Shades of Hamlet

Riffs on shakespeare: Elsinore
The Premiere Dance Theatre
The Globe and Mail

WE know it will be brilliant, but why do it? That was the feeling in the house assembled to watch Robert Lepage conduct his one-man, two-hour assault on Hamlet, retitled Elsinore. It was also, with an appropriate adjustment of tenses, the feeling after he had been and gone and done it.

Lepage tells us in a program note that he is doing it because he wants to; in fact, that he couldn't stop himself. That is the best reason for doing anything, but it seems that he also sees Elsinore as a way station toward a full-scale production of Hamlet: one, I guess (or hope), with a full complement of other actors. In the meantime, there is this tour de force with its obvious built-in excitements and limitations. "You cannot," writes Lepage, signing off with engagingly arrogant self-deprecation, "make a Hamlet without breaking eggs." (Is that the message one should send a Hamlet on his first night - break an egg?) Not the least dazzling aspect of Lepage's technique is his ability to crack a yolk, I mean a joke, as good as that in his second language. His production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Britain's National Theatre was by most accounts ghastly, if admittedly with the ghastliness of genius; most harshly criticized was his actors' mangling of the text. Here, of course, he does all the speaking himself, and it's pretty good for rhythm, excellent for sense. There were times when he lost it (I've never heard an actor flub words on "to be or not to be" before) and I imagine the whole thing was more fluent when he did it in French in Montreal, but considering everything else he must have had on his mind, his vocal achievement was stunning. Apart from the Frenchified courtier Osric, he plays all the characters with perfect English accents. Not Canadian English: English English.

By "all the characters," I mean Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Gertrude, the Ghost and, of course, Hamlet himself. This obviously necessitates much quick changing: of position rather than costume, though Lepage can do a lot by donning or discarding a cloak. He has the help of a mute double; still, we were all delightedly fooled when Hamlet was teasing Polonius, and the young man instantly appeared where we thought the old one still stood. (Eat your heart out, Heath Lamberts.) Hamlet in this scene reads a book; Lepage stages it most appositely in a library, glimpsed mostly through a window cut in a huge, hinged central flat. At other times this aperture becomes a huge playing card, which, through the miracle of back projection, can instantly change its suit to frame the appearances of Claudius (King of Spades), Gertrude (Queen of Hearts), Polonius (Joker), and Laertes (Knave). Even Lepage has to make some compromises, and the women at this Danish court unavoidably sport the same beard and mustache as the men, but if you want to watch two hours of legerdemain you have them here at a virtuoso pitch.

Personally, I tired of it. Even the final sequence of duel and massacre, a real piece de resistance, cheered me largely because it meant the end was near. The real problem is that Elsinore unwittingly gives us a new gloss on the old gag about Hamlet without the Prince. Despite considerable cutting, some of it rather arbitrary, and a bit of reordering, this is still the same old play telling the same old story, and therefore demanding the same old magnetic protagonist. And though the hero here is everyone and everywhere, he is also no one and nowhere. Hamlet says so much about so many things that he needs a generous leavening of the actor's own personality to make him cohere.

Lepage has simply spread himself too thin. He sketches in the minor roles quite nicely, but all he told me about Hamlet himself was that he had a mind for metaphysics, lying on his back and contemplating the heavens while considering suicide, and that he could be nasty about sex; he gets very graphic when quizzing Ophelia on "country matters." He is also, thanks in part to a menacing physical production and crushing musique concrete, the gloomiest Dane I have ever seen. He is bucking a trend, since the fashion now is for mordantly witty Hamlets, but I think the fashion is right.

Maybe Lepage is simply just too lightweight an actor to play the role, though, remembering his solo magnificence in Needles and Opium, I would like to think not. On the other hand, remembering the generally fine acting in Tectonic Plates and especially The Seven Streams of the River Ota, it could be that the way ahead for him would be to direct someone else in Hamlet. (Working on equal terms with a star might put an interesting new spin on his work.) There is still much to marvel at here. Nobody makes more stunning use of space, as when Hamlet gazes down through a trap at an invisible Player and wonders at the psychological gulf between them. The play scene itself is ingenious. And he ends one section by sending a table and carpet spinning into infinity while placed on a gravity-defying diagonal. I don't know that it signifies much beyond itself, but it takes the breath.