Hamlet (review)

In 2008 and 2009, acclaimed Scottish director Graham McLaren’s collaboration with the Necessary Angel Theatre Company offered Toronto theatregoers a welcome opportunity to watch this experimental production take shape. The company offered a series of “sneak preview” performances at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in November 2008 (see my review in Shakespeare Bulletin 27.3), a full year before the production’s world premiere as part of the World Stage series at the Harbourfront Centre’s Enwave Theatre. In the progression from workshop performance to official opening, the look and feel of the production—with its clever visual references to contemporary pop culture, punk rock, decadence, and cold war authoritarianism—remained much the same. There had been some significant changes to the cast, and, happily, some incongruities in the script had been smoothed out. What emerged most powerfully from my multiple viewings, however—I saw it once in workshop, and twice more during its official run at Harbourfront—was the destabilizing effect of McLaren’s method: his insistence upon a semi-improvisational, actor-centered approach to theatre intended to sharpen and revivify one of Shakespeare’s most familiar works. What had seemed at first to be a dynamic part of the actors’ workshopping process—the director’s notes for the preview stated that they had “not yet blocked a scene or made any permanent decisions on how the scenes should be played”—turned out to be the production’s guiding principle. The result was an uneven, but at times fascinating, rendition of a play that is, in so many ways, about acting.

Entirely absent from this pared-down production, as before, were any references to the play’s Reformation context or to the concerns about Norway and young Fortinbras which normally serve to justify the overhasty marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. The usurper’s regime had the look of a mid-century military dictatorship in this production (almost everyone at court was in uniform—with the notable exception of Horatio, who was dressed like a priest, and Hamlet—and when Guildencrantz first appeared, he was being fitted with a wire by Polonius), but it wasn’t clear that there was any real threat from without; instead, with all the action unfolding in the same trash-strewn room, the play’s focus was tightly fixed on the small, decaying, incestuous world of the Danish court.

Casting changes had perhaps the most palpable effect on the show, three of the nine original cast members having left the production after the preview performances. Most notably, Benedict Campbell had replaced Tom McCamus as Claudius, and Eric Peterson, known to Canadians for his role on the TV series Corner Gas, had stepped into the role of Polonius, formerly played by Stephen Ouimette. Each of these actors transformed the role he was playing: where McCamus had played an edgy, scheming Claudius who always seemed to be planning his next move, Campbell brought a sensuality and a quiet subtlety to the role, offering us glimpses, now and then, of the king’s troubled conscience. Ouimette had played Polonius as an overbearing father, but Peterson’s turn as the old counselor was far more disturbing: cold and calculating in his official capacity as Claudius’s spymaster, domineering and cruel in his scenes with Ophelia, this Polonius took an obsessive, possibly incestuous, interest in his daughter’s sexuality. Tara Nicodemo’s performance as Ophelia took on new resonances as a result: we could see that she was under obvious psychological stress from the beginning of the play— abused and betrayed by those who claimed to love her most, bewildered and frightened by the unfolding violence—and we watched her struggle against the confinements of her...