Play Review: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, directed by Bill Rauch

[juushika]

My family just spent two days visiting Ashland, Oregon to attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We go every year (more than once a year), and it is one of my favorite places in the world. Saturday afternoon for a near-packed matinéee performance, we saw Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Pictured is Hamlet, to the right, deciding whether to slay Claudius, to the left. By Jenny Graham, copyright OSF.)

It's difficult for me to separate my love for the production from my undying love for the script. To be fair, the best script can be ruined by poor performance, and even OSF has done it. (I refer specifically to last year's production of Macbeth. Macbeth is my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, perhaps my favorite piece of literature, but the 2009 production was my worst experience with OSF. I never wrote a review, but this Oregon Live piece describes some of my issues: it was a frantic production, rushed and loud, which felt made for TV rather than theatre—all the way down to questionable special effects. It did a disservice to the script by adding in lines and chopping out others, gender-flopping without considering the impact of gender roles, and playing fast and lose with casting; it destroyed the tone by playing much of violence and madness with humor, which stripped away the play's gravity and its horror and without those—well, what's the point of Macbeth? But this review isn't about that production—it's about this year's Hamlet, which was much better.)

Such a strong, recognizable script as Hamlet gives a production an immediate step up, and as long as the production doesn't do that script a complete disservice then it probably won't be bad. But Hamlet isn't "not bad." It's amazing. It isn't perfect, but this is a strong, smart play with wonderful acting and some of the best interpretation of Shakespeare's most famous lines that I've ever had the privilege to see.

The star—and rightly so—is Hamlet himself, played by Dan Donohue. Prior to seeing the play I heard another theatre-goer describe it as Shakespeare's darkest comedy. I wouldn't always agree, but for for this production I do. Donohue draws out all of Hamlet's humor: the comedy of his madness, his personal insults, and the double-entendres of his language. It's clever humor rooted deep in the script and blossomed through stage direction, and it endears Hamlet to his audience swiftly and deeply. The humor and tragedy don't always find a perfect balance (and as a result, the last two acts of the play—the graveyard humor (5.1) followed by the tragedy of the swordfight (5.2)—rub a bit roughly against each other), but often they do, and even when tragedy is underexplored Hamlet's personal struggles never fail to shine. Shine indeed is the optimal word: brilliant spotlights highlight Hamlet during his soliloquies, all of which are wonderfully dissected, paced, and delivered; here Hamlet shows that the intelligence which gifts him with such sharp humor also curses him with constant complicating thought and introspection. Acting and directing carve out a very specific delivery, and they make the play's most famous, oft-quoted lines seem new again. I've never seen a more engaging Hamlet. He perfectly walks the line between independent and accessible: his struggles are personal and private, but—as is the play's greatest strength—every viewer can understand them.

The play centers so much on Hamlet that other characters go somewhat overlooked. Gertrude is wonderful in her closet (3.4) but otherwise almost forgettable, Claudius is too much the villain, but for the most part the core and supporting cast are wonderful—but not remarkable, because this isn't their story. The exception is Polonius, played by Richard Elmore. I had the privilege of hearing Elmore discuss his role after the play, but even without that bias I loved this interpretation of Polonius: like Hamlet's fresh soliloquies, Polonius feels new again—even when delivering his tritest lines. His buffoonery is shadowed by the hidden threat of his manipulation of family, friends, and kingdom—giving him depth but never detracting from his humorous role. It's a refreshing, careful, smart performance, and a joy to watch.

Apt words for the play as a whole. This is an intelligent Hamlet, taking nothing for granted, never content to skate by on the momentum of its fame and notoriety, digging deep into the mind and action of its protagonist and supporting him with a strong setting and cast. The aesthetic is modern but—with one exception discussed below—rarely distractingly so, and it does impress the viewer with the timelessness of Hamlet's self and struggle; moving partitions make for a flexible, deceptively simple set which isn't in itself attention-catching. In general, the play's other aspects—from cast to stage—are solid, strong, but not so distinctive to distract from Hamlet's core performance. The play benefits from its purity of focus and Hamlet's character shines; what aspects are distinctive and experimental are never outright bad, but they can tend towards distracting.

