he gives himself not to act. If he truly believed that the ghost may be an evil spirit, or if he genuinely thought that by killing his uncle in prayer he would sent him to Heaven, why does his most important speech on the very nature of life and death ignore all Christian doctrine? I must confess that the play has rather obsessed me of late.

So today, having planned a trip to London to see two plays that had nothing to do with Shakespeare whatsoever, I was looking forward to a break from the gloom of Elsinore. Or so I thought.

First up was Ivanov, part of the Donmar Warehouse’s run at Wyndhams Theatre, starring Kenneth Branagh and directed by Michael Grandage. Ivanov is a middle-aged landowner in 1880s Russia. His wife is dying of TB, and he is on the verge of bankruptcy, but he finds himself unable to feel or do anything. Now, anyone with any knowledge of the play will know that it not only has parallels to Hamlet in having a protagonist mired in melancholy, but that Chekhov ran with this to the extent that Ivanov refers to himself as Hamlet several times and even quotes from the play. I, however, had no real clue about the play before today, having never seen or read it before. It really was excellent and I’d recommend it to anyone if you can get a ticket.

Tom Stoppard’s translation was very funny – certainly funnier that I’d expected from a play that, to outward appearances, looks like a tragedy. But then Ivanov himself, in one of his references to Hamlet, says “As far as I’m concerned, my case and all its symptoms are the stuff of comedy and nothing more. People should be laughing themselves silly at my carrying on.”

Ivanov is older than Hamlet, and his emptiness and misery come from feeling used up with life, rather that from any single external event. Hamlet is pushed into action (or inaction) by his father’s death and mother’s too-quick marriage – he has yet to really live life and love for the first time before the ghost comes bellowing to be remembered. Hamlet’s tragedy is of a young life cut short, of someone who should have had a bright future but is left able to see nothing but pain lining the path ahead. He asks himself “who would bear the whips and scorns of time” when he could spare himself the suffering by taking his own life, but ultimately Hamlet cannot even do this, such is his inertia and his fear about what may await him in the undiscovered country after death. He only finally acts to kill his uncle when the mortal poison on Laertes’ blade has already sealed his own fate.

But Ivanov has lived enough of life to know that it once was good, and full of promise, but that nothing has worked out the way it should. Time and age are catching up with him. His wife’s Jewish parents refused to pay her dowry, so angry were they with her for converting to Christianity to marry Ivanov. This leads many of the village folk, including the self-righteous Doctor Lvov, to believe Ivanov wants Anna to die so that he can move on to another woman. But when the Sasha, the daughter of his friend, declares her love for him he is torn between the prospect of redemption and the self-loathing that leads him to reject her. He mocks her inexperience and intentions, again comparing himself unfavourably to Hamlet. “My moping around moves you to admiration and awe, you think you’ve found your very own Hamlet… whenever you start trying to save me, your eyes become wide and so deep, as though you were gazing at a comet.” 

After his wife dies, Ivanov and Sasha become engaged, but he can see that he is already beginning to drag her down with him – her own heart becomes heavier the more she tries to save him, like a woman reaching out for a man drowning in quicksand, she will be pulled down too before too long. On the day of the wedding he tries to call it off. “We have to come to our senses. This provincial performance of a hand-me-down Hamlet and his awestruck disciple… when I saw myself in the mirror it was like an exploding shell in my conscience. I started to laugh; I nearly went out of my mind. The melancholy Dane! ‘What a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ ‘I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.’ The only thing missing is writing rotten poetry.” Sasha cannot bring herself to give up on him, even though she recognises the situation. She is no Ophelia – tamely wandering to her doom after a man out of her reach – rather she is a new generation of woman, one to refuses her parent’s dowry and recognises in herself the reason she loves Ivanov – because he needs saving, and “the more you do for love, the more love you feel”. In the end, confronted with the prospect of ruining Sasha’s life, and the wrath of the village folk who blame him for Anna’s death, he does what Hamlet could never do. His youthful verve returning, and throwing off the “pale cast of thought” that struck Hamlet to inaction, Ivanov takes his own life. It was a truly powerful ending, one that I did not expect until the single offstage gunshot of the very final line. Magnificent.

