Hamlet (review)

This version of Hamlet was distinguished by three extraordinary performances—all of them delivered by Greg Hicks. While Toby Stephens energetically rendered the title character, it was Hicks, doing triple duty as the Ghost, the Player King, and the Gravedigger, who defined the haunting production.

Anyone who saw Hicks's Ghost will confirm the terror elicited by him. With a white, disheveled mane and an unnaturally pale, exposed torso, he drew an enormous broadsword across his trail as he entered from the house. Nobody in the audience moved or even breathed for half a minute after the Ghost first appeared, blurring the boundary between our reality and Elsinore. The director, Michael Boyd, reports that Hicks's spectral mien "was genuinely frightening and gave Toby Stephens a powerful problem to solve." The features of the Ghost marked him as coming from Purgatory. As Stephen Greenblatt suggests in the program notes, this circumstance made urgent the Wittenberg-trained Hamlet's concerns about what acting on the Ghost's exhortations might mean for his soul.

Although less obviously threatening, Hicks's Player King reminded viewers of the Ghost, particularly as he simulated the death of King Hamlet in The Murder of Gonzago. Boyd reveals the deliberate linking of the patriarchs: "Our players were . . . led by Greg Hicks, who carried with him the awful authority of the Ghost." Like the spirit of King Hamlet, moreover, the players entered from the house, reinforcing the sense that their leader was linked to our world and emphasizing the powerful connection between drama and life intuited by Hamlet.

Hicks took the stage a final time as the Gravedigger. Once again his character entered the world of the play from an unusual direction: up through the trap. And again, although his character was individuated, Hicks's distinctive features and lanky build visually recalled his earlier manifestations. The audience was thus asked to experience, like Hamlet, a haunting. In psychological terms, it was possible to imagine Hamlet projecting his father's likeness onto all manner of people, encountering the departed ruler at every turn. As with Hicks's other parts, his Gravedigger evoked not just death—real or make believe—but a past that Hamlet needed both to honor and to leave behind if he was to have his revenge.

Each time Hicks walked the boards, he was both different and the same. He was, in some sense, the audience's conduit to the world of the play. Parallels between his looks and his unconventional entrances helped to make of his three roles an eerie triptych, which amplified the overwhelming sense of obligation pressing upon the prince and foreshadowed his imminent end. Hicks embodied Hamlet's anxieties about faith, family, and mortality. He forced the prince to confront these anxieties, and he compelled the audience to dwell upon them throughout the production—and after the final curtain dropped.