Hamlet by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

Michelle Terry's Hamlet, her first production as Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe, seemed designed not simply to reflect the recent change in leadership, but to reverse certain practices of her predecessor. Emma Rice, who served for two years as Artistic Director, resigned at the end of the 2017 season because the Globe's board found her productions, marked by strong directorial concepts and employing contemporary sound and lighting techniques, at odds with the organization's central tenets. At the start of her Twelfth Nightin 2017, for example, the cast on the SS Unity, prior to the shipwreck, sang along with a recording of Sister Sledge's We are Familyas they danced up and down a gangplank that extended diagonally from the balcony to the stage. Hamlet, on the other hand, was played throughout on an entirely bare stage. The balcony was used primarily for a brass ensemble that appeared intermittently during the production to provide sound effects (flourishes at the King's entrance, for example). No stairs led from the stage to the yard, as is often the case at the Globe, and thus no exits and entrances were made through it and no action took place in it. Although two directors were credited in the program, the production was shaped by the actors and the creative team working openly (members of the Globe staff and visiting students attended the rehearsals) and collaboratively over ten weeks on both Hamletand As You Like It, in an attempt to replicate, in contemporary terms, the rehearsal process of Shakespeare's company. As Elle While described it in the program, "the worlds of the plays have evolved out of our interaction with each other and the texts. The task has then been to develop the threads that tie our ideas together."

With only twelve actors, equally divided between male and female, some cross-gender casting was not just inevitable, but a deliberate choice. Hamlet, Horatio, and Laertes were played by women. Guildenstern was also played by a woman who is Deaf: she signed her lines with Rosen-crantz acting as her interpreter. Gertrude and Hamlet also communicated with Guildenstern through British Sign Language. Ophelia was played by a young man and Rosencrantz by a man who looked old enough to be Hamlet's father.

While imagination, as Theseus reminds us ( A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.209), must always to some degree amend what it encounters on the stage, the production, in an admirable attempt to embrace diversity in its casting across age, gender, and disability, went further than most in challenging literal renditions of characters and lines. The discrepancy in height between the diminutive female actor who played Laertes and the tall, thin male actor who played Ophelia led to some unintentional comedy (and laughter from the audience), as did Laertes's reference to Ophelia's "chaste treasure" (1.3.30). The King, following the script in 3.4.250, called "Ho, Guildenstern" through the door on the right to bring Guildenstern on to the stage, although Guildenstern would have been unable to hear him. The gray-bearded Rosencrantz did not in any way suggest that he was, as Claudius puts it, "neighbored" to Hamlet's youth (2.2.12). Perhaps the point of the casting was not simply to provide a new way for the actors to replicate the conditions of Shakespeare's theater, but also to extend this replication to an audience watching an ensemble of actors performing a play.

The production, for the most part, let much of...