hamlet
Premiere dance theatre
The National Post

The First Gravedigger in Hamlet, asked why the troublesome Danish prince has been sent off to England, replies that his eccentricities won't be noticed there, because "there the men are as mad as he." It's one of the few infallible laugh-lines in Shakespeare. Or it is when both the actors and the audience speak English.

In Lithuania they cut it. At least they do if the Meno Fortas company's production at Toronto's World Stage is anything to go by. Fair enough: It isn't a gag that travels. (Other cultures might agree with it, but they wouldn't find it funny.) And in Eimuntas Nekrosius' production it would backfire. This Hamlet doesn't have to set foot outside his own castle to meet men (though not women) who are at least as mad as he or, in several cases, madder.

The Production -- it seems to demand the capital letter -- has already moved on, but is worth considering as a phenomenon. It is sometimes interesting, sometimes exasperating, and often boring, though some of the tedium can be blamed on our not understanding what the actors are saying; the original text is projected on three separate screens, but they can hardly alert you to any subtleties of intonation.

The show also lasts four hours, despite substantial cuts; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, or at least missing, though nobody seems to have informed the surtitles, which still have Hamlet referring to his "two schoolfellows." Some of his exchanges with them have been transferred to other contexts, and there is much textual shuffling all 'round; scenes you think you have escaped are liable to ambush you later on.

The weather in Elsinore appears to be terrible, and the castle roof leaky; water drops on to the stage almost throughout, and several scenes are played around puddles. The stage is littered with impenetrably symbolic props, whose deployment accounts for much of the running time.

If the play is meant to take us on Hamlet's spiritual journey, then it fails. The hero drops in from time to time and broods, but is otherwise anonymous. The actor, Andrius Mamontovas, is a major rock star at home, but if his presence has a built-in significance - - voice of youth, and so on -- it stops at the national border. Claudius (Vytautas Rumsas) is easier to decode: a bull-necked boozer who shouts at everyone. He even bellows his way through his prayer scene, as if trying to bully himself into repentance. He is far from the conscience-haunted diplomat-king we usually meet, but he makes a lot of sense. And he does prove capable of playing the politician, when he persuades Laertes to murder Hamlet.

As it happens, Laertes (Kestutis Jakstas) is just the kind of young man to be duped, somewhat honest, but headstrong and smug, especially when lecturing his sister on the preservation of her virginity while standing, apparently, on top of his own cabin- trunk, all packed up for a good dirty time in France.

Daddy Polonius (Povilas Budrys) makes little impression, apart from being subjected to an interestingly grisly death from asphyxiation while holed up within, I believe, the very same trunk, and from being the youngest- looking old man ever while alive. He is forbiddingly bald and acts as an usher around the court -- two attributes he shares with Horatio (Ramunas Rudokas), who is accorded the most unusual interpretation of the evening. The prince's chum, prized by him as the embodiment of stoical endurance, here becomes a burly, giggling neurotic, forever imitating the cock-crow that in the play's first scene sent the Ghost scuttling back to Purgatory. So eccentric is his behaviour that Hamlet lectures him on it, using the advice against overacting that, in a more conventional production, he would be addressing to the Players.

These professionals, by the way, have a hard job competing with the amateur histrionics going on around them, but they do their best, delivering most of their lines rolling around on rollers. They turn up later as the Gravediggers (three instead of the usual two), whom they play, uncompromisingly, as Clowns: i.e. determinedly stylized and grimly unfunny.

All this shouting, screaming and sawing of the air with hands leaves you wondering what the director can have left in reserve for the play's one episode of genuine insanity: Ophelia's mad scene. The answer, simply, is simplicity; the actress (Viktorija Kuodyte) comes on stage, says and does her stuff with great calm and stillness, and is both very effective and a great relief. By a similar paradox, the most consistently human person on stage is the Ghost, whose presence (he seems to have been preserved as a waxwork) haunts Claudius as well as Hamlet, and who here ends the play, bending over his son's corpse and sorrowfully beating a drum, as if bemoaning all the trouble he has caused.

This kind of Central or Eastern European production -- heavily- staged and ritually oppressive -- used to denote the director's dislike of the play, on grounds ideological or aesthetic or both. I don't think that's the case here. (Just as well; if you are bored by a play, your audience will be too, though not necessarily for the reasons you intend.)

I wondered if audiences in Lithuania are as familiar with Hamlet as audiences here; presumably they are, since this show -- which comments on the story instead of telling it -- would be incomprehensible to them otherwise. Nekrosius seems to be a clever but over-ingenious director, and Mamontovas a virtual non-actor; between them they scupper the play's emotional reality, the one element without which drama cannot sustain itself. To return to Hamlet's advice to the Players, he especially condemns "inexplicable dumb-shows and noise." This production is loaded with both.

To judge from that speech, with its references to "the modesty of nature," what Hamlet -- and presumably Shakespeare -- really wanted was, of all permanently unfashionable things, naturalism. Of course, that sounds crazy, since Shakespeare wrote in a profoundly unnatural medium; nobody really talks in verse, rhymed or blank.

But he and his contemporaries made it sound natural, and they obviously expected their actors to do the same. That is the genius of theatre; it starts with artifice and acts like it's real.