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by William Shakespeare, adapted and directed by Ravi Jain

Why Not Theatre with the Soulpepper Theatre Company, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto

April 19-29, 2017;

Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

February 7-24, 2019

In reviving Prince Hamlet, Why Not Theatre’s first-ever production, director and adaptor Ravi Jain has added the unnecessary complexities of bilingualism and gender-swapping to an already complex text. Shakespeare’s tragedy is often defined by the actor in the title role. Christine Horne makes a sympathetic Hamlet, but she doesn’t maintain the character’s intense air of cynicism and punishing self-doubt that should underlie all he says.

In 2007, Jain had heavily cut the text, reordered the scenes and reassigned some of the dialogue.

Now he’s made it bilingual – in English and American Sign Language. Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio are “The rest is silence.” Perhaps for this reason Jain has Horatio (Dawn Jani Birley) played by a self-identified Deaf actor.

Jain’s reconfigured text situates Horatio as the omnipresent narrator of the others’s actions. Birley's signing is only occasionally spoken by another actor, but she signs so expressively that translating her lines into speech is largely superfluous.

Jain’s other change from the 2007 production is to gender-swap all the roles except, quite inexplicably, those of Claudius (Rick Roberts) and Gertrude (Karen Robinson). Gender-swapping has the positive result of allowing actors to play roles otherwise closed to them, but to be effective it should also somehow help us interpret the play. Since Hamlet, unlike Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, is not primarily about male and female roles, it seems that this partial gender-swap is done more for the sake of change than insight.

Though the overall acting level is high, only Maria Vacratsis* as a wryly funny Polonius knows how to speak the verse as poetry rather than prose and to wring out the full meaning of words through careful pauses or emphases.

Jain has brilliant ideas like having Hamlet also speak the unseen Ghost’s lines as if possessed, and having Claudius pray to himself at a mirror. Yet with Jain’s odd choices – like staging the duel with all characters seated, except Horatio – we realize that this adaptation of Hamlet is aimed at those already thoroughly familiar with the play, since Jain’s changes will likely confuse any newcomer.

Christopher Hoile

*In the 2019 remount Barabra Gordon plays Polonius.

Note: This review appeared in NOW Magazine on April 24, 2017.

Photo: Christine Horne as Hamlet and Karen Robinson as Gertrude, ©2017 Bronwen Sharp.

For tickets, visit http://theatrecentre.org/?p=10235.