Which is to say I have some disappointments, and one or two concerns. Among the disappointments is Ophelia, played by Susannah Flood—although a strong actor, especially in 1.3, she had a few weak moments, one of which is "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (3.1). Both a famous speech and an important moment, the fact that it comes across as a little more than "O, woe is me" ends Hamlet's wonderful "To a nunnery, go" on a low note. She's the weakest of the core players, which strips some of the tragedy from her downfall (although I enjoyed this interpretation of her madness (4.5), and her suicide (4.7) is well staged).

My concerns with the play are at once more amorphous and persnickety. It can be sad to lose favorite lines (as my beloved forgotten hobby-horse (3.2) was indeed forgot), but I don't mind to see scenes cut because even the King's Men did it; when scenes are retained, however, I prefer to be preformed as written—preformed by prescribed actors, following stage direction, and spoken in their entirety. Shakespeare is the genius we're here to admire, interpret, and understand; substituting alternate speakers and truncating lines can misrepresent his source material—and after four hundred years of study and performance, I think we can safely say the source material is genius enough to stands on its own. Much of this production of Hamlet is a careful interpretation of precise source material, but it takes a few experimental liberties. Some alternative line deliveries work well, such as Ophelia and Laertes echoing their father's "few precepts" (1.3) as if it are a litany of clichés they had heard from him before; others however irk me, none more so than "The rest is—" with silence left to a literal on-stage pause as Hamlet dies (5.2). That sort of meta-acting, playing around with too-clever delivery of some of the most famous and important lines of the play, comes across more as glib than meaningful. Last year's Macbeth tried this trick too, and I dislike both attempts. The script is genius. Cut it as needs must, to keep the play length reasonable, but don't presume that a "clever" adjustment of its words in any way improves them.

Speaking of play length, Hamlet is pretty long—an hour and forty-five minutes before intermission, over three hours in total, and that's after cuts for length. Thanks to rapid-fire scene changes, the pacing never drags, but some sections eat more time than they deserve: Hamlet's translation of his deaf-and-dumb father's American Sign Language is a unique twist which does wonders to personalize the Ghost's message (1.4), establishing from the beginning that this is less revenge tragedy and more one man's struggle towards knowledge, interpretation, and action—but the scene simply takes too much time. Likewise for the hip-hop play within a play (3.2). The Mouse-trap's rhyming couplets transition beautifully to song, but the production is too loud and too long, eating up valuable time and overshadowing Hamlet's vital commentary on the play. The hip-hop acting troupe also distracts from the the play's messages about acting (as how it relates to action), which is a pity—they're not the most vital aspects, but nonetheless they're personal favorites.

These are small complaints, no less valid for being specific but still not major disappointments. OSF's 2010 production of Hamlet is undeniably strong. It's smart, it's careful, it's sensitive, and while not all its risks turn out to be successes, more often than not they do—and none of them overshadow the production's brilliant portrait of Hamlet's character, of his thoughts and doubts, of his attempted actions. What a wonderful start to the season, and even better that it's playing all year long. Go see this play (and I hope I'll have the chance to do so once more before the year is out).

I'm aware that this review is probably longer than most people will bother to read, but I had a delightful time and it's been too long since I talked Shakespeare (or reviewed a play!), so I just can't help myself. This is OSF's 75th year and they have a lot of great plays running and coming—we also saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and while I may not take the time to review it I loved it too. If you have the chance to get there this year, I urge you to go. I'm looking forward to our two more visits of the year.

Along the lines of writing and epic posts, I've lately been playing with IOGraph, which maps mouse movement and delights the hell out of me. Following is a picture of my mouse movement while writing this post (dots indicate mouse stops, lines indicate movements). Total recording and writing time: 3.5 hours. Click through to view notes (of what the graph indicates) and to view larger.