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| Amazing artwork ©2021 noplot, badly adapted from one of my favourite t-shirts |
I went to see Hamlet one Sunday evening in August. Again.
The first time for this latest production at the Perchance Theatre in Cupids, but for the umpteenth time in my life.
Why do I keep going to see this play, other than the fact that my talented niece, Erika Squires, aka Drama Queen (DQ), was playing Horatio extremely well in it?
It feels like I know all the lines, felt like I knew them the first time I read or heard them; this play is so quotable, its words and phrases live on in common parlance, even for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a Shakespeare performance (and almost everybody gets caught dead in Hamlet, after all).
To be or not to be...
To sleep perchance to dream...
The play's the thing...
Methinks she doth protest too much (misquote, I know, but we all like to rewrite the masters)
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
I expect this sense of recognition may not be as prevalent for people born since the turn of the century, but I think even the girl who served me ice cream the other day and was surprised to hear that Shakespeare also wrote comedies! has heard of that first quote.*
I read it first in second year university, and afterwards I saw it, can't remember when. Was it onstage? Was Mel's version (1990) really the first time I saw it, the first time I realized what a truly funny play it is, funnier than some of his comedies, in fact? Did I see the Shakespeare by the Sea production? Did I see Olivier's or just stills and clips? I know I saw Kenneth Branagh's and liked it, but can't recall much about it.
I will never forget buying a beautiful-deep-blue-OMG-it-has-pockets dress in a shop at Stratford-Not-on-Avon in the hopes that Paul Gross would notice me, a beacon of loveliness in the melancholy dark of the theatre.**
But my favourite Hamlet so far has to be David Tennant. He brings the emotional depth, the humour and the madness that served him so well as the tenth Doctor, also my favourite Doctor. With Jean Luc Picard so amazingly good as his bad uncle Claudius, it is no surprise that a Shakespeare junky with a predilection for sci fi like me was in her glee.
DQ suggested that the evening performance was the best time to see the Perchance production, which made sense to me because Hamlet is essentially a horror story, the shades of the past haunting all the characters and driving them on to their deaths with DQ playing the only surviving blonde girl.
Since this is an outdoor theatre and the show started at 7 pm in broad daylight (plus Covid rules necessitated shortening the run time), the dark and spooky opening scene was cut, replaced by the appearance of a silent figure, a woman walking slowly, measuredly, unnaturally into the foreground before the stage. I knew Hamlet was being played by a woman but was this Hamlet Sr.'s ghost?
It turns out to be Hamlet, using new pronouns, haunting her own play like a poltergeist as she goes on to cause trouble and annoy everyone around her. It was odd to hear her addressed as "my liege" instead of "my lord", but it turns out that, Errol Flynn movies notwithstanding, "liege" does not refer only to a king and is not as definitively a male term, although I had never heard a woman addressed like that. Perhaps because it's so rare to find a woman in a position of authority back in the olden days. Am I the only one who had to google that during the performance?
My pedantry aside, Allison Moira Kelly does a fine job as Hamlet. I was particularly startled by the intensity of her grief as she speaks her first monologue, wishing her too solid flesh would melt with her tears, which flowed freely in a bout of ugly crying which I feel compelled to call feminine, having so rarely seen that kind of emotional outpouring from a man. I cannot recall any other Hamlet of my acquaintance letting more than a few drops of moisture fall on his manly cheek, no matter the reference to Niobe's endless tears.
It was in that moment, I made the realization that Hamlet and I were both fatherless children, and the emotional connection between us rang more clearly than it ever had before.
Was it the idea that royalty feel differently about these things which kept me at a distance (The king is dead, long live the king! seems to remove human feelings from the equation) or just the masculine experience of grief, which seems to favour expressing overwhelming anger instead of tears, that felt foreign to me?
I have had have plenty of anger over losing my father to lung cancer when I was only 20-years old but I don't remember voicing it much. But thinking about it now, if I stumbled upon a tobacco company executive cold-bloodedly calculating the profits of ensnaring young people with their noxious death weed, denying them the chance to meet their future grandchildren, I might find it in me to stab that bastard right in the arras.
