The Prince Hamlet
Why Not Theatre
The National Post

The Shakespearean adaptation calling itself The Prince Hamlet comes in at just under two hours, which means, of course, that nearly half of the original has been cut. This is a Hamlet with no political background. If this production's Denmark is a prison, it's guarded from the inside. There are no Polish wars or Norwegian incursions, no mention of Fortinbras, let alone a personal appearance to claim the throne and clear up the bodies. This version ends with Horatio's recap about carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, all of them strictly domestic.

It also begins with that speech, so that the main action becomes a major flashback, within which, in this treatment, there are other minor flashbacks. The official opening scene doesn't happen, at least not in its usual form. It's transported, or bits of it are, into the second scene, as an audio-visual illustration of Horatio and Marcellus's account to Hamlet of their initial sighting of his father's ghost. Soon after this we see for ourselves the dishevelled prince intruding on the terrified Ophelia, instead of just hearing from her dad about it. And much later -- a matter of extrapolation rather than interpolation -- we see her watery end even as the queen describes it.

The show is the initial offering of a new company, Toronto-based and internationally staffed, called Why Not Theatre. They aim, by their own account, "to see and hear [Hamlet] as if for the first time" and "to simply tell the story, simply." They have succeeded. The production, directed by Ravi Jain and Katrina Bugaj, is lively, exciting and very intelligent. This does not, despite some of the implicit claims that seem to be floating somewhere above the program notes, make it unique. I have seen full-length productions, with the lines spoken in their accustomed order, that were just as illuminating. They have generally been done, though, by actors more experienced than these, and one reason for welcoming this production's reduced running-time is some -- not all -- of its nine actors would be hard-pressed to hold our attention for longer.

And it is true that the cuts, and the transpositions, and the occasional transfer of a speech from one character to another, keep those of us who have heard this text rather too often on our toes. But the treatment would also, I think, make sense to someone who'd never seen the play before; that's more than you can say for most Shakespearean collages that only work, despite their pretensions to freshness, as japes for the jaded. Some things have been filled out, and others filleted, but the spine of the original remains unaltered.

Some of the staging really is illuminating. When Claudius, in what is now the first scene, announces his marriage to his brother's widow, he appears to be presiding at that brother's funeral, and it's chilling; no wonder Hamlet is traumatized. (Relentless strobe- lighting may have something to do with it as well, though it's probably meant as effect rather than cause.) The king is standing on a rostrum at the time and he spends a significant amount of time there. The only other furnishing is a movable arras-curtain, used for its accustomed purpose of concealing eavesdroppers. This production, though, places us on the eavesdroppers' side. When Hamlet, out of sight though not of hearing, tells Ophelia to get her to a nunnery, we watch the reactions of Polonius and, more importantly, of Claudius, increasingly alarmed at the realization ("those that are married already, all but one, shall live") that he has been rumbled. When the closet scene comes around, we're again on Polonius's side of the arras as he waits to be stabbed, though this time it's less exciting; maybe it's a trick that only works once in an evening. The fight is very sharply staged. Jain, Why Not's guiding spirit, studied at the Lecoq mime school in Paris, as what Canadian experimentalist did not, and his staging is appropriately, and aptly, physical.

Hamlet's four soliloquies are here down to two-and-a-half; he shares the "rogue and peasant slave" diatribe with a taunting chorus. We still, as the production must mean us to do, get inside his head, a thoughtful and sensitive head, progressively corroded by experience. Philip Graeme, an Anglo-Canadian actor well worth keeping an eye and ear on, gets the essential point about Hamlet; that his is a mind that will take on anything. He even brings "to be or not to be" to fresh life, springing it out of left field and with a remarkable knack for landing with perfect logic on words that other actors have left unstressed.

Matthew Bulgo is a bluff and loyal Horatio, Rory Sheridan a funny Polonius, and Kathryn Merry a poignant spirited Ophelia who goes arrestingly to her death singing the Bus Stop song, a.k.a. A Paper of Pins. She also benefits from having her two mad scenes collapsed into one. Sean Donovan's Claudius must be the least fleshly usurper on record, and he's too lightweight in other ways as well, but the production at least allows him to be credibly conscience-ridden. Gertrude, one of the most opaque characters in Shakespeare, remains that way in Liz Pounsett's performance; I think she drinks the poisoned cup on purpose, but it's impossible to be sure. Laertes (Aron De Casemaker) has nothing to distinguish him beyond his mohawk haircut. This Danish play contains a real Dane, Troels Hagen Findsen, who does most of the Gravedigger's part in what I assume is his native tongue. He also plays Rosencrantz in a cloth-cap, opposite a Guildenstern (Will O'Hare) in a bowler. And Why Not?