The skull in the Royal Shakespeare Company's props department has a name on the paperwork...
That name is André Tchaikowsky.
It is not the name he was born with.
He came into the world in Warsaw in 1935 as Robert Andrzej Krauthammer, the son of a Jewish family. He showed musical ability from early childhood, taught piano by his mother from the age of four.
In 1940 the Nazis arrived, and the family were moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, when he was seven years old, he was smuggled out. The people who got him out gave him a new identity on forged papers. The papers said his name was Andrzej Czajkowski.
He was sent into hiding with his grandmother. They stayed hidden until 1944, when the Warsaw Uprising swept them up and deposited them in a transit camp, from which they were eventually released.
Robert Krauthammer did not survive the war. Andrzej Czajkowski did.
He went on to study piano, first in Lodz, then Paris, then Warsaw. He won prizes.
He emigrated to England in 1956. He changed the spelling of his name to André Tchaikowsky, the French form, the name by which he would be known for the rest of his life. He became a respected pianist and a passionate composer.
He was obsessed with Shakespeare. When he died of colon cancer in Oxford in 1982 at the age of 46, he left his body to medical research and his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company, requesting in his will that it be offered for use in theatrical performance.
He never got to see it happen.
The RSC received the skull, dried it on a rooftop for two years, and then placed it in a tissue-lined box in the props department, where it stayed for 26 years. Directors took it out for rehearsals and then put it back. It was too much, they said. Too distracting.
Too real.
In 2008, director Gregory Doran retrieved it for his production of Hamlet starring David Tennant. For months, eight times a week, Tennant stood on stage at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and held the skull aloft during the gravedigger scene. Audiences had no idea whose skull it was.
The image became one of the most reproduced photographs of the production. It ended up on a British postage stamp.
The name on that stamp, on the programmes, on the posters, is André Tchaikowsky.
The skull belongs to a boy who was handed a false identity in a ghetto in 1942 and kept it for the rest of his life and beyond it. Robert Krauthammer wanted to survive.
André Tchaikowsky wanted to play Yorick. In the end, both of them got what they were after.
Mordmardok
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