Academics like to claim that
Hamlet is unperformable. That Shakespeare's tragedy is too copious, too complex, and too long for a production to ever do it justice. The words, words, words will in all likelihood undermine even a very gifted actor or director. The critic Harold Bloom (
who can't stop thinking about Hamlet, his secular scripture) derides most attempts to stage this "poem unlimited." Hamlet is smarter than us, maintains Bloom, so most stage productions will invariably get it wrong. We're better off to just keep re-reading it.
To these assertions, I can now reply that I saw a pretty great production of
Hamlet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last May. Having previously seen three different
Hamlet productions in my lifetime, I know that the theatergoing world abounds in mediocre
Hamlets. Prior to last night's show, I saw one (lop-sided) production here at OSF ten years ago, a community theater production one time, and a hyper-abridged one-hour high school version.
Picture if you will the cliche hep audience member, enjoying his post-theater cigarette by the stage door. The star emerges, now in plainclothes, and the audience member ducks over to assert his gratitude (as well as book smarts): "Hey man! I just wanna' say, I
dug your choices." Well, this production of
Hamlet, for the OSF's 75th anniversary season, starring the brilliant Dan Donahue, well, I
DUG its choices. That is, for the most part...
Let's talk about some of them. We'll start off with the weirdest one, the most glaring. The production choice that came from way out of left field, making me go, "What?" and then, "But - but why?" and then finally, "Oh! Cool." Get this: In this production, the King, the Ghost of Hamlet's father ... he's deaf. He uses sign-language to speak all of his lines. When he gets real mad, he yells one of his lines and his speech is realistically impaired. Furthermore, lest you think this was some sort of spectral, purgatorial consequence for the King's being poisoned in his ear, let me stop you. King Hamlet was, apparently, deaf during his lifetime as well. I call this choice the most glaring because it's the one that distracted me from the play itself - its presence made me start to worry, and we don't like worrying during our plays.
My realization of this choice was slow to dawn: Horatio tries to speak to the Ghost in the play's first scene. Me: "Okay, why's he hand gesturing?... Okay, that's over now. Good. It must have just been some sort of military semaphore. Moving on... " Later: Hamlet tries to speak to his dead father. "Why the fuck is Hamlet hand gesturing while he speaks? Are there hearing-impaired people in this audience? Is this one of those sign-interpreted performances -- with the sign-interpretation
incorporated into the diegesis of the show? That... would be pretty crazy." Then: Father-Ghost and Son speak to each other. "Oh, man. The dad is actually deaf. They are actually, together, translating out Uncle Claudius' whole treasonous crime with the Father signing it, and the Son speaking it. Wtf." Maybe this play's going off the rails...
I then found myself sitting there, zoning out from the acting in front of me, and scanning the book and volume of my brain for some justification, some textual support, for this very unusual choice. Where in the world did deaf come from? What dramaturgical clue clicked a lightbulb on in the director's head? (*snaps finger* "Of course! He's deaf!" *begins composing mass-email* "That's gold, Jerry, gold.") But, f'oh about my brains, I couldn't come up with a thing.
Thankfully though, it got better, this potentially-crippling production choice. During young Hamlet’s translation (for the audience’s sake) of his dad’s shocking murder revelation, I was complaining in my head: Look, in real life, deaf people’s loved ones don’t verbalize their speech. They simply comprehend, and respond. So, I came away from that scene feeling like the production lacked the courage for this conceit. If he’s deaf, at least have him be realistically deaf, okay? But then, later, it did just that. In the Ghost’s third scene, when Hamlet speaks daggers to his mother, the Ghost silently signed his entire injunction for Hamlet to go easy on his mom, and also to make with the uncle-revenge business. Hamlet verbalized none of this for the audience's expositional sake, and then simply picked up his next line: “How is’t with you, lady?” I was so pleased.
Then the deaf Father idea did have some late payoff, finally. It arrived at a moment where I thought “okay, that’s actually cool.” This came in the last word of the last line of Hamlet’s dying moment. As the life leaves his body, he begins to both sign and speak his famous final words, perhaps as a sort of fond commemoration of his departed dad, or maybe as an urgent hope that the two of them be reunited soon. And then, Hamlet can't utter the last word. He can only silently sign the “silence.”... Nice right?
Moving on to some of the production’s other interpretive choices. There was another potentially cringe-inducing device, which actually acquitted itself nicely. The traveling troupe of players was turned into a rhythm-step group. Their "Mousetrap” performance into a hip-hop concert. You can almost see this concept going over well in a table read. In theory, it makes sense. In practice, however, it could have easily been dead in the water. But it goes down smoothly enough, like a glass of champagne that’s gone a little flat. And at the point when Polonious interrupts the players’ impromptu rehearsal, saying, “This is too long,” we at least laugh with a sense of solidarity.
