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The ghost makes a dramatically late entrance in the new touring production of Hamlet from Tina Packer’s Shakespeare & Company. The opening moments pull the audience up short. No midnight watch, no nervous “who’s there?,” no plea of “Oh speak!” from Horatio to the ominously silent ghost of the dead king. Instead, flickering and flashing lights reveal Hamlet center stage, surrounded by an electronic buzzing and fragments of lines from the play. Then the lights steady, and, bang, we are in scene two, as Hamlet’s uncle, the new king, holds forth. This opening changes the character of Hamlet; rather than emerging slowly, from the periphery of the second scene (at court, where he is a reluctant presence), the prince has our attention from the first instant. The shift is one of several bold strokes in this re-imagining of the work from director Eleanor Holdridge. Here the director takes the Romantic view of Hamlet very much to heart. Samuel Coleridge suggested that in this character the balance between “outward objects” and “inward thoughts” vanishes, the result being “great, enormous intellectual activity, and a consequent, proportionate aversion to real action.” The director, in her program notes, asserts that she has “conceived a production that centers the play in Hamlet’s brain in his last few dying moments” (the flashing lights and electrical buzzing are used at various points to suggest the sputtering signals of Hamlet’s brain). Holdridge thus goes Coleridge one better, imagining a wholly interior Hamlet, with no real “action” at all.
Such radical re-imaginings are an inevitable result of a desire to seek out fresh perspectives on a long-popular play. Most theatergoers know Hamlet, or think they do. Holdridge intends to give them a jolt. So, how well does this approach work? First, to the positive. There are some real merits in the depiction of the court. The costumes of King, Queen, and courtiers (designed by Jessica Ford) are redolent of the Edwardian music hall—bright, garish and tacky—and above all the reincarnation of its fashions on Carnaby Street. (Claudius, with his loud suit and sideburns, looks like one of the Krays); their appearance makes perfect sense as part of Hamlet’s interior vision of a debased and vulgar court. Nigel Gore’s Claudius and Tina Packer’s Gertrude stand out as highlights of the piece, presiding over much of the action with a kind of grinning, gimlet-eyed, determined merriment. And Holdridge takes some real liberties with these two in the play-within-a-play scene, having them, at Hamlet’s urging, take on the roles of foresworn Queen and murderous brother in the dumbshow that reenacts Claudius’ own crime. The shift almost works, as another example of the dying Hamlet’s vision, in which all the characters are, as it were, puppets of his mind. Claudius and Gertrude recite the lines Hamlet has written for them; they brazen it out, Claudius cheerfully playing the villain’s part—until he cracks.
What is lost here is, ironically, the play’s emphasis on what is seen, on Hamlet as determined observer. When the King and Queen themselves are “players,” we watch them—not Hamlet watching them watching a play. This is a work full of watchfulness, of surveillance and spying. From the first cut of the first scene, Holdridge weakens that sense of Denmark as endangered, a land of people peering into darkness (we also lose, for instance, Polonius’ hilarious instructions to a bemused servant that he spy on his son Laertes in France). And the particular approach here, interestingly enough, doesn’t really change the central character. Leaving aside the pauses marked by light and sound effects that recall us to the fact the Hamlet is dying, that the action is all flashback, Hamlet’s words and actions are, well, what they would be in a more traditional production. That is not to slight Jason Asprey’s performance in the title role, which shows a fine range. Asprey is especially good in the soliloquies, where he convincingly enacts Hamlet’s mental struggles. This work is finely shaded. That is seems unconnected to the larger structure of this production is not the actor’s doing. Where we in fact see Hamlet fitting in to the director’s conception is in his interactions with the Ghost, the Player King, and the Gravedigger, all acted by the scene-stealing (and I mean this in a favorable sense) Johnny Lee Davenport. While the doubling of those first two roles is not uncommon, the addition of the Gravedigger draws us back into Holdridge’s conceit: Hamlet seems haunted by his father in multiple guises, seeing him everywhere.
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| Hamlet (Jason Asprey) berates Gertrude (Tina Packer), photo Kevin Sprague ©2008 |
One is left thinking that this reimagining of Hamlet does not go far enough, and peters out in the end. If the action is to take place in mind of the dying Hamlet, well, then, go for it. Be more radical in cuts and revisions. It must be pointed out, for instance, that this approach to the play makes nonsense of the presence of Fortinbras. In the jettisoned opening scene Horatio has a long speech on the doings and plottings of the upstart Norwegian, who as man of action is a foil to Hamlet from the start. Here the fellow pops up from time to time, at one point ludicrously referred to by Hamlet as “a delicate and tender prince” (he looks like a Marine). The strictly psychological vision of the production allows this figure no weight, and his presence after Hamlet’s death no deep meaning.
While the production fails to follow through on its promise or its premise, it is well worth the ticket, if only to catch a unique take on the play and on key scenes, by a highly proficient company.
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ed.'s note:
This was a lively effort which featured some excellent acting. Whatever one thought of the director’s presentation of the play as Hamlet’s dying thoughts, it conveyed most successfully what a miracle the play is. Tina Packer’s stunning delivery of Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s death still haunts my ears:
There is a Willow growes aslant a Brooke,
That shewes his hore leaues in the glassie streame:
There with fantasticke Garlands did she come,
Of Crow-flowers, Nettles, Daysies, and long Purples,
That liberall Shepheards giue a grosser name;
But our cold Maids doe Dead Mens Fingers call them:
There on the pendant boughes, her Coronet weeds
Clambring to hang; an enuious sliuer broke,
When downe the weedy Trophies, and her selfe,
Fell in the weeping Brooke, her cloathes spred wide,
And Mermaid-like, a while they bore her vp,
Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her owne distresse,
Or like a creature Natiue, and indued
Vnto that Element: but long it could not be,
Till that her garments, heauy with her drinke,
Pul’d the poore wretch from her melodious lay,
To muddy death.
Her reading of these lines was an object lesson in how to speak Shakespeare.
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