The theatre is a small, comfortable, very intimate space. In fact, it felt as if I were in someone's living room watching the play. The sight-lines were excellent looking straight on. A side view might have been a different story. The staff were pleasant and helpful, even if one star-struck usher forgot to keep patrons off the set during intermission. I'm not sure about the theatre's house rules. For a show billed as starting promptly, it started late due to patrons who could not manage to get seated for a 7 p.m. curtain. Were I the manager, they would have watched Act I from the lobby.
The set was minimal. It consisted of a round dining room table center stage. A round table on a square stage with audience members on three sides. Audience members will get to see the actors' backs. Interesting blocking choice. There were bottles and glasses of wine everywhere. Upstage, set back in the corners, were two fully-stocked bars that were used throughout the show. This was a production that believed in drinking deeply! Some white leather sectional couches formed corners of a square space bottomed with a white tile floor. A floral overhang provided a nice touch, even if it did not figure into the show at all. With the lack of scenery, much was left to the imagination. The costuming was modern and did not change throughout the night. It was as if each actor could be afforded only one suit of clothes.
Now to the show itself. As I pondered how to describe it, various descriptors came to mind. Surreal. Kafka-esque. A mess. Then the fellow seated next to me mentioned something during intermission--Twin Peaks. The TV show was a perfect parallel! This was David Lynch takes on Shakespeare. If a giant or a dancing dwarf had appeared during Act II, it would not have been at all surprising, and it might have helped.
The opening scene was poorly lit. It was impossible to see faces on the castle battlements. No ghost appeared. The characters claimed to see him, but the audience did not. OK, nothing too crazy there. Give it time, I thought.
The casting was bizarre to say the least. The first sight--Gertrude was OLD. Very old. She could have been a grandmother to Hamlet, but doubtfully the mother of a college-age student. I found her performance to be the worst of the bunch. Her manner of speaking was not at all believable or sympathetic, it was just dreadful. Claudius was OLD, to match his wife. Polonius was reasonably old. Laertes, too, was OLD. Hamlet even was older than expected. Ophelia was a more suitable age. One actor played Reynaldo & Guildenstern & Lucianus & the Priest & Fortinbras. Another played Barnardo & Voltemand & First Player & Player King & Captain & an unbilled Osric. These might have worked if they ever changed costume. They didn't. Instead they moved from part to part as if we could tell a difference by occasional changes in diction. Again, imagination. And perhaps that same imagination could excuse the whiny, wussy, petulant tone of Hamlet's voice or the way the actors repeatedly stumbled over their lines. Let's just pretend it's otherwise.
One directorial touch became apparent early on. "Exit" meant "move to the background." Characters who were not involved in the action moved to the back of the stage. Sometimes, they stayed in the midst of the action as it occurred around them. For the "O that this too too solid flesh" soliloquy, Ophelia sat at the table while Hamlet whined/orated--to her, to the audience. Was she listening? Was she somewhere else and we were seeing a meshing of the two scenes? Huh? All the while, there was background music with a heavy bass beat. I thought that there must have been a night club next door holding a rave, but I think it was part of the play. Or was it? Confusion was to become a common theme.
Hamlet hears about the appearance of his father's ghost. He joins his friends to see it. And yet... No ghost. In fact, no scene at all. It was edited out of the play. Apparently this was a directorial decision made in order that "everybody gets to be seen in some kind of dimension." (And yet two actors play eleven parts interchangeably?) How is the audience to know what is said? Apparently, we're not. So are we to know that Hamlet's father was murdered? Had I never seen or read Hamlet before, this would have been an interesting way to experience it. As it was, though, confusion.
Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. As the two are seated with Hamlet at the table, they join together in a customary snort of cocaine. Really? Yes, really. So perhaps this entire play is really just the drug-addled nightmare of its principal character. Hmmm.
