Horatio

And one of the things that struck me about that was the contrast between the seeming order that's imposed by power and the incredible disorder as exhibited by the corpses, you know, and the blood on the floor.

And I wonder whether part of the suggestion on the part of the play is that what Horatio refers to is at the very end is the wildness of men's minds.

Let me... quote this precisely, he says at the end, even while, this is Horatio, even while men's minds are wild, less more mischance on plots and errors happen.

Men's minds are wild.

So there's, as you say, there's a kind of lurking chaos in the question of the transmission of power within the monarchy.

And maybe that's required.

And when that order breaks down, as it does, when this is me simply throwing out an amateurish thought about the play, when it breaks down, thanks to Claudius's murder of his brother, thanks to regicide, um, Spiritual moral disorder follows.

I guess to put this kind of thought differently, I wonder whether part of the point of Shakespeare framing it this way is to suggest that however base and silly and corrupt political order is, we need to have it or we ourselves, our minds become wild, to use Horatio's term.

all of those things that she knew him to be before this play started.

We start to see the generosity of spirit when he meets Horatio, even his generosity with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his brilliance in how he can carry a statement about ambition to a point where it's no longer, you can't even argue it any further, so that his intelligence, how he uses words effectively, the deep feelings that he holds, the disappointment, the disenchantment of people that he loved every step of the way.

And we're going to find out his love of theater, his love of theater, love of the players, you know, in spite of getting everything out of his, any trivial fondness, getting rid of that and fastening on the ghost only.

Now we'll head into one moment in the play.

So he's just not revealing all of himself.

I think it's a great question.

And I think one of the things we have to examine is remember when he had Marcellus and Horatio swear to never speak a word of this.

And he says, don't even intonate that by shaking your head.

It was like Hamlet as you would expect it to be with the, you know, the sword fighting and everything.

And I played Horatio and, you know, reading the script, There's no way around it.

Like Horatio's in love with Hamlet.

And so I was, it being the type of theater that it was, that's not something that you could bring to like the overt text, but I was loading it with subtext.

Like it formed my entire performance.

But the funny thing about that, I mean, that Midsummer Night's Dream production, I don't remember quite as clearly as I do being taken by Jeremy to see Adrian Lester in Hamlet, Peter Brook production in Paris.

in which Scott Handy, who's the geish in Our Cyrano, played Horatio.

And that was the first production I saw where I went, oh, I think I want to do this.

I think I sort of want to direct.