Hamlet (31 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
The incapability of an individual and uncorrupted life in this bureaucratic world was emphasized in the setting. The designer Alison Chitty favored
… minimal furnishing, wide empty spaces, shades of bureaucratic grey, and you [got] a corresponding sense of watching the play under laboratory conditions. Pimlott is a believer in modern-dress Shakespeare, too, which on this occasion means jeans, leather jackets, name-tags, courtiers dressed like City traders …
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David Warner and Sam West, respective Hamlets in 1965 and 2001, wore defining items of clothing which set them apart and marked them as part of contemporary rebellious and disaffected youth. Warner’s long, red student scarf has remained an iconic theatrical image. Sam West first appeared in black jeans and a black “hoodie,” a “hunched and hooded figure squatting with his back to the audience, snooping on the court.”
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As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tried to find out his secrets, they plied him with a joint of marijuana.
Pimlott’s thoroughly modern production is set upon confounding traditional expectations and sometimes he manages to do so with a vengeance. The guards try to blast the Ghost away with machine-gun fire. A leather-jacketed Hamlet finishes off Polonius with a pistol rather than his knife. On the Prince’s orders, Horatio videos the murderous Play scene, so that his close-ups of a twitchy Claudius and Gertrude loom large before us. And Ben Meyjes’s splendid Laertes, possessed
by the furies, holds up the king with machine-gun fire and what suitably looks like an incipient Palace revolution.
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Moving away from politics, Matthew Warchus’ quasi-cinematic production of 1997 completely cut out the Fortinbras subplot and focused on the families of the court.
Hamlet is a play absolutely saturated with the words “father,” “mother,” “sister,” “brother,” “son,” “daughter,” “uncle.” … I cut about 35% of the text of the play in order to focus on the domestic story—on the two families who I imagine in this production live together with their staff in an isolated house.
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Warchus conflated the three existing versions of the play, reordering events and including rarely played scenes, such as Horatio’s Q1 reassurance to Gertrude that her banished son is safe. The cuts were justified by the director in an interview with journalist Lyn Gardner in
The Guardian
:
“I know that by cutting the play you could diminish it, but by cutting a couple of courses from a banquet you can also make the flavours sharper and richer” … he knows that in excising the political dimension of the play, he risks turning it into a small domestic incident rather than a full-scale tragedy. “My hope is that when the story is told very vividly, very passionately, audiences will recognise it as a blueprint for what happens more widely. Shakespeare is so good at both macrocosm and microcosm. I feel that what I am doing is taking the play out of the hands of the academics and intellectuals, and bringing [it] back into the arena of relationships. More than any other play I have directed, I am doing this with my heart, not my head.”
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Warchus succeeded in creating a Hamlet that was accessible and exciting, “about a wounded individual rather than the rank corruption within a tyranny.”
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Its modern setting led to many inventive touches: Hamlet taking Polaroids of Claudius at a wedding party
which looked like “a gaudy purple disco,”
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and later using them to show Gertrude the comparison with her dead husband; the audience unsure if Hamlet, carrying around a revolver in a brown paper bag, was going to use it on himself or others; Ophelia handing out pills instead of flowers.
There’s a clarity and energy here that silences the usual anxieties about updating a classic from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II. [Alex] Jennings hugs [Derbhla] Crotty, then pushes her away, stubs his cigarette out on the floor and tells her to get to a nunnery. There’s a whole new spin to her saying he’s blasted with “ecstasy.”
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In 1980 director John Barton picked up on the many references in the play to role-playing and theatricality, making it the central metaphor for his production in collaboration with his cast and designer. Michael Pennington, who played Hamlet, explained how
the distinction between self-dramatization and real feeling, theatricality and life, runs right through the play, and was beginning to influence my reception of the text; and soon the theatrical world itself—hampers, cloaks and property swords—began to appear in rehearsal.
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Reviewing this production, the critic Irving Wardle pointed out that
Hamlet
, everyone agrees, is Shakespeare’s most obsessively theatrical work. This production puts that idea to the test of the basic scenic elements, ransacking the text for disguisings and routines, and always allowing the spectator a full view of the concrete instruments that create the sense of illusion. Where is Elsinore? It is a stage. Who is Hamlet? A man who may not be able to take action but who can always put on a show. What happens happens bang centre stage: otherwise characters retreat to the benches and philosophise across wide open space as if they had no part in the events.
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Another reviewer noted that
The style of the production is, in a sense, dictated by Ralph Koltai’s design: a thrusting wooden platform over which five rehearsal lights hover and behind which are arrayed such necessary props as a thunder-sheet, a table for the swords, a huge dragged suit of armour, for people to hide behind.
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6.
Hamlet
is the most self-consciously theatrical of the tragedies: Hamlet himself is fascinated by actors and the idea of playing a part (does he
act
his madness?) and his deep concern with “acting” in relation to thinking and feeling introduces a play on the two senses of “to act.” The presence of the players and the play-within-the-play is crucial to all this, but the highly rhetorical linguistic style of
The Murder of Gonzago
(otherwise known as
The Mousetrap
), together with the dumb show, require a different theatrical style from that of the main play. Masks were used in Buzz Good-body’s intimate 1975 production in the studio theater The Other Place.
“Who’s there?”
Hamlet
famously begins. The question, centred on the ambiguous figure of the Ghost, haunts the entire play.
(Stephen Greenblatt)
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As the catalyst for the play’s action, the staging of the Ghost is key in indicating what type of production and what type of
Hamlet
the audience are about to see. However, one of the difficulties with staging
Hamlet
in the modern era is creating a Ghost that will have the terrifying and awe-inspiring impact that it had on audiences of previous centuries.