In between plays, I first got caught in a downpour while watching a free McFly gig in Trafalgar Square. I love how utterly random London can be sometimes. Pitching up at a coffee shop for an hour, I thought I’d better get started on my NaNoWriMo project, the aptly-titled Rain is Expected Tonight in London, but alas the batteries in my Alphasmart were dead. So much for getting November off to a flying start! I then mooched on over to the Geilgud Theatre for Six Character in Search of an Author, a radical new translation of an already experimental 1920s Italian play by Pirandello. I’d been warned to expect the unexpected. I hadn’t, however, been warned to expect yet more Hamlet.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is nigh-on impossible to explain. In fact, having just seen it a few hours ago, I’m still working it out in my own head. A documentary crew are filming about an assisted suicide clinic in Denmark (should have been a warning sign from the start!) when, late one night, a group of people declaring themselves to be “characters” burst in on them and insist that the producer tell their story. What follows is a fairly crazy story-within-a-story as the characters attempt to convey the tragedy that’s happened to them by having it filmed.

The blurring of the lines between fact and fiction are at the heart of the play. The documentary crew start off worrying about how to edit their film about a teenage boy going to the clinic, about how to film reconstructions, and so on. One of the doctors they have filmed at the clinic quotes “To be or not to be” and they wonder whether to cut it out from the film as a “red herring”. When the family of characters arrive and want their story told, the producer attempts to explain why they want to use actors instead of them on film, that it will make it “more real” even if it is false. The characters want to play themselves and act out scenes of their own tragedy. The producer tries to have them re-enacted by her own actors. The characters complain that it is nothing like the truth, the producer tells them that by fictionalising facts they can get closer to the emotional truth of the story. At one point, the character of the father asks the producer how she knows that she’s even real herself. When the characters start to die, the producer attempts to save them, only to find to her horror that she herself is just a character in a film version of Six Characters in Search of an Author.

We hear the DVD extra voiceovers coming from the director and writer backstage as the start of the play is played out over again. They then get invaded by the characters offstage, only to re-emerge on stage as the writers and theatre producer planning a play about doing a movie version of Six Characters, laughing about how to end it – and noting that half the theatres in the West End are being taken up with Hamlets this year (“the Tennant one, the Jude Law one, the one Branagh’s not doing, the one at the National…”). When they too are killed by the now marauding, murderous characters, they are replaced by a scene between Pirandello and his maid, where he bemoans his lack of progress with writing Six Characters. The maid implores him not to stop because it is “his masterpiece, his symphony, his Hamlet”.

They leave and we are left with the documentary producer alone on stage and still utterly confused about how she can’t be real. The tape of the boy at the clinic plays and he starts to quote Hamlet, from the soliloquy after the actors have arrived at Elsinore, the one about how actors can move themselves to high emotion without reason – and how much more they could do had they “the motive and the cue for passion” that he has himself, that they would “drown the stage in tears”. The documentary producer takes over the speech before taking her own life in a mock-up of the very clinic she was filming in.

The most astonishing thing about Hamlet is its almost boundless scope. Here today were two very different plays about very different things. The first, about a man’s descent into numb misery – what happens to the soul when you fall out of love with life itself? How can someone lose himself so utterly? The second, about the nature of truth in art – whether it is more truthful to have actors representing a fiction that cuts to the heart of the matter, or whether it is more truthful to show real people who may not be able to convey what needs to be said? Which should filmmakers, documentary makers, and writers try to do – show the truth and miss the point, or show a fiction and hit the mark? And yet both of these utterly different plays had Hamlet at the heart of them. How can a single play convey so much… it bewilders me.

I have started to see Hamlet in everything, everywhere I look. Enough is enough. I'll have no more of this melancholy, no more of being stalked by the depressed Dane. Tomorrow night I'm off to the Slaughtered Lamb to see the Factory Theatre perform, er, Hamlet. Ah...