bardolatry

(order the DVD from Amazon)

starring Adrian Lester

reviewed by John Murphy

We Shall Sift Him

“It is only when we forget Shakespeare that we can begin to find him.”

— Peter Brook, 1996.

Who is Hamlet? That is the question. First off, he’s an acid test for actors. Viewing the different versions can be disheartening. It’s like watching one soldier volunteer to scope out the enemy lines, only to be picked off, followed by another volunteer, then another, until finally a whole squadron’s been taken out. Yet each new attempt, however ill-advised, offers some fresh angle from which to view the perennially tortured Prince of Denmark. Laurence Olivier played the blonde fop who couldn’t make up his mind. Richard Burton was the Byronic poet. Derek Jacobi the biting, sarcastic intellectual. Kevin Kline the profound melancholic. Mel Gibson the attention deficit. Kenneth Branagh the hyper-sensitive. Ethan Hawke the beatnik rebel. Keanu Reeves the…whoa… Reeves tackled this part?.

Obviously that brief summary is a gross and irreverent oversimplification. There have been, supposedly, over forty film adaptations of Hamlet (I’m 21 now, so I’ll be roughly in my second childhood by the time bardolatry gets around to reviewing them all). But the point is that no single actor is the definitive Hamlet, the one and only last stamp on the role. Hamlet is either an oasis of insight that one can return to again and again for nourishment, or an abyss. I’m not sure which. But having read and studied Hamlet as well as having seen a variety of incarnations on stage and screen, I confess a temptation to roll my eyes as yet another actor/victim launches into yet another tired reading of, “To be or not to be.” The whole audience anticipates the soliloquy and then mouths the words with him (or her—Hamlet as a play is so exhausted as to now be gender-blind) and the meaning behind the words becomes diluted by a universal consciousness of the words themselves.

So who needs another Hamlet?

I did, apparently, though I didn’t know it. I desperately needed another Hamlet. But not just any Hamlet—this Hamlet.

As C.S. Lewis once said of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Brook’s adaptation of Hamlet is like “lightning out of a clear sky.” Brook aims this version at an audience already so familiar with the play that they settle in to watch another Hamlet like a re-run of a favorite sitcom. The lights dim, the curtain goes up and…Ah, there’s our old friends, Bernardo and Francisco, on the castle ramparts. Check. We know Hamlet’s first line before he speaks it, “A little more than kin and less than kind.” Check. We know Claudius is the villain before Hamlet does. Check. We know who will survive (not many) and who won’t (everybody else). Check. We’ve read the play. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.

Brook wants to re-examine the words, or rediscover them. But the words remain the driving force. Not Brook’s imposition of what the words are supposed to mean to him, but what do they mean? The play’s the thing. This Hamlet is bracingly original, fresh, and innovative. It’s like Spencer Tracy’s line about Katherine Hepburn, “Not much meat on her but what’s there is cherce.’”

The set is stripped bare: a red carpet and some throw pillows surrounded by cave-like walls with a diabolically crimson cast. Only a handful of actors are on hand to play the entire dramatis personae. Brook slices, rearranges, recontextualizes, and generally rewrites the play. But there’s a reason. And it’s not self-indulgent, believe it or not. Think of Hamlet as a work of modern art. Because that’s what it is: modern art through and through. It always will be modern, because it will always be beyond our scope to fully understand it. So Brook treats the text like the Cubist-phase Picasso would his subject. He attacks it from different angles, highlights words and scenes that are frequently cut out of other adaptations.

The opening shot is Hamlet’s inscrutable, enigmatic face. And he says, “O that this too too solid flesh would melt.” It’s jarring, unsettling (what happened to Marcellus, Bernardo, et al!?), but appropriate: Brook wants to capture the essence of the play in an almost haiku-like form, and what better way than to zero in on Hamlet, the perpetual enigma, from the first shot onwards? Hamlet is either the heart or the void at the center of this Essential work of art.

