Reviews

Hamlet

Daniel Fish’s eight-actor treatment of this classic is an absolute must-see for Shakespeare lovers.

Rob Campbell in Hamlet(Photo © T. Charles Erickson)
Rob Campbell in Hamlet
(Photo © T. Charles Erickson)

To anyone who’s never seen a production of Hamlet, I’m not convinced that I would recommend Daniel Fish’s staging at the McCarter Theatre Center, which is stripped to the bare essentials and then some. But the director’s eight-actor treatment is an absolute must-see for Shakespeare lovers who collect Hamlets and Hamlets the way young boys used to covet rare baseball cards. This is a version for aficionados who’ve found traditional approaches increasingly fustian but who consider many other recent, non-traditional approaches far-fetched and ludicrous.

Fish is a man clearly impatient with stagings of the play that he has seen elsewhere. He also has an obvious deep regard for the Bard’s text and is brimming with ideas on the best way to present it without allowing self-impressed directorial flourishes to overwhelm the poetry. Dressed in street clothes by costume designer Kaye Voyce (the entire cast is likewise attired), the Wittenburg student Hamlet here looks like a Princeton undergrad. He wears striped running pants, a black (for mourning) sweater pulled over a white shirt (tails untucked), and shoes with no socks. Since the play is being presented on the Princeton campus, it makes sense for Hamlet, who has a theater man’s understanding of stage technique, to look as if he’s just come from a Triangle Show rehearsal.

Foremost, Fish understands the importance of having a first-rate actor in the title role — and with Rob Campbell, he’s got one. Hamlet has fascinated theatergoers for just over four centuries because he’s so endlessly complex; and the dark, brooding, youthful-looking Campbell negotiates those complexities with concentrated ease. He consistently indicates — without obvious acting indications — that Hamlet manipulates family and friends like an angler playing his catch because he’s uncertain how else to handle the grief he feels over his father’s sudden death and his mother’s hasty remarriage. His retaliatory scheme(s) will lead to tragedy, but he’s too inexperienced to understand the potential ramifications of his behavior. Campbell’s Hamlet is headstrong and impulsive in the manner of an intelligent young man who’s attempting to deal with a situation beyond his grasp. His Prince of Denmark is humorous, angry, troubled, ruminative, and self-critical. Campbell is also adept at making the famous soliloquies seem as if he’s thinking them up on the spot. In sum, this is as good a Hamlet as any longtime Hamlet-watcher could imagine.

Secure in the knowledge that he’s got a reliable thespian in the central role, Fish goes about wiping cobwebs from the text with commendable conviction. His surprises are so often immediately right that it would be unfair to describe most of them in detail, so only a few examples will be given here. He begins the play by placing the cast around two white-topped tables, as if they’re gathered for a first read-through. Instantly, the director’s starting-from-scratch tactic is apparent. It’s further underlined by John Conklin’s undressed set, which features two off-white containing walls that suggest Peter Brook’s white box without copying it outright. Under Scott Zielinski’s subtly shifting lights, Fish establishes the empty space within which good theater can be attained.

When Hamlet goes forth to meet his father’s ghost for the first time, Michael Emerson — playing the late, elder Hamlet — arranges a small conversation area for father and son to occupy. He pulls two chairs into place so that he and his son can face each other. He positions a standing lamp between them, and he lights a cigarette. It’s as if he’s preparing to deliver every dad’s speech about the facts of life, but he will actually state the facts of death — i.e., his own murder.

I won’t give away Fish’s ingenious staging of the scene wherein Hamlet confronts Gertrude (the accomplished Stephanie Roth Haberle) in her bedroom, but I will say that he finds an entirely original angle from which to play the action that busybody Polonius (the always on-target David Margulies) overhears. The brilliance of that notion is matched by any number of others: the use of an LP turntable on which Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” plays when the ghost materializes (Darron L. West is the sound designer); Polonius slipping Laertes (Jesse J. Perez) a few bucks along with his tedious advice not to be a lender or a borrower; the random objects that Ophelia (the touchingly believable Carrie Preston) distributes when she thinks that she’s dispensing rue and rosemary; or the appearance of fawning Osric (the versatile Emerson again) in 17th-century attire, speaking with glib John Gielgud intonations.

Inventive as Fish is, he does miss the mark several times. I’m not sure that I agree with the final by-play he’s plotted between the poisoned Hamlet and best friend Horatio (Haynes Thigpen), or with the Player King (Frank Wood) readying himself for The Murder of Gonzago by rehearsing Hamlet’s vaunted “To be or not to be?” speech. Also, as a byproduct of the actors doing so much doubling, some scenes have been eliminated and others truncated; for example, Claudius and Gertrude no longer greet Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern because Emerson and Haberle are also playing Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Still, none of these missteps is severe enough to take the edge off this Hamlet.