The 2010 Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Hamlet.

Hampton, Bryan Adams

Traveling north on Interstate 65, away from Montgomery, one happens upon an undersized off-white billboard rising on short stilts from a farmer's field; emblazoned there is a horned devil in red silhouette holding a pitchfork and ominously gesturing towards crimson letters that read "Go To Church or the Devil Will Get You." The billboard's message resonated in my mind as a fitting emblem during my evening drive back to Chattanooga from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's 2010 production of Hamlet, directed by Geoffrey Sherman. On a visceral level, the emblem was appropriate because it was as if the red devil himself were the passenger in my lusterless car, which baked for an afternoon in the flames of the Alabama sun, and which has had no air conditioning for three summers. One may query why I have failed to get the air compressor fixed, bur like the ghost of Hamlet's father, perhaps I drive it in situ "Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away (1.4.13-14). (1) On a spiritual level, the emblem was a fitting foil for Shakespeare's great tragedy, which the eminent critic A. C. Bradley a century ago asserted was the closest that Shakespeare approached to a "religious drama." (2) The play voices the early modern eras belief in the danger of evil spirits that might draw a person to "the dreadful summit of the cliff/ ... / And there assume some other horrible form" (1.4.70-72) to lead one to madness, destruction, and damnation. But the tragedy also evades the hermeneutical confidence and metaphysical certainty the Alabama farmer's sign registers. Uttered by a spooked Bernardo, the first line of the play, Who s there. (1.1.1), initiates the audience into the uncertainties of appearances and realities woven throughout the play.

Sherman's production captures the play's motif of indecipherability with fair success. Composer James Conely's buoyant bursts of trumpet fanfare at the beginning of the play serve as a contrast to the gloom and billowing fog. Brilliantly designed by Peter Hicks, the set evokes the columns, arches, and stairways in M. C. Escher's 1958 lithograph Belvedere, whose skewed angles challenge our perceptions about the integrity of the structure; one might imagine Hamlet, or the audience, in the figure of the seated man contemplating the illusions and impossibilities of a Necker Cube. Two massive blue-gray columns organize the central space of the stage and extend up well beyond the audience's field of vision. A balcony serves alternately as the ramparts of Elsinore castle, the place of spying, and the exalted seats from which Claudius and Gertrude watch The Mousetrap; actors enter and exit the balcony from one direction, and on the other side they descend the stairs, first to a landing with yet another exit, or to more stairs that lead to the main stage below. Under the balcony and partially obscured is a truncated stairway that leads to no perceivable place, and a colonnade disappears at an angle to the back of the stage, creating a murky middle ground where Nathan Hosner's capable Hamlet strolls or peeps about the columns in the shadows. Hosner drifts into the scene in 1.2, under the colonnade, and he is like one of those shadowy columns straining to hold the weight above. He demonstrates Hamlet's isolation and vulnerability by tightly hugging himself--a posture repeated throughout the performance, though mostly during the soliloquies. The visual effect is, at times, startling, as the audience is immediately confronted with a protagonist simultaneously given to breaching a keen and reeling mind that reveals its inner workings, and to buttressing a body that is closed off and conceals its cracks. It is no wonder, then, that Polonius, Gertrude, Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern have trouble comprehending his melancholy and his wit. Hosner's Hamlet is contradictory and indecipherable from the start.

In his classic 1904 lecture on Hamlet, Bradley claims that "in Hamlet's absence, the remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all" because without its dominant character the story would be merely sensational. (3) Hosner, the tallest of the troupe, certainly dominates the physical space in his "nighted color" (1.2.68) in the same way that Hamlet's character dominates the intellectual space he shares with his interlocutors, and with the same result: he masters everyone. He is head and shoulders above the two fops, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, fawningly played by Jordan Coughtry and Michael Pesoli, respectively (both of whom have other roles in the production). The two plaster sickening smiles onto their faces and lick Claudius' boots, yielding their services as the Crown's spies at the beginning of 2.2 with a synchronized step and bow. When the pair is sent to fetch Hamlet to Gertrude's chamber in 3.2, following the play-within-a-play, Hamlet forces a recorder into the hands of Guildenstern, who protests his lack of skill. Hosner's height serves his advantage here: he grabs the slight Pesoli, abruptly spins him round, bear hugs him from behind, shoves the recorder into his mouth, and performs several Heimlich maneuvers as Guildenstern blows broken notes and becomes Hamlet's instrument. The staging reinforces the many instances of manipulation in the play as well as Hamlet's angry words: "You would play upon me.... 'Sblood do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me" (3.2.363; 368-71). We are glad when the two friends from Wittenberg get what they deserve.

