mary-masked

Hamlet Review

Published: July 21st 2017, 3:16:04 pm

My best friend and beloved patron got me a ticket to see Hamlet at The Public, featuring Oscar Issac as Hamlet and Keegan Micheal Key as Horatio. Hamlet is one of my all time favorite plays and I've been impressed by Oscar Issac since he was in Suckerpunch so I was REALLY EXCITED about this and the show did not disappoint.

Oscar Issac was amazing. Not all great film actors are great on stage and not all good actors are good at Shakespeare but Issac was great both on stage and with Shakespeare. He spoke the words as naturally as if they were his own, but made no effort to tamp down the intense emotion of the roll. Hamlet is a role that calls for some over the top emotion, he dives into an open grave to fight with someone who is hugging a dead body for christssakes, and it's hard to do that without descending into melodrama but Oscar Issac always seemed completely honest and human.

And, honestly, I can say that about all the performers in the show. Claudius had a touch of Shakespeare voice going on but, for the most part, all of the actors managed to stay real and honest, and speak as naturally as modern language. This is a rare and delightful quality in Shakespeare shows.

The show was uneven but, if we're being honest, so is Hamlet. It's a tough show to do. A lot of the stuff Hamlet does, doesn't make much sense. There's a lot of expository dialogue that is important to people who don't know the play, but kinda boring for people who do. There's that long Player's speech which is hard to cut but does nothing to move the plot along. The list goes on. This the first time I've really noticed all the problems with the play while I was watching it. I'm not sure if it's because I'm very familiar with it, or the  actors were so natural with the language it laid bare the many logical inconsistencies in the play, or there were just some large choices that they didn't make clearly enough. But, for all its flaws, Hamlet has so many beautiful and brilliant parts that we still love it after 400 years.

Similarly, this production had many long moments of brilliance. The play began with Hamlet laying out a shirtless older man down on a table center stage, followed by a blackout. The entire first scene was done in total darkness except when a dim light came up on the ghost, the man we saw laid out on the table. This was brilliantly simple and effective and set up this feeling that there's always a dead body in the middle of the stage. Hamlet did "to be or not to be" lying on the same table. Later in the play, Polonius' body is in the same place, on the floor this time all through Ophelia's madness scene. She actually dragged in potted plants and covered his body with dirt and flowers during the scene. Then she came back on spraying herself with a hose and lay down next to him, hose still going, and they laid there till the grave digger scene, when they both got up and played the gravediggers. I know that sounds a bit too on the nose, but it really worked.

There were other things I was less crazy about. The design was very bare bones "everyone in street clothes on a bare stage." Not a new choice for Hamlet, but one I understand. It's a beautiful play, you don't really need anything other than the words and the acting. But, personally, if I'm going to be staring at a guy for three and a half hours, I don't really want him to be wearing sweatpants.

There was also live music on stage. Again, this is not a new choice for Hamlet but it's one I understand less. Why music in Hamlet? Why does this show need that? It wasn't a five piece band or anything, just one dude playing a cello and some sort of wooden organ (heh.) Sometimes it was great, especially for the ghost scenes. But there were other times when people were onstage, acting their faces off, and I was straining to hear them over this dude's frenzied noodling. It was all I could do to not shout "Buddy, could you NOT?  There's a play going on."
I also think that playing music under Ophelia's songs made her seem less  crazy and more like she was in a musical. And since she had a very  strong, brassy, voice, that musical seemed to be Guys and Dolls. I  assume that was not what they were going for. 

Ophelia in general was, I think, miscast. You might have seen her on GLOW as Shelia the She Wolf. And she wasn't a bad actress she just...seemed like a tough broad who could handle herself, which is pretty much the opposite of Ophelia.
It's a rare actress that can convincingly play both Ophelia and Sheila the She Wolf and Gayle Rankin wasn't it. I applaud the director for trying to fight the cliche but that cliche exists for a reason. Every scene Ophelia has is a glimpse of a woman in the process of being bent until she breaks. She has to be at least a little brittle.  
If her father and brother tell her to stop seeing hamlet and her response is to shrug and say "ok" or Hamlet yells at her to get to a nunnery and she yells right back at him, we have no reason to believe that she will be utterly broken by the death of her father. She's pretty independent, he's kind of annoying, so why is she suddenly crazy?
It just did not work for me and I think it really damaged the impact of the play. Hamlet is supposed to be one devastating tragedy after another but no one really likes Polonius so his death isn't really devastating until it drives Ophelia mad. And if her madness scene isn't heartbreaking, then her death isn't either. A lot hangs on that scene. A lot of the emotional arc of the play really hangs on her big scenes so if we aren't *really* pulling for her so much of the play loses its impact.
Shakespeare's women may not be the protagonists but they so often drive the play or are the heart of the play. Desdemona is maybe the only sympathetic person in Othello. Juliet is both the brains and driving force of R+J, Romeo is just kind of a whiny horndog. Lady Macbeth is the engine that keeps going and she is, arguably, the most famous character in that play despite only being in, like, five scenes. I just wish people would put the thought and care into casting these roles that they do with the male protagonists.