A Hamlet Without an Idea in Its Skull

Shakespeare plays go through phases, like the moon. Or maybe they break out like rashes. Either way, we are now pretty inarguably at full Hamlet. Jessie Buckley got her Oscar for playing Will’s grieving wife in the much discussed movie of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, which imagines the playwright’s seminal work as a kind of cathartic lament after the death of a child (and was almost immediately adapted for the stage). Riz Ahmed is currently onscreen playing the brooding prince as the heir apparent to a British Indian real-estate dynasty — and in his review of that film, my colleague Bilge Ebiri drew up a list of all the melancholy Danes leaving contrails through our cultural ether right now. They include Hiran Abeysekera (known to lovers of tiger puppets as Life of Pi’s shipwrecked hero) in a new production directed by Operation Mincemeat’s Robert Hastie, visiting BAM from the U.K.’s National Theatre.

I agree with Bilge that this proliferation of Hamlets isn’t just a fault in our stars. I think we can sense on some subarticulate level that the play — so spiritually expansive that it will never be irrelevant — is of particular urgency now. The task of any production, however, is the articulation of that instinct: What is calling us to this old drama, itself based on a still more ancient saga of royal revenge? The question isn’t quite, Why does Hamlet feel like a modern character? His post-Enlightenment — almost post-Freudian — introspection ensures that he always has and always will. But the play isn’t just its protagonist, and a director has to zoom out to account for the whole thing. If Hamlet feels ripe for our moment, then the real question is, Why? Such a line of enquiry, viscerally pursued and communicated, girds up stagecraft like a steel foundation, and Hastie’s production lacks it completely.

“Did you have a particular take or vision when you began work on the play?” the Brooklyn Rail asked the director recently, to which Hastie replied, “What’s a pithy way of answering this? No, I mean you can’t, because the play itself is so complex.” Why the punt? The myriad plays in Hamlet make it all the more vital that a production clarify which is its own. In lieu of anything firmer, Hastie has put a lot of his eggs in the humor basket, and while there’s nothing wrong with that — Hamlet is a comic character trapped in a tragedy, and that tragedy is also quite funny — those efforts fall flat amid a mishmash of inconsistent and enervating staging choices. Jokes are forced and telegraphed; emotion, though some actors fight for it as if against a river’s current, is strikingly absent. I once had a teacher who liked to remind us of the electric sparks between the comedic and the deadly serious by saying, with a prophetic grimace, “You laugh! But it’s funny.” Here, neither director nor star has any sense of that galvanizing tension.

What they do have is a commitment to reshuffling the text to no palpable end but novelty. Admittedly, the play exists in multiple versions, and it’s any director’s prerogative to reassemble its pieces, but Hastie’s production frequently gives the impression of a lecturer who has dropped his note cards and tried to put them back in order on the fly. If you’re a Hamlet head, these fitful adjustments keep you at arm’s length (Oh, they put that there, I kept thinking, rather than feeling much on behalf of any character). If this is your first outing with the play, you could be forgiven for losing the thread or for wondering why, after the burial of his supposed beloved, as Fate’s hand is squeezing him ever tighter, the hero takes a clunky pause to debate with himself about the ethics of suicide.

That’s right: If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to hear Hamlet deliver “To be or not to be” in the final act, after the burial of Ophelia (here played puckishly by Francesca Mills, who’s trying hard to escape a room where no one has helped build her a door), this production has your answer, and that answer is: senseless. The Hamlet who considers whether it’s nobler, in the face of life’s insults and injuries, “to die, to sleep” is a man still wracked with uncertainty, an actor who knows he has been cast in the wrong play and who’s desperately seeking a way to perform (in all its meanings) a part that his soul reviles. He is not the man of Act Five, who returns from exile in England with blood on his hands and a haunting new equanimity in his manner. “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” says this sadder, wiser Hamlet to his best friend, Horatio (Tessa Wong). “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all … Let be.” 

“To be or not to be” and “Let be” are points on an extraordinary line of character evolution, and in smashing them together Hastie has eliminated the impact of both. As for Abeysekera, the words every Hamlet dreads end up laden with even more baggage than usual: Who wants to put on the brakes with the bloody ending in sight? Not the audience. Probably, biorhythmically, not the actor. Certainly not the play. 

