Great Dane; Hamlet Brings Out the Best in Stratford's Ensemble

hamlet
The Stratford festival
the national post

There is an extraordinary freshness about the new Hamlet at Stratford, the best Shakespeare production on the main Festival stage since the last Hamlet at Stratford. That was half-a-dozen years ago. That play and that platform bring out the best in one another. Both are perfect grounds from which the actor can confront the audience. 

Antoni Cimolino's production, in varieties of modern dress, starts with the stage full of back slabs; we might be in the graveyard already. Rows of darkly lit figures seem to be advancing on us; they could be an army. Another figure rises up to face them; his back is to us, but it must be Hamlet, victim or victor. From this disquieting prelude we pass to the official opening, on the battlements, and note from the very first words, that the actors are not, as often happens in this scene, taking their lines for granted. They're exploring them, and exploring one another, as well. There are people here, and relationships. And so it goes, right through the play.

The chief explorer is, of course, Jonathan Goad's Hamlet, first officially seen in a very contemporary black jerkin, standing out in silent accusation at a court levee from the world before 1914, the men in showy white uniforms, the women in lustrous gowns. His speech is desolation, bitterly biting. He shares it with us in his first soliloquy, baffled by circumstance but desperately questing. It's balanced later by the explosive rage, self-flagellating and self-defeating, of his "rogue and peasant slave" speech. All his soliloquies are delivered with exemplary lucidity, even while conveying that lucidity can only take you so far; "thinking too precisely," as Hamlet himself says, can be its own enemy. Meantime, in his "antic disposition" after the Ghost's revelations, he's as antic as a Hamlet has ever come, cutting physical as well as verbal capers, revelling in the chance to say to people's faces all the things he couldn't tell them when he was sane. He doesn't fully convey the contrasting stillness and maturity that follow Hamlet's return from his sea voyage; but this is still a fine, glowing performance.

What's remarkable, in a role so famous as a solo, is the way in which he bounces off the other characters, and they off him. This is an extraordinarily strong cast, all beautifully responsive. I have never seen a better Gertrude than Seana McKenna (and seldom one as good). She holds in perfect balance her maternal love and concern, which are overwhelming, and her relish for her role as consort; she looks resplendent in her blue dress, and knows it. Her world shatters when her son forces her to see the things she's been denying; she rallies on the surface but she's dead inside. Geraint Wyn Davies' Claudius believably loves her; otherwise he's a consummate courtly operator who's almost persuaded himself of his royal invulnerability. His impotent prayer scene, in a chapel setting that's brilliantly used throughout, makes Hamlet's refusal to kill him there especially ironic. Uncle and nephew have plainly loathed one another from way back. Wyn Davies doubles as the Ghost, though his heart doesn't seem in it. The living dynamics of Elsinore's first family are, however, exceptionally vivid.

So are those of its second. Tom Rooney's Polonius can illuminate three sides of his character within a single line: a practiced politician, excessively pleased with himself, a caring father, consistently wrong about his children. He's sometimes touching, often hilarious, always real. Mike Shara's Laertes, a priggish rake, has clearly inherited the paternal hypocrisy, but his vengeful fury over his father's death is frighteningly genuine. Adrienne Gould's Ophelia clearly, if teasingly, sees through him; her intelligence makes Hamlet's treatment of her all the more troubling (the nunnery scene is brutal) and it makes her madness devastating. This, by the way, is the only production I've seen to make anything of Horatio's presence in the mad scene; pulling him onto a bed, she's treating Hamlet's friend as Hamlet's surrogate. The friendship, in Tim Campbell's performance, has been remarkably affecting, though warmer perhaps on his side than on Hamlet's; Goad conveys a certain reserve that he would like to conquer but can't. He's significantly more demonstrative with the Players, whose patron he is, and especially with Juan Chioran's Player King, whose Hecuba speech is as moving as Hamlet says it is. He can also have fun bantering with, or against, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, twin nonentities rewardingly cast with, in Sanjay Talwar and Steve Ross, two distinct and distinctive actors. Mike Nadajewski's Osric is decadence in pince-nez. When we finally reach the cemetery, we find, in Robert King and Brian Tree, a pair of gravediggers respectively ripe and precise; while back in the Polonius establishment, Jennifer Mogbock is both amused and amusing as Reynaldo, the old man's incredulous emissary.

 With all these actors interweaving, and most alertly orchestrated by Cimolino, every scene pulses with intelligent life. The final massacre, often messy, is a potent example, the shocked and frightened courtiers draining away, leaving the stage to the dying and the dead. (Revelation: they don't want to save Claudius.) Teresa Przybylski's sets are as starkly protean, give or take a great pair of chandeliers, as her costumes are gorgeous; Michael Walton's lighting is superb. The last image echoes its first, not quite convincingly; if the production is trying to make a point about militarism, as exemplified in Fortinbras, it isn't clear. But that's my only quibble.