Hamlet, All’s Well That ends well
Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in high park
The national post

One of the rules at Shakespeare in High Park in Toronto is that no performance should run longer than an hour and a half. So it's intriguing one of this summer's two plays should be Hamlet, which usually clocks in at three hours and has been known to stretch to four.

Intriguing, and in many ways, rewarding. As you'd expect, Birgit Schreyer Duarte's production does a lot of cutting; it also does a lot of cross-cutting, juxtaposing bits of one scene with bits of another, with some illuminating results. The general speed and clarity make for excellent storytelling. They don't, though, allow much in the way of exploration. The play is Shakespeare's longest for a reason. It twists and turns because its hero's mind won't stop working. Here, everything is over so quickly that nothing can take on weight. It seems particularly strange that Hamlet should keep beating up on himself for not getting around to killing his uncle. He's hardly had time.

As it happens, Frank Cox-O'Connell's Hamlet is especially good in his self-lacerating moods. Tall and thin and pale, a punk intellectual who seems to have majored in nihilism, he jabs at himself (cutting is catching) before considering whether to be or not to be. He then proceeds to bring that too famous speech to new and tingling life. But then he does that with every word he utters.

This actor has shone in independent productions, and he also staked a good claim as a director with Soulpepper's The Just. He now gives the best lead performance I have seen in the park, slicing as keenly as his knife through the muggy open-air acoustics. He's a master of the unexpected, logical emphasis: "How ALL occasions do inform against me," he complains with exasperated weariness; "at YOUR age," he lectures his mother with all the insufferability of the puritanical young. Pulling a cloth from the wedding-feast table, he wraps it around his head to embarrass his newlywed mother and uncle. Also, it seems, to protect himself: grief and anger have made him emotionally raw. He delights in playing the bitter fool even before the ghost's visitation gives him the excuse to play the madman.

His quicksilver moodiness ignites his scenes with Ophelia, hurtling between affection and disgust, each note sounding genuine. It's clearer than usual that his mother's marriage has unleashed the misogynist in him. Rose Tuong's Ophelia, here almost a joint protagonist, and a clearer-cut tragic figure, positively gains from the textual editing, which allows her to act out scenes that generally are only described. She goes on a fated journey from spirited lover to reluctantly obedient daughter to, if I can coin a word, sexhibitionist. It seems fitting her funeral, prefaced by a reggae-fan Gravedigger (Marvin L. Ishmael) should be one of the highlights. Nicky Guadagni plays a female Polonius (surely that should be Polonia): an idea that works well in her maternal scenes with Ophelia but collapses when Hamlet kills her thinking she's Claudius. Surely he would have noticed the difference. 

It also seems strange that nobody should regard killing a woman as monstrous; chivalry must really be dead in Denmark. Other gender reversals give us a Rosencrantz without a Guildernstern, pressed into service as Hamlet's impromptu shrink ("glean what afflicts him" she's told, and she does her best), and a Princess Fortinbras who doesn't work at all. Alon Nashman's Claudius brings a booze bottle to his prayer scene, making it clear why he tries to repent, and why he fails. Elsewhere, he's less lucid: he rushes through the speech about his love for his queen, strange in a production that makes a big romantic deal of their relationship.

 Hamlet seems quite a churl for resenting his elders' happiness. After all, what's a little incest so long as you keep it in the family? Or a little fratricide? The director's program note, which isn't nearly as good as her production, makes some startlingly unsupported claims about the play's action while deriding a sentimental interpretation that nobody has actually advanced in decades. In fact the sentimentality is all hers, as she ends the play with Horatio's "good night, sweet prince" followed by a sequence of home movies. Fortunately, what has gone before is far more bracing. And there's that central performance.

All's Well That Ends Well, the companion play, offers almost nothing as good. It has the same cast and a comparably ingenious editing of text, but none of the actors is consistently on top of that text except perhaps Cox-O'Connell, whose First Lord has the same bite and authority as his Hamlet. These two roles are the same as were played by Ben Carlson in his first season at Stratford: a pleasing coincidence as we have here the best Shakespearean actor to appear among us since Carlson. 

The driving role here, love her or hate her, should be that of Helen, the poor physician's daughter who cures the King of France of a fistula, wins the man of her dreams, and then has to win him all over again. Mina James has her moments, mainly the dejected ones, but her method with a long speech is to punch out every other word.

Ted Witzel's production also has moments, especially in the last scene where he has the actors swinging about in military formation as if registering amazement at the ways of this play's peculiar world and the ambiguous happiness of its ending. His principal interpretive idea is to give the soldier Parolles a homosexual attachment to his young patron Bertram; it's an interesting notion but the acting isn't there.

 Qasim Khan is excellent as a Horatio even more taciturn than usual by virtue of the lines he's lost, but his Parolles is colourless, his humiliation has nothing to fall from. But perhaps I was unfair in comparing this production to Hamlet. There is one commanding performance: Rachel Jones as the clown Lavatch, though the text she's on top of isn't all Shakespeare's; the director has written her some very long monologues saying how bittersweet everything is. It would be nice if the play could do that by itself. It has been known.