Moving Hamlet’s most famous speech is simply the most glaring example of Hastie’s overall cut-and-paste approach. Inside it, his actors struggle to find ballast, which may be why they keep diving for the furniture. Set designer Ben Stones (who also did the contemporary costumes) has built a lavish box for the show, a vaulting neoclassical ballroom with painted walls where woodlands gradually give way to a depiction of Danish military might à la Delacroix. Initially decked out for a celebration (full of the “marriage tables” Hamlet ridicules as he recalls how quickly his “father’s funeral” became his “mother’s wedding”), the space works for the play’s early court scenes, but its profusion of chairs rapidly turns dangerous. They are energy-sucking butt magnets, and Hastie lets everyone yield to them. Even the tortured ghost of Hamlet’s father (Ryan Ellsworth, stalking the shadows in military fatigues) plops himself down to tell the story of his murder at the hands of his brother, Claudius (Alistair Petrie, towering and patrician), who’s now not only the new king but newly married to the old king’s widow, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Ayesha Dharker). Abeysekera hesitates for a moment before also surrendering to a seat, his body visibly straining to retain some vestige of the scene’s stakes: He perches on his knees rather than fully sitting, but it’s still no position from which to howl “O, my prophetic soul! My uncle!” Eventually, the show’s crew takes away all the furniture except a single chair close to center stage. Guess where everyone gravitates then.

It’s not the ensemble’s fault. Bodies without their own sustaining drives will search for anchors. Actors without a solid grasp of why they are where they are — both on the granular character level and in the broader sense of a project’s ethos and necessity — will try to ground themselves. That’s the impression Petrie often gives: He’s looking for Claudius, and though he finds flashes of dignity and connection, all that complexity Hastie mentioned has been misplaced somewhere. Both king and court end up like a group of unlucky ice fishers, tapping around, trying to find a place to bore through to something more profound, and the cold, slick surface keeps rejecting them.

At the center of it all, Abeysekera has simply embraced this superficiality, or perhaps unavoidably absorbed it. His Hamlet is a slight, petulant creature, too glib for either real, robust comedy or deeply felt tragedy. At one point, he wears a T-shirt scrawled with the words “Tobacco and Boys,” a reference to the non-hetero leanings of Shakespeare’s bad-boy contemporary Christopher Marlowe. But the whiff of queerness is a red herring — this Hamlet is too sexless to swing in any particular direction. I’m not sure I’ve ever been less upset by “Get thee to a nunnery” (Mills is reduced to waving her arms illustratively to try to drum up some pathos) or more baffled as to why the Prince of Denmark stays in his own play. That’s the crux of the thing, after all: Hamlet knows he’s miscast. Every scene he has to play is ludicrous agony — it’s why he contemplates making the final exit and having done with it. Why must he — in every sense — act?

Hastie is clearly piqued by the play’s reflexivity — the brilliant inbuilt conflict between seeming and being that transmutes its story from hoary revenge tale into unparalleled meditation on both morality and theater — but he doesn’t know what to do with this trove of meta riches except, every so often, to jerk a thumb in its direction. When Polonius (an endearing, understated Matthew Cottle) speaks an aside to the audience, Abeysekera performs several slack-jawed takes, looking to him and then us, as if to ask whom in the world this weirdo is talking to. But earlier, he himself has frozen the bustling action around him by stepping provocatively across the proscenium to deliver his first soliloquy (relocated, of course, so that it lands in the middle of a crowded scene). Hastie keeps rewriting the rules of engagement: Presented with the choice, he and Abeysekera repeatedly favor the easy reaction over an enduring consistency of play-world logic. For a few halfhearted laughs they sacrifice the ability to make us care. 

And that is a tragedy. Because what Hamlet is actually about — beyond trouble in the Danish monarchy — is devastating. It’s a play about the grip of the dead and dying upon the living, the story of a young man — educated, funny, flawed, full of wit and life — who is quite literally tasked with carrying the old brutality of the last generation forward into the future. Hamlet is a new kind of player handed an old script, a thinking, feeling person imprisoned in a violent archetypal plot, and he kicks as it pulls at him, sensing, both because and in spite of all he’s been taught, that the same old bloody tools can’t make a new world. That’s why his play still resonates in our bones like some great bell, even if, in a production like this one, we aren’t quite able to hear it.

Hamlet is at BAM’s Harvey Theater through May 17.