Hamlet
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Paul Gross' Hamlet is a very nice young man. I am not being sarcastic; like you, I am weary of scruffy, snarling Hamlets attempting to pin their own neuroses and those of the modern world onto a Renaissance prince whom nearly everybody in the play seems to like. When Gross' Hamlet appears before us, mourning his father's death and his mother's re-marriage, he is not playing games. He seems every bit as sad as he claims to be: consumed by grief, to the exclusion of all other feelings.

He also seems innocent; he may be in love with Ophelia, but he plainly hasn't touched her. A virginal Hamlet makes a lot of sense; it explains as nothing else could the intolerable tone, at once prurient and priggish, that he takes toward his mother. Considering the bad ends that await both the prince and his beloved, the play might be interpreted as a stern warning against the dangers of premature sexual inexperience.

This is not a case of a television star venturing embarrassingly out of his depth. Gross makes literal sense of the text, and rhythmic sense as well. (So does everybody else in the cast. A rumour persists that Stratford actors have forgotten how to speak verse. Maybe they did forget once, but they seem to be well on the way to remembering.)

What's missing is not technique but temperament. He remains a diffident Hamlet.

Sometimes this works. About a third of the way through the play, Gross brings off something really enlightening. He has been listening with admiration to the First Player's recitation about the fall of Troy. (As well he might; Juan Chioran's Player is the best performance of the evening. Chioran also plays the Ghost and -- with unusual sardonic dignity -- the First Gravedigger, making a triptych of characters who in different ways offer signposts to Hamlet while putting the fear of God into the king.)

Then comes the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy, in which Hamlet expresses his jealousy of the actor's capacity for passion; he tries it on himself, tries a tentative shout of "oh vengeance!", finds it doesn't suit him, and subsides into the rueful self- mockery of "why, what an ass am I."

This respect for what professional actors can do that amateur avengers can't carries through into his advice to the players about holding up the mirror to nature, which he invests with unusual urgency, as if telling them that they have a moral responsibility to act well.

In the middle of this sequence comes the "to be or not to be" speech, which Gross delivers as a reasoned summary of the pros and cons of suicide. What he doesn't sound is involved, as if Hamlet himself might have been tempted to self-slaughter. There are no depths to this Hamlet, or none that the actor seems capable of sounding.

He probably knows they're there; he literally twists the arms of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while he's interrogating them, but the gesture has no connection with the innocuous way in which he plays the rest of the scene. He has no capacity for venom (a quality with which Hamlet's lines are loaded), no recklessness and no abandon. When he grapples with Laertes at Ophelia's grave, you wonder what he's going on about; his admission of the virtual murder of R&G goes by without a ripple; and he dies without having once disturbed us. Joseph Ziegler, who directed, is an excellent actor, and this is very much an actor's production. That is to to say it's efficiently staged, traditional in appearance, and stronger on co-ordination of performances than on interpretation.

The setting (by Christina Poddubiuk) is so old-fashioned as to seem avant-garde; the Festival Theatre's familiar steps lead up to platforms adorned with yet more steps and crowned with a series of graceful arches. The indoor style is romantic, with a profusion of blazing candelabra; outside, it's more Gothic, the battlement scenes awash in dry ice, with a light fall of snow. Costumes are Regency English; the queen makes her first appearance in a riding-habit, courtiers wear frock-coats, and when hats are finally donned (for Ophelia's funeral) they are toppers.

The production's two most original ideas are also its silliest. One involves having half-a-dozen actors march on the spot in a distracting effort to look like the Norwegian army.

The other is breaking the action just after Hamlet, sword in hand, comes upon the king at prayer; in fact, just after the first line of his speech ("now might I do it pat"). Clearly we are meant to go out into the lobbies in a state of agonized suspense -- is the king about to be slaughtered in the intermission? (An even nastier fate than being stabbed through the arras.) I don't think I'm giving much away if I reveal that he isn't.

Much, though, is intelligent, including the appearance of the king right on top of Hamlet's line about catching his conscience. Ziegler shows what he can do with a pair of responsive actors in his subtle, supple treatment of the scene in which Claudius (Benedict Campbell, otherwise bland) and Laertes (Graham Abbey, good throughout) plot Hamlet's murder. Jerry Franken is a standard-order civil-servant Polonius.

Of the women, Domini Blythe's Gertrude looks handsome and sounds concerned, but the role still seems like the most underwritten major character in Shakespeare. Marion Day, like most Ophelias, is blank when sane and effective when mad.

This is Stratford's first Hamlet in years. More worrying than their having parachuted in a star to play the lead is the lack of any obvious contenders for the role within the regular company, current or recent. (The only one I can think of is Tom McCamus, who's already played it in Toronto.) In the meantime, we have a Hamlet who would probably make a first-rate Horatio, and a director whom Stratford should encourage. Between them, they tell the story. That's more than some productions manage, but it isn't enough.