Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Adrian Noble
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
May 27-October 26, 2008
"As I pronounced it to you, Trippingly on the tongue"
Stratford’s latest production of “Hamlet” is one of the clearest, best thought-through productions the Festival has ever presented. That does not mean it is perfect. In fact, one could argue that director Adrian Noble, former Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (1991-2003), achieves such notable clarity by neglecting the emotions and sense of mystery that are also part of the play.
Ben Carlson’s Hamlet is unlike any you’ve ever seen before. Noble places the emphasis on his high intelligence and sardonic wit. This is not a wan romantic or a self-obsessed child-man racked with mental instability. The old canard, “Is he mad or not?” never arises. Hamlet is clearly sane, as he should be, throughout. “To be or not to be” is not a consideration of suicide as in the famous Olivier film but an intellectual inquiry into what causes men to act morally. What this Hamlet cannot abide is betrayal whether from his mother, his stepfather, Polonius, Ophelia or his one-time friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, now sent to spy on him. Carlson’s Hamlet is not melancholy when we first meet him but rather wears black as a silent protest against the court’s unseemly lack of mourning for his father. His skills honed on delivering Shaw’s paragraph-long sentences in his years at the Shaw Festival, Carlson speaks Hamlet’s soliloquies rapidly but with absolute clarity and understanding. Again and again Carlson’s precise but natural diction, punctuated with thoughtful pauses, lifts veils of obscurity from Hamlet’s words so that their meaning seems almost self-evident. It is a major achievement and Carlson accomplishes it as if it were a matter of course with not a whit of the pomposity or self-promotion that mars so many performances of this role. The trade-off in such an approach is that Shakespeare’s words are spoken so rapidly that there is little time for their poetry or concatenation of images to register. Also, Carlson’s Hamlet experiences his emotions not in slow development but in sudden fits. What I missed was the overall arc of emotion from despondency to self-loathing and inaction to final acceptance of fate, whatever it may be.
There is a second revelatory performance in Geraint Wyn Davies’ Polonius. For once we do not have the stock old buffoon, but rather a proud middle-aged philistine ready to meddle in the private lives of both his children. After all, he sets Reynaldo to spy on his son and commands Ophelia to break off with Hamlet and, in a nice touch from Noble, also steals her diary. This is not a lovable old dodderer but a dangerously suspicious man who feels naturally superior to others. The humour in character comes from his blindness to his own pedantry and to other people’s dismissive view of him.
The presence of such a strong, self-assured Hamlet tends to cast everyone else in the shade. “Give me that man That is not passion's slave,” he tells Horatio, but the Hamlet we see already does not seem to be “passion’s slave” rendering Horatio’s usual role as the rational confidant to the over-excited prince almost redundant. And indeed Tom Rooney has little to do as Horatio but act as a rather dull sounding board. When he offers to commit suicide at Hamlet’s death, it seems out of character. As Laertes, Bruce Godfree communicates a general sense of volatility but without the verbal punch and clarity of Carlson. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of David Leyshon and Patrick McManus are rather colourless. As soon as Hamlet recognizes them as spies, any potential humour involving them is drained away as Hamlet’s jests with them become increasingly bitter. Against this Hamlet, Scott Wentworth’s Claudius, who acted out of passion not calculation in winning Gertrude and the crown, seems distinctly inferior. He may rule Denmark, but we really don’t feel Hamlet is in real danger from him. By the same token, Claudius’ soliloquy and the chapel scene are more impassioned because it is he who senses he is in danger.
In minor roles James Blendick makes a fine Ghost, but I was surprised he was confined to only that role. Though Hamlet questions whether it is “a spirit of health or goblin damn'd”, Noble shuns any ambiguity and treats the Ghost simply as the former. Ron Kennell makes a memorable portrait of Reynaldo as an innocent surprised by Polonius’ unusual demands in spying on Laertes. Juan Chioran is a suitably officious Osric. Victor Ertmanis is very good as the Player King but excels as the First Gravedigger, allowing the humour to flow entirely from the character without gimmicks. Randy Hughson as the Second Gravedigger finds more humour than usual in this dim-witted foil. As Young Fortinbras sporting an Iron Cross at his neck, Jeff Lillico aptly represented the man of deeds not words that Hamlet is not and so commands the stage at the end that we see that a new, more authoritarian power has just taken over a court that has self-imploded before our eyes.