But, you know, women are taught to swallow our anger.
However, there is no societal restraint on womanly tears, inconvenient and uncomfortable to watch as they may be. Hamlet, the character, although usually a man, is quite womanly (in the traditional sense) in this play. He/she makes everyone else squirm, insisting on displaying natural human emotions when everyone else just wants to pretend those pesky things should have run their course by now, three weeks being plenty of time to mourn a Dead Dad. Claudius, aka the Dad Slayer, has a vested interest in squashing natural emotion of course, as does his former sister-in-law, Gertrude, aka Hamlet's Mom, aka Cleopatra, the Queen of Denial, who should have been grieving a dead husband, not getting on with the business of living happily ever after with a new king.
Even if it's not very manly (in the traditional sense), Hamlet has good reason to be sad and angry since her father was murdered and her mom doesn't seem to care. If that weren't bad enough, the villain looks exactly like Dad, in this and many other productions. Jody Richardson is so good in both roles, auto-tuned and scary as the ghost, desperate and malevolently plotting as Claudius.
In fact the whole cast is excellent.
Marthe Bernard is an affecting Ophelia, her mad scene heartrending. Whether Hamlet is actually in love with her is another question, but that is a question the play fails to answer whatever gender Hamlet may be. Ophelia's father, Polonius, is convinced that Hamlet does love his daughter but he is hardly any judge of emotional truth, ignoring the painful situation he is putting Ophelia in by asking her to spy on someone she truly loves.
When Hamlet kills Polonius, it is no wonder that Ophelia is driven mad by the conflicting demands of love for both of them, which leads to her death by drowning. Grief and the natural anger arising from her death brings everything to head when her brother Laertes (a passionate Owen Van Houten) agrees to murder Hamlet to get his revenge but then everyone gets accidentally-on-purpose murdered. The End.
It's kind of a bummer.
But unlike anyone in Hamlet, I have access to the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and two-and-a-half English degrees so I'll deal.***
After DQ relieved my fears that the genderbending would ruin Horatio's elegiac farewell to her best friend ("Good night, sweet princess" wouldn't have had quite the same ring to it) and the play was over, perchance to let CSI do its work with all the corpses laying about since Fortinbras was nowhere in evidence, I realized that Gertrude neglected to announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. They are friends of Hamlet's who unwittingly become the weapon Claudius uses to rid himself of his irritating niece; sent off to England with Hamlet, they carry a letter asking the English king to kill Hamlet upon receipt of same. Hamlet has a lucky escape when their ship encounters pirates but sends R & G on without her, a new letter in their hands directing the English king to kill them instead, because apparently, the British take homicidal direction well?
It cheered me up to no end to think that these perennially interchangeable patsies may in fact have survived the play. Their unquestioning willingness to do whatever they are told suggests they were unlikely to open the letter sealing their doom, thereby actively saving themselves, but one can at least hope they misplaced it.
So to sum up, it was a really good production of Hamlet, made me think lots of interesting (to me) thoughts, and I would recommend that you jump in your tardises (tardisi?) and go back in time to see it. Or go see any and all productions at Perchance Theatre next year because they are worth the trip.
*call me a cranky old lady telling kids to get off my lawn, which is what SWDNO essentially did at the time, but that particular encounter as we were on our way to see the delightful As You Like It got my granny knickers in a twist at the educational system, deplorable state of!
**I wore it the other day for a background role in a tv show filming locally and nearly lost it (talk about your Shakespearean tragedies!) to the wardrobe mistress when I carelessly left it lying about and then made a holy show of myself dragging everything out of my bag in the middle of New Gower Street when it suddenly occurred to me to check that I had everything. There was an overly dramatic last minute rescue as I spotted the deep blue edge peaking out of a pile of neatly-packed costumes through the open door of the van, dragging my precious out, heedless of those lesser items who had never had the privilege of viewing Paul Gross nor considered tossing themselves on stage in tribute...
***aka I'll achieve catharsis and purify and purge my negative emotions and stuff through art.
