Thoughts on Shakespeare: Visiting Mexico
The Observer

The Jornadas Culturales Anglo-Mexicanas were, as you might very well guess, an artistic collaboration between Britain and Mexico. Not an exchange, since the traffic was all one-way. London dispatched to Mexico City a package containing the Royal Ballet, the London Symphony Orchestra, a Turner exhibition, a director and designer from the Royal Shakespeare Company, and me. 

This is not to say that there was no native talent involved. A Mexian conductor, Eduardo Mata, presided flamboyantly over the LSO in a concert unfortunately shorn of its advertised visiting attraction, John Williams. (Mr. Williams, like so many visitors to Mexico, was intestinally stricken.) The concert was held in the Palace of Fine arts, a triple-tiered, concrete and marble edifice, in shape and dimensions a cross between the Albert Hall and Covent Garden, with a stained-glass dome for a ceiling. 

The modern buildings of Mexico can be stunning. (It makes you realise with a start that everything we most prize in Britain is old). The most celebrated, justly enough, is the Anthropological Museum, which seems to have been not so much built as sculpted: a series of long rooms, built around a fountain-dominated plaza. 

The museum is set in parkland, some way from the centre of town. A short distance beyond it lies the Teatro del Bosque, the home of Mexico’s National Theatre company. It’s always refreshing to visit a theatre that stands in parkland; Broadway and the West End—the crowded midways—have their allure, but they cannot compare in attractiveness to a theatre that stands (as some do, even in the metropolises of Paris and Berlin) in its own grounds. 

The play I saw—the one which in fact accounted for my presence—was Richard III, directed by Clifford Williams and designed by Farrah. The latter gave it leathery costumes and a deep open set, reminiscent of his Stratford Henry V and Coriolanus, the production, too, had a Stratfordian drive and lucidity — and, what most astonished the audience, Stratfordian speed. (Acting is generally as leisurely as everything else in Mexico.) 

For me it was a special kind of culture-shock: a recognisable RSC production, only spoken in Spanish. Vigorously spoken, too, especially by the women and by a Richard rather glamorously sardonic, and one who continuous activity as ‘refusing to surrender to jet lag.’)

Our audience were actors, expatriates and — predominantly — students and teachers of English. Clifford Williams talked about the difficulty and importance of finding a trustworthy text; I harangued them on contemporary Shakespearean production in Britain, which effectively meant that I talked about the RSC, appealing to Williams for memories and descriptions of his own productions just as sneakily and as often as I could. 

I also lectured—in Monterrey and Guadalajara, as well as in the capital—on such generously fashioned topics as ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Modern British Theatre.’ Mexicans in general speak of Monterrey with about as much enthusiasm as the British generally muster over Stockport, but I liked it; the traffic is less savage than in Mexico City—where the density of the jams and the reckless competitiveness of the drivers reduces nervous newcomers to a steady ten miles an hour—and you get a comforting view of the surrounding mountains. 

Guadalajara, urbane and relaxed, was about the nearest I got to orthodox tourist's Mexico. All the same the talk I most enjoyed giving was in Mexico City, and the National Theatre company. It nearly didn’t happen; food and climate had caught up with me (after a week I had hubristically thought myself safe) and no official interpreter had materialised. I pressed into service a couple of English-speaking drama students, whose uncompromising dismissal of the National (they themselves, Grotowski-like, were ‘into something more holy’) had reminded me forcibly of home. Sternly flanking me on the platform, they translated the actors’ questions and my answers. I felt like a foreign politician on a television newsreel, and looked apparently as if I were being guarded for my own safety. 

August in Mexico City is the rainy season in the good old days it rained at four every afternoon. You set your watch by it as you retreated indoors. Nowadays Mexico’s weather is as capricious as everywhere else’s and you can get caught. There is an uncompromising quality about Mexican rain; you feel you might drown in it. I felt entitled to seek some sun and Acapulco being inaccessible (the natives, no fooled, had every flight booked up) I retreated across the US border, fetching up in Los Angeles.