In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Hamlet
  • Samuel Park
Hamlet at the South Coast Repertory Theatre, May 25–July 1, 2007

Daniel Sullivan's production of Hamlet, presented by South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California, signaled an effort to present a thoroughly contemporary staging of the play while still avoiding modern dress and/or a conceptual setting. Best known as the director of the Broadway productions of Rabbit Hole and Proof, Sullivan seemed to approach the Bard's greatest tragedy as if it were a "new" play, encouraging the actors (particularly the younger ones) to speak the lines the way they themselves would in real life, avoiding any kind of inherited ideological baggage, and lending the language a "hip," conversational quality. At the same time, Sullivan and his costume designer Ilona Somogyi dressed his actors in Elizabethan and Medieval costumes, while set designer Ralph Funicello placed the action on a mostly bare, wooden platform—the same rustic and unvarnished type of surface the Lord Chamberlain Men's themselves might've acted on. To lend some visual excitement, the entire background of the stage was covered by a giant folding panel featuring a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of Dulle Griet (Mad Meg). With its famously surreal (and oddly contemporary) representation of a peasant woman's descent into a hell of screaming faces and headless bodies, the painting stood as a potent metaphor for Sullivan's central conceit: a Hamlet set within its own historical moment, but imbued with the same kind of seemingly anachronistic details and immediacy as Bruegel's painting. [End Page 141]

Early press accounts of the production, which ran through July 1, 2007, focused on the casting of two sitcom actors in the show, Hamish Linklater of CBS-TV's "The New Adventures of Old Christine" as Hamlet and Michael Urie of ABC-TV's "Ugly Betty" as Horatio. Some newspaper reviewers took the obvious approach of criticizing the production for its apparent "stunt" casting, ignoring the fact that both actors have considerable theater credits; Linklater, for one, recently played Hamlet in a 2004 Long Wharf Theater production in Connecticut, and acted in Peter Hall's 1999 Los Angeles productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Measure for Measure at the Ahmanson Theater. Interestingly, when Linklater performed Lysander for Hall, he delivered a fairly traditional performance in terms of his use of language; in Sullivan's production, on the other hand, Linklater's Hamlet spoke in a deliberately naturalistic manner, delivering oblique line readings free of iambic pentameter and with an almost Seinfeldian, ironic detachment. The closest equivalent might be found in Michael Almereyda's 2000 film version of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke, in which iambic pentameter is entirely done away with, replaced with the jarring clips and rhythms of modern-day Americanized English. Linklater and Urie deemphasized the poetic beats of the play for the sake of a more immediate and "relatable" sense of speech, sometimes even mumbling or racing through speeches. This approach largely paid off, eliminating any possibility that the production would become a "museum piece." Sullivan appeared to reject the potentially colonialist notion that Shakespeare must be done with faux-British accents, with actors enunciating every precious word clearly and loudly. Sullivan embraced the American accents, focusing more on the larger meaning of each scenes. However, for those for whom the poetry is the thing, the production had the potential to frustrate.

Linklater also exploited the comic potential in the play, especially in the moments where Hamlet pretends to be mad. In his scene with Polonius, in 2.2, Linklater played up the physical gags, continually thrusting his hips into the air for the "conception is a blessing" line, and then walking onstage with his legs spread apart for the line, "like a crab you could go backward." Linklater also drew laughter from the audience with his sharp comic timing, as in the scene after Hamlet kills Polonius, where Hamlet tells Claudius that the dead man is "At supper." If Laurence Olivier's famous stage and film embodiment of Hamlet can be described as the "melancholy Dane," Linklater offered a comic, almost light-hearted Hamlet, at one point jumping onto tables...

pdf

Share