Many directors have eschewed any attempt to make the Ghost frightening, especially when the production has a modern setting. In Matthew Warchus’ 1997 modern-dress production,
As Hamlet, Alex Jennings appears centre stage, holding his father’s ashes in an urn, while on the screen behind we see black and white footage of the father playing in the snow with his son. Over the speakers, we hear the words of the usurping king, Claudius: “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death the memory be green …” In this strong personal production, which axes the public-political side, Hamlet’s memory of his father, the motive for revenge, never loses its freshness.… Into [the] wedding celebrations, amid champagne, fireworks, balloons and bridesmaids, walks the ghost of Hamlet’s father (Edward Petheridge) … [entering] in a smoking jacket, [he] speaks with quick authority, then drifts away.
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Steven Pimlott’s 2001 production had an extremely animated and fast-moving Ghost. He clutched at the distraught Hamlet and held him in his arms when imparting his story of betrayal. When Hamlet went too far in berating his mother the Ghost strode purposefully into the room, rather than just appearing, and almost grabbed Hamlet, as if to say “That’s enough!”
In 1965 David Warner played Hamlet as a man obsessed with his
father, not only by the loss of him, but by his inability to match up to him in stature. In order to emphasize this the Ghost appeared as a tremendously tall figure. Roger Howells, the stage manager, explained that the device used to create this effect was like a “dalek.” When staged in Stratford, two men, one standing on the ground and the other on the platform above him, maneuvered the Ghost from inside a “shell.” The voice of Patrick Magee
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was sound-recorded and then boomed over the speakers to create an otherworldly effect. Critic Anthony Dawson remarked that
the sense of being outmanned was the dominant effect. The Ghost entered with raised arms through the doors at the back as the sentries and Prince huddled around the cannon downstage … on “sweep to my revenge,” he swept, ironically, to the long arms of his father, to be cradled within them for the remainder of the scene. He seemed to be “looking for the comforts of the nursery” (
Times
, 20 Aug.), and it was clearly his father rather than his mother, here and throughout, that fired his imagination. But the gap between heroic parent and inadequate child was overtly underlined by the stage image, generated as it were by Hamlet’s inner compulsions: the father huge and protective, the son comfortless and unfit. Even after the Ghost’s departure under the stage, as he reeled about getting his friends to swear their secrecy, Hamlet kept falling on the ground as if attempting to return to his father’s protective embrace. How could such a man effectively take on the polished King or his politic prime minister?
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David Warner explained how the powerful image of the Ghost’s embrace gave the scene a feeling of “total love and belief in the father.” Warner “reacted quite violently to the Ghost’s request for revenge even to shouting ‘WHAT!’ (not in text) and then sobbing throughout the Ghost’s long speech.”
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For the revenge [Hamlet] really wishes, and achieves, is on himself for not being the great Hamlet his father was.… As the hollow voice beneath the stage cries “Swear!,” his son lovingly
measures his length on the ground, as if on a grave; but the voice moves, he cannot cover it. Clutching violently at his mother on her bed he looks up to find the huge presence of his father towering between them.
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Obviously, Hamlet’s sense of intense grief plays a large part in the way he perceives the world. Grief can often bring with it an exaggeration of the senses, a cruel self-awareness and feelings of isolation. As Stanley Wells points out, Shakespeare’s central concern in writing Hamlet was “Reactions to death.”
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For Hamlet, actor Michael Pennington believed,
Grief seems to have sharpened his sense of falsehood in the world around him, but in other ways the immeasurable shock he has received has sent him to sleep. The torpor is deep and disturbing to watch, lifting in utterances—“My father, methinks I see my father”—which are more hallucinatory than sentimental. Anybody familiar with bereavement can recognise the symptoms. In dramatic terms, until the news of the Ghost’s appearance animates him, gives him something to believe in he is a dramatic hero of whom nothing much can be expected.
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In the production starring Pennington, the Ghost sat on a bench and quietly told Hamlet what had happened. Director John Barton’s highlighting of theatricality also informed his Hamlet’s reaction to the Ghost:
From Hamlet’s viewpoint, perhaps even the Ghost is a Satanic actor, until the closet scene when Hamlet gently presses his mother’s face round and, in a shared moment of stunned disbelief, she too sees the Ghost.
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Hamlet’s grief stems from an acute awareness of the importance, the preciousness of human life. Anger at his mother’s inability to see, to be aware, of the truth of her situation, prompts one of the most potent dramatic scenes ever written. In this production, Gertrude not only saw into her own soul, but in witnessing the Ghost became
fully aware of what Hamlet saw and felt. The effect was so powerful that she fainted.
Michael Boyd’s 2004 staging of the supernatural was striking and imaginative. The Ghost appeared with slow progression through the audience to the stage, skeleton-like with his mouth contorted into a silent scream. With its truly frightening visage, this nightmarish apparition was one of the few modern stagings of the Ghost to truly unsettle the audience:
Instead of the usual stern but fatherly figure, in the “fair and warlike form” of his living self, old Hamlet here hauls himself into the play as a bowed, deathly-white, half-naked spook, with hollow red sockets for eyes, scraping his broadsword along the ground to nerve-shatteringly ominous effect. He hawks up his speeches in an agonised vomit of vengefulness. That he seems to hail from an alien belief system as well as from another world is entirely deliberate.… Boyd has been inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s recent book
Hamlet in Purgatory
, which highlights the tragedy’s unsettling premise: “A young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.” Or, as the director puts it, “There has been a political and intellectual revolution, and then Hamlet re-encounters the past in the shape of his father’s spirit and has to negotiate with it.”
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