Brook wants us to hear the words as if for the first time. What if you’d never seen a production of Hamlet? What if Hamlet was a character, not an icon? It’s tempting by now to snicker at the “To be or not be” line. But when it disappears, we miss it. When it reappears unexpectedly in a new context, it’s exhilarating. Brook shifts the soliloquy to a different place, after Hamlet has killed Polonius. Blasphemy? Perhaps. I confess I don’t generally like my Shakespeare deconstructed (I operate under the assumption that Shakespeare knew what he was doing), but Hamlet is an exception. It is arguably the most famous work of literature in the English language and the play itself is an intellectual chess-game, more icy and detached than Othello, King Lear, or Macbeth—the only equals. Hamlet’s a dead horse that’s been beaten six ways from Sunday. The only way to resuscitate it is to ignore, or purposefully reject, the almost halo-like glow that surrounds the play and its central character.

Thus, the new context. And the words suddenly mean something. They make sense. We listen. We don’t recite by rote.

It helps that Lester, an incredibly adroit actor, has absorbed the language, made it his own. He is Hamlet. Or, at the very least, he is his Hamlet. He doesn’t appear to suffer from the same Anxiety of Influence so many other Hamlets have suffered from (Branagh particularly seemed to be wrestling with Olivier’s shadow). Lester plays Hamlet as if no other actor has ever tackled the part. It’s a remarkable balance of the physical, emotional, and intellectual. He beats his head, froths at the mouth, disarms his opponents with cutting wit and unexpected flights of lunacy. He is sensitive, collegiate, philosophical, and yet can turn on a dime and then…watch out. He’s dangerous. Very dangerous. He is attractive even when he recounts how he sent his old college chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to their deaths.

Adrian Lester owns this role, as much as anyone can own the most elusive character in English drama. He is the most likeable, charming Hamlet I’ve seen. His is truly a “noble mind o’erthrown.” Lester speaks the lines with an ease and understanding that belies his young years. His reading is so fresh that I suddenly understood lines that had long since confused me. Even the ambiguous last, “The rest is silence.” Like syncopated music, Lester emphasizes the off beats. His heated encounter with Rosencrantz, “Will you play upon this pipe?” bristling with anger and hurt and sarcasm, is literally breathtaking. I didn’t think I could still get chills hearing these lines and I was dead wrong.

Speaking of ‘dead,’ Hamlet is a character neurotically aware of his own mortality, as we all know. Strip the play to its essence and that’s what remains: the dark cloud of mortality. And beyond that: the threat of something after life. Sartre could not have conceived a drama more existential. Taking the verbal cues, Brook colors the blood-soaked proceedings in a blood red lighting scheme. The pockmarked walls are like diseased, disintegrating flesh. I don’t think there’s any question: the ghost of Hamlet’s father is a damned ghost, drawing the otherwise noble prince Hamlet down into a never-ending spiral of madness, solipsism, and, eventually, death. Death and damnation pervades. By his fruits shall you know him.

The rest of the cast, like a veteran orchestra, supports Lester, the scintillating soloist. Jeffery Kissooner plays both the Ghost of Old Hamlet and Claudius (I’ve never seen that one—it’s almost too obvious); twin brothers, but no more like each other than I to Hercules. The Ghost is deep-voiced, unsmiling, pale and revengeful. His voice rises to a terrifying crescendo as he recounts his demise at the hand of a brother. Hamlet hugs him in a spontaneous gesture of devotion, and the Ghost pushes him away. Claudius is the polar opposite of his subdued brother. Kissooner uses Hamlet’s line about his uncle, “One may smile and smile and be a villain” as the basis for his performance. Claudius is an oily salesman, always smiling, but there are fangs behind those smiling lips. Shantala Shivalingappa, on the other hand, is a pure and sweet-hearted Ophelia. Polonius is a well-intending would-be philosopher, if a few stories short of a building. Horatio is ever loyal and sycophantic.

Every member of the cast brings their best to bear. If they hadn’t, they’d have been blown off the stage by Lester’s dynamic, brilliant Hamlet. But by now I’ve honestly exhausted superlatives in trying to convey how impressed I was by this performance and production. I never thought I’d be so over-the-moon about an elliptical, deconstructed adaptation of Shakespeare, but Brook pulls it off. Is it blasphemous? I’d have to say that Shakespeare owes Brook a debt of gratitude. By forgetting Shakespeare, Brook has found him. He was hiding in the words, words, words.

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