Elsinore (review)

Figure 1.

Hamlet (Peter Darling) in Ex Machina of Quebec’s production of Robert Lepage’s Elsinore, directed by Lepage. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Majestic Theater. Photo: Claudel Huot.

Figure 2.

Hamlet (Peter Darling) in Ex Machina of Quebec’s production of Robert Lepage’s Elsinore, directed by Lepage. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Majestic Theater. Photo: Claudel Huot.

At the start of Elsinore, actor Peter Darling announces that “The play’s the thing,” but the evidence that follows contradicts him. Director Robert Lepage’s technologically busy distillation of Hamlet is a frequently dazzling succession of visual stunts. Darling, playing all the characters but assisted by hidden cameras, microphones, projections, and a body double, gives a workmanlike performance. Unfortunately, no matter how capably he clambers about on his flexible jungle gym of walls and floors, he is scrambling as fruitlessly as a caged hamster on a wheel. This is not a one-man show that aims to explore either an actor’s virtuosity or the original text, but a magic show designed to display one conjurer’s mastery of illusions.

Lepage digs deep into a grab bag of multimedia and theatrical tricks here, each one jockeying to top the last. Designer Carl Fillion’s versatile set, a trio of large white platforms, the center one on pulleys, makes an excellent playground for these games. Darling can stroll through the door and meet himself on the other side; sway, gently suspended, on board the ship to England; or be sucked down through the platform, flailing in too much blue cloth, to Ophelia’s watery grave. The best sight gags in Elsinore, however, are simple physics: for example, the chair that swings level so that Darling continues to sit upright even as the wall to which the chair is attached shifts ninety degrees from horizontal to vertical. Occasionally the production prompts an enjoyable detective-like scrutiny, keeping the audience occupied looking for sleights of hand—or, more often, of video camera. But even the fleeting diversion of trying to track the two pairs of shoes on the alternating feet of Darling and his body double raises the question of why the energy expended coordinating the moves of these two actors isn’t better directed toward, for example, telling a story? Although the striking images in Elsinore keep piling up, Lepage never links them together.

Nor does he assemble the sampled sound bites of famous passages into a comprehensible or dramatic whole. The events of Hamlet seem to be scrambled here to no foreseeable end, such as when Hamlet and Laertes fight over Ophelia’s grave before the Gravedigger arrives. Further, Darling’s handling of the arbitrarily cut-and-pasted text ranges from unremarkable to monotonous, with one exception: Hamlet’s speech to the players, which Darling delivers, with pleasant camaraderie, to the audience. Of course, the fact that this is one of the few coherent passages in Elsinore is ironic since otherwise the production in no way concerns itself with Hamlet’s extremely useful advice on how to speak text effectively. Instead the script serves as a jumping-off point for images. For example, Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” becomes an opportunity to project da Vinci’s anatomical sketch onto the body of a revolving Darling. The action of the fragmented Elsinore stalls repeatedly, and Lepage continues to jump-start it with new bits of snazzy visual excitement. The result is that the meaning of the dense, detailed story is lost, and dramatic interest is never built, let alone sustained.

Contributing to the play’s incoherence, Darling fails to make any real character differentiation apart from swapping doublets, gowns, and crowns. His Gertrude is particularly uninspired: a walking dress, she is a mere tonal shift from Hamlet, and possesses none of Hamlet’s already scant emotional drive. Clearly unaided by the production’s breakneck pacing and piecemeal script, Darling’s indistinguishable characters result in relationships...