Moving on to the next impactful choice. This one involved some true textual sleuthing. This is probably where the director and the dramaturg reached for the elbow grease, winked playfully and proceeded to arm wrestle. In their production, Hamlet’s first three soliloquies, as well as some of his dying words, are purposefully set off from the rest of the text, distinctly juxtaposed from the mis-en-scene of the play. This is accomplished by positioning these speeches away from their usual placement in the scenes, and initiated by a sharp light change, which haloes Hamlet in his solitary audience address while the other onstage characters freeze in a tableau. To futher section off these speeches, this production has rearranged their placement within the sequence of their scenes, often dropping Hamlet’s later private contemplations into earlier public moments. So, rather than soliloquizing after everyone has left the room, Hamlet opens up his personal thoughts to us while frozen within the interpersonal instant that inspired them. (Or, at any rate, the instant posited as inspiration by this production.)
It's not a revelatory choice, but the creative team gets good mileage out of it. For Hamlet's first two soliloquies (“O, that this too too solid flesh” and “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I”), the idea makes excellent good sense. The former soliloquy is incited when Gertrude compels Hamlet to stay with them longer in Elsinore. His soliloquy concludes, “but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue,” light change / break tableau / resume public moment: “I shall, in all my best, obey you, lady,” with a resigned, broken voice. The "peasant slave" soliloquy is provoked when Hamlet watches the Player King perform his monologue about Hecuba. And there's plenty of textual support for that choice: “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?” Hamlet privately asks us, with the Player King frozen behind him while enacting his "dream of passion."
The placement of the “To be or not to be” is less about the dichotomy between public and private space, but its resulting interpretive tenor is nonetheless bold, debatable, and compelling. Hamlet first spots Ophelia kneeling in a chapel. “Nymph, in the orisons, be all my sins remembered.” “Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day?” “I humbly thank you. Well…” He proceeds to exit the chapel, and suddenly finds himself locked in a dark, square, stone room, with Polonious and Claudius listening just on the other side of a barricaded door. “Well, well,” says Hamlet, completing his line with a suspicious tone. His ensuing soliloquy – the most famous lines in Western Literature – therefore assumes a paranoid, defeated quality, as if Hamlet were a penned-in animal under constant surveillance.
This third adaptive choice works tremendously well, and it leads me to this production's chiefest asset: Dan Donahue’s performance itself. This actor's dexterous, buoyant Prince lends the whole production a fluid pacing and a smooth accessibility that single-handedly raises it up from mediocrity. I for one never realized that the character of Hamlet could be so laugh-out-loud funny. Donahue makes this Hamlet instantly relatable; He’s like the prankster-friend you love having around. As a result, you’re all the more heart-broken to see his inevitable fate played out. Sad to see a noble mind here o’erthrown, sadder to see it when the noble mind is also effortlessly hilarious. OSF contracted Donahue years ago specifically to fill the roles of clowns and fools. That apprenticeship has served this production well. Not only did he make this audience member hear a lot of these very familiar lines afresh - no minor accomplishment for any Shakespeare production - but he additionally wrung laughter from unlikely and un-mined places. He managed to turn his every ironic "crazy" interaction with Polonius, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, into the light, playful tauntings of your favorite puckish class clown.
With Donahue's precise and vivid portrayal as its centerpiece, this production has dozens of other smaller adaptive choices I'm eager to talk about. I'll try to keep it short. His work as Hamlet shoulders this production with ease, but then unfortunately leaves a few of the other performers looking static by comparison. Jeffrey King's Claudius blusters around unevenly. Greta Oglesby's Gertrude hits all the appropriate notes, which is to say, she's serviceable. Susannah Flood's surprisingly level-headed, almost sardonic Ophelia reads as out of place in this production, but then her restraint pays off during the actress's fully-realized mental melt-down and painfully poignant drowning scene. A pair of gardening shears becomes a key prop throughout the action. After Ophelia first uses them to prune flowers in her first moment, Donahue keeps snatching them up for his mischief from scene to scene. He uses them to snip Polonius's tie, and then promptly discovers its use as a bookmark. He uses them as weapon to insinuate suicide. He also periodically slices holes in his black mourning suit, signaling a psychological deterioration, and eventually comes to look quite like a patched fool. Fittingly, the daughter's garden shears travel their full arch when Hamlet drives them home into the father's stomach, stabbing Polonius through the arras. And, finally, one last thought. My reaction to this production reveals how much I've been of the school that the central character
chooses to act crazy, performing his antic disposition to gain an upper hand on his tormentors. The fable (directing-speak for "brief synopsis of a particular production's point-of-view") for this
Hamlet may have included a sentence like: "As a result of his encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet's mind is infected and he literally goes insane." The rich copiousness of Donahue's portrayal from scene to scene suggests a person swinging rapidly from strutting prankster, to disillusioned lover, to loyal or disgusted son (the list goes on...) to a man terrified at his own tenuous grasp on reality.
So, if by saying that
Hamlet is unperformable one means that the infinite possibilities for interpretation cannot all be on display at once, I would tend to agree. If, however, one means that a lively and on the whole well-thought-out production of
Hamlet cannot be found, I would tend to say drop your preconceptions. I would say something is rotten in the state of scholarship. I would say head to Ashland, Oregon.