The arrival of the players was cause for more overacting. The ham-handed speech did not bring the actor to genuine tears, but Polonius thought so. Hamlet seemed unmoved as he sat immediately to my right, close enough that his Rolex was visible. What followed was more oddity. "Now I am alone." Well, no he wasn't. The player remained on stage and Hamlet delivered the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy to him. That was followed by the request for the player to insert a speech into "The Murder of Gonzago."
Hamlet's comment to Horatio about "playing something like the murder of my father" made for interesting theatre. Remember, this is the first we're hearing of murder. The ghost never appeared to us. How were we to know? Was it supposed to be a surprise? Is the assumption that the audience has never seen this play before? Confusion.
Speaking of confusion, the "To be or not to be" soliloquy came next. This time, though, it was not a soliloquy. Hamlet delivered it to Ophelia. Strange. Then he had his violent outburst during the nunnery scene. The dining room table became the object of his aggression as wine bottles and glasses were spilled and wine ended up everywhere. That was followed by a hammy outburst from Ophelia about a noble mind being o'erthrown. And we were left with the first act completed and prop techs cleaning the mess (and breaking more glasses themselves).
Act Two began with "The Mousetrap." Ophelia sat with Polonius. Hamlet sat alone. There was no dumb show. The lady did protest too much, but she didn't protest anymore than did Gertrude every time she spoke. Ugh. When subsequently Hamlet thought "Now might I do it," it was while touching Claudius (?!) and holding a steak knife. Not much of a weapon, but it was enough to dispatch Polonius through the arras upstage. When Polonius died, he walked across stage. Wait. Was he a ghost? We can see his ghost but not that of Hamlet's father (who did not appear at all during the closet scene)? Confusing.
Ophelia's madness was happily not overly violent and psychotic. Rather, it was suitably pathetic, until she grabbed a sword that was under the couch and tried to off herself. Laertes, who had reappeared in exactly the same garb he had worn when he left for Paris, saved her from herself. This begs the question, though, as to whether her subsequent drowning death could be considered accidental. She certainly showed overt suicidal tendencies here. Hmmm. The graveside scene, with one gravedigger, apparent ghostly apparitions of Ophelia and Polonius and no actual grave, was marked by a ridiculously over-the-top reaction by Laertes. Please.
The duel scene meant that we were nearing the end of the evening. There had been no build-up to the plot, though. Laertes and Claudius never discussed it in our listening. Just as they were about to hatch it, Gertrude had entered to share news of Ophelia's death. So is the audience expected to know that there is something amiss? Again, confusion. (And was Gertrude really sitting at table listening to Hamlet's story of escaping death in England?)
The lame fencing duel led to the biggest gaffe that I have ever seen on a Hamlet stage. While preparing the chalice, Claudius poured wine from one bottle into a goblet. Then he topped it off with wine from a second bottle. (These people and their wine. It's a wonder the cast is not drunk at the end of a show!) Into the glass went the requisite pearl. The glass was set by a while. Hamlet wiped his brow with a napkin and threw it over the poisoned goblet. When Gertrude drank, SHE DRANK FROM THE WRONG CUP! She drank from a glass of wine left from previous scenes. The poisoned cup was still below the napkin. Was all of the wine on the table poisoned? Was Gertrude faking her own death? That this happened is indicative of the confusion that reigned throughout the production. Had there not been wine glasses everywhere, this might have been avoided. Instead, it was a laughable slip-up.
Hamlet was hit with an obviously bated sword that was "unbated." Laertes fell on the sword and when it was pulled out from under him it apparently sliced his belly through four layers of clothing. Gertrude died (or did she?) but kept breathing. Laertes died but kept breathing. Claudius drank purposefully from the real poisoned goblet, died and kept moving. Hamlet snatched the goblet from Horatio, drank some more, died and kept staring straight ahead. Fortinbras, one of that actor's five parts, arrived to clean up and to bid the soldiers to shoot. And then the rest really was silence.
That brought the CSC excursion (and brings this extended review) to an end. It was truly a unique evening of theatre, although the adjective is not meant entirely as a compliment. While I give credit to the director for trying something new, what resulted was a confused, Kafka-esque, Lynchian mess. Cue the dancing dwarf.
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