The only two women in this male-dominant play are Ophelia played by Adrienne Gould and Gertrude played by Maria Ricossa. To his credit Noble makes both more intelligent than is usually the case. Gould’s Ophelia is no waif-like young thing hovering on the verge of mental breakdown. Rather we see a strong young woman whose love for her father, despite his faults, dominates her life. It is not Hamlet’s condemnation of her that pushes her over the edge but rather Polonius’ death. Borrowing an idea from John Caird’s “Hamlet” for the National Theatre in 2000, Noble has the mad Ophelia enter wearing her father’s coat and treating Claudius as if her were her father. Though Gould does not entirely succeed in it, we are at least spared the typical singsongy madness of Ophelia for one that chills through its creepiness. Ricossa seems rather bland as Gertrude and in constant danger of losing her voice, but she comes into her own in the powerful closet scene. There, for once, despite her confusion, Gertrude actually is won over by Hamlet and does reject Claudius’ advances at the end. Thereafter, in another nice touch, she finally dons black to mourn Old Hamlet. For once, her decision to “carouse” Hamlet’s fortune in the final scene makes sense as an act of defiance against Claudius. While Claudius has poisoned the chalice, we finally perceive the further irony that her defiance is the result of Hamlet’s influence.
After the excesses of Des McAnuff’s “Romeo and Juliet” the previous night, it was a relief to revel in the clean lines of Noble’s uncluttered production. Designer Santo Loquasto’s set consists only of a square of broad-board flooring set at angle on Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s bare set, a physical correlative one supposes that the time is “out of joint”. The two staircases and upper balcony are still missing as in “Romeo and Juliet”. In their place is what looks like a blank wooden wall that opens into a gigantic two-panel door. This is where the Ghost appears amid clouds of smoke and this is where the Players rig up the curtain for their performance. Loquasto has set the action, for no clear reason except perhaps its aura of pre-Great War peace, in 1910 and modelled the handsome costumes for the court after those at both the British and Russian courts of the period. Michael Walton’s lighting superbly captures the gloom of a northern clime in winter.
Unlike Caird’s “Hamlet” in 2000 that cut everything to do with the Fortinbras story that frames the action, Noble puts every bit of it in, even including the scenes with the other Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the play, the ambassadors Voltemand and Cornelius (David Francis and John Innes). The Fortinbras plot is very important in placing the intrigues in Denmark in context. Not only is Fortinbras a kind of anti-Hamlet, but his warlike presence suggests that the inward-focussed world of Denmark is about to crumble no matter what anyone at court may do.
Noble’s direction is unfussy and generally very effective, but there are odd lapses. He decided to stage Hamlet’s first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in an outdoor café. This immediately ruins the sense of claustrophobia that ought to predominate until Hamlet’s first scene away from the castle in Act 4, Scene 4, when he sees Fortinbras’ army pass by. It may be fun to see the players arrive at the café via their broken-down truck, but it is also quite unnecessary. Noble stages Claudius’ plotting with Laertes in Act 4, Scene 7, around a bizarrely overlarge billiard table that surprises us with its sudden appearance but in no way illuminates the scene. In contrast, the “Mousetrap” scene is impressively staged, with the players presenting the dumbshow first as a shadow play on the back of the curtain. After the lights go out the search for Hamlet proceeds with the searchers’ flashlights coursing about the totally darkened theatre. Ophelia’s burial with only the slightest hint of snow in the air is also extremely effective, especially when passions run so high Hamlet actually wrenches Ophelia’s body out of the coffin.
Clarity may outweigh mystery, intellect may outweigh passion and the surrounding performances may be uneven. Nevertheless, this is one of the most coherent productions of “Hamlet” starring one of the most articulate Hamlets you are ever likely to see. If all productions of Shakespeare at Stratford reached such a high level, we would be very lucky indeed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Scott Wentworth, Maria Ricossa, Ben Carlson and Geraint Wyn Davies. ©David Hou.
2008-05-29
Hamlet