Old Mind and Young Soul: The Hamlet We've Been Waiting For

Hamlet
The National Arts Centre
The National Post

My trip to Ottawa allowed me to catch the penultimate performance of the NAC's mainstage Hamlet. I had heard good things of Marti Maraden's Shakespeare productions (she is the director of the NAC's English Theatre as well as of this play) and this one justified them. It was a conventional staging, clear and lively, on a very Stratfordian set: all stairs, rostra, and ladders.

The least successful thing about it was its one innovation: An apparent attempt to suggest the whole play was being presented by the company of Players who turn up in it as characters. What this amounted to in practise was a series of mute, surprised encounters between, say, the Player Queen and the real Queen, as if the former were holding a mirror up to nature and the latter just didn't know where to look. These interludes were confusing while they happened, and completely forgotten once they were over. The concept may also be held responsible for the weirdest intermission-placement (halfway through the play scene) of any Hamlet I have seen, but it allowed the piece to be done in, of all avant-garde things, Elizabethan costume. We even got a traditional Ghost, in a silvery-grey cloak and a thorny crown. It may even have inspired a piece of luxury casting: Douglas Campbell, doubling a First Player proud of his craft with a First Gravedigger corpulently confident in his. If William Hutt is the elder statesman of Canadian acting, then Campbell is the roving patriarch.

It was altogether a strong company. Fiona Reid gave Gertrude credit for more intelligence than do most actresses, and was notably more attached to her son than to either of her husbands.

Ben Carlson was a Horatio with almost too much personality to stay in his place as onlooker. People are always asking why Hamlet didn't just kill the King and get it over with; you wondered why this Horatio, so kind and capable, didn't do it for him. He also seemed, in the mad scenes, to be in love with Ophelia on his own account. Victor Ertmannis's Claudius, pure villain, and David Schurmann's Polonius, mild dodderer, were limited conceptions, competently executed. Michelle Monteith, like many Ophelias, was nothing in particular while sane but admirable when demented. Her whispered delivery of the line about rue -- "we may call it herb of grace on Sundays" -- was new and imaginative, the sound of a convent-girl gone horribly wrong.

Which leaves us with Tom Rooney (currently of TV's This Is Wonderland), the production's raison d'etre, and the first Hamlet in ages to hold me as a whole person in a story rather than an actor in an anthology of diploma pieces. Hamlet, according to the Gravedigger, is 30, which usually comes as a surprise. Rooney, pushing 40, made no special attempt to shed years, but then he has a spectral face and precise voice that make him seem ageless -- own brother to Yorick, and bearing the same twin marks of the jester and the corpse. With the hyper- ironic Ian Richardson in Toronto with The Hollow Crown, I found myself wondering whether Richardson's youthful Hamlet may not have been much like Rooney's: a joker who is not a dyed-in-the-wool cynic; a man who genuinely wanted to think the best of humanity and whose will has been shattered along with his ideals; a prematurely old mind yoked to a still-young soul. He has counted Claudius out from the start, and hardly bothers to disguise his contempt. He treats his mother with a mixture of respect and bitter disillusion. His "solid flesh" soliloquy is quiet and helpless: uncomprehending despair in a fallen world. He works the miracle of bringing "to be or not to be" alive; he unpicks it as though it were a metaphysical poem, a series of conondrums to which he would genuinely like an answer. Some scenes -- the hysterical triumph after the play, the quiet acceptance before the duel -- are as good as I have ever seen them. He is technically impeccable. He is also, without sentimentalizing, very likeable. If he can play the part again, and play it soon, he could be the Hamlet we have all been waiting for. Stratford and Soulpepper should be knifing one another for his services.