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Anthony Cochrane, who admirably captures King Claudius' self-aggrandizing tendencies, is Hosner's opposite: shorter, built like a bulldog, and lavishly dressed in the rich, red and gold Jacobean period costumes designed by well-seasoned veteran Elizabeth Novak. Cochrane's baritone British accent naturally commands attention, especially from a southern American audience not accustomed to its crisp enunciation and aristocratic flair. This stout Claudius seems always moving greedily toward the center of the stage to attract the gaze of all present, jockeying only with Hamlet for position with his rapier remark that Hamlet's persistent melancholy is "unmanly grief" (1.2.94). In the Mousetrap scene (3.2) Cochrane's Claudius self-importantly watches from the balcony above, surrounded by his courtiers, but he entirely misses the "dumb show" that precedes the lengthier reenactment of The Murder of Gonzalo--his attention is consumed by a messenger who enters and hands him a paper detailing some unknown issue. Meanwhile, Horatio, blandly portrayed by Matt D'Amico, sits on the edge of the stage reading the acting troupe's foul papers, eyes the king's reactions, and registers his initial skepticism until after the dumb show. During the murder scene of the Player King, Claudius' eyes look furtively left and right as he tries to sink into his chair; when he cannot hide, Claudius aggressively rises and marches across the balcony without a backward glance, in an apparent ploy to communicate his royal disappointment with the performance rather than his guilt. In the following scene, Cochrane's Claudius becomes a figure of pathos, even if fleetingly. On his way to Gertrude's chamber, Hamlet spies him from the balcony; Claudius has removed his crown and crimson robe of state, and Cochrane splits his attention between addressing heaven and playing to the audience with a conspiratorial wink. In Hamlet's moment of deliberation, Cochrane's figure is highlighted in a single spotlight from above as his hands are pressed together in the attitude of prayer, but the spotlight enhances the glow of his red vestments, rendering him much like that red devil in the farmer's field. The split impulse of the poetic line, "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below" (3.3.97-98), is subtly undergirded in Cochrane's gesture: when Hamlet exits above, Claudius begins to cross himself, but never completes the sacred ritual. He gazes forlornly for a moment at the heavens, but they will not open themselves to this "bosom black as death" that desires pardon but willfully "retain[s] th'offense" (3.3.67; 56).

Curiously absent from our gaze is the physical presence of the ghost, who in the play-text technically appears four times: mutely to Horatio and the watch in 1.1 on the castle ramparts; mutely to Horatio, the watch, and Hamlet in 1.4, as the protagonist fearfully but resignedly follows him; in 1.5 with Hamlet alone hearing the tale of murder; and, finally, in 3.4 as Hamlet accosts Gertrude in her bedchamber. In the first three, the ghost is clad from head to foot in his armor, with the beaver up to reveal his face; in the last, many modern editors follow the lead of Q1 (1603), the so-called "Bad Quarto," which directs "Enter the ghost in his night gowne," a detail not preserved in Q2 (1604-05) or the Folio. Instead, Geoffrey Sherman has chosen to represent the ghost with a sickly, pale green light into which the actors stare or follow, while the ghost's lines are recited in a voiceover accompanied by an ominous thrumming bass note. The strength of this production choice, as the director communicated with me post-production, is that it avoids the earthly clunkiness of a fully armored actor onstage and allows the ghostly presence to be staged at times other than when the play-text indicates, as for instance during the duel or at the death of Claudius. When the ghost first appears to the watch, the light shines upon the balcony/ramparts; Hamlet enters the scene, and the light representing the ghost emanates from different sections of the stage. When Hamlet is alone with the ghost, the green light glows from the two sets of entrance/exit stairs which emerge from tunnels and dressing rooms underneath the audience and ascend/descend at the front of the main stage. The flexibility of the sickly light registers well Hamlet's initial dilemma of the origins of the ghost ("Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell" [1.4.40-41]), since this ghost can in one moment blend with the sky at dawn and in the next moment emanate from the abyss below. (4) With the flexibility gained through this approach, however, there is also sacrifice, and I confess my disappointment with this point of the production. One might argue that the ghost is the fulcrum upon which the action of the entire play rests, and his physical bearing and attire (whether armor or nightgown) have compelling implications for how Hamlet interacts with his departed father and Gertrude, as well as for establishing the tone of the particular scene. His appearance thus enhances both the dread and pathos of his doom. If the ghost is dressed in armor, the audience and Hamlet perceive him in his hardened authority, a fallen warrior-king murdered by a treasonous subject; if the ghost is dressed in his nightgown, the audience and Hamlet perceive him in his utter vulnerability, a cuckolded house husband betrayed by lust. Marjorie Garber surmises that the ghost is "both the shade of Hamlet's father ... and also a kind of superego, a conscience-prodder, inseparable from Hamlet himself." (5) Without his physical presence onstage, one wonders if Hamlet can be fully present.

Fully present, however, are three actors whose performances upstage Hosner when he shares a scene with them: veteran ASF actor Rodney Clark who plays Polonius, Kelley Curran who portrays Ophelia, and Paul Hopper who plays the gravedigger (and who voices the ghost). Clark's Polonius is the best I have seen onstage, and he deftly renders Polonius at once sychophantic and self-absorbed, lost in the folds of his courtly outer garment as much as in his own platitudes. When the audience is introduced to the subplot in 1.3, it is clear that Polonius has interrupted a tender leave-taking between brother and sister. Laertes (a mixed performance from Matthew Baldiga) and Ophelia treat their father with outward respect but look for every opportunity to short circuit his orations and escape his presence. Comically, Laertes attempts to make a swift exit on his way back to France, but when Polonius begins giving advice he resignedly drops his shoulder bag to the floor, crosses his arms, rolls his eyes, and grins. Even Claudius and Gertrude, the latter disappointingly played without distinction by Greta Lambert, smile but barely tolerate his presence. Curran is a wisp of a woman, but her more mature Ophelia has a regal bearing and exudes charisma--which only intensifies the shock we experience when she appears in a soiled white shift during her later scenes of madness, flitting about the stage alternately crying and laughing through the tuneless lyrics she sings. Hopper's gravedigger, half-visible from a lowered central platform on the main stage, looks like a hoary "redneck" from the Alabama woods or a refugee from a ZZ Top concert as he digs up bones and swills what is certainly Danish moonshine. When he recovers a skull and jawbone, the clown manipulates the blanched pair like a ventriloquist, which drew laughter from the audience. As the gravedigger, Hopper exaggerates a deep southern drawl even as he brilliantly matches wits, unwittingly, with Hamlet's quick mind. Throughout the exchange, however, one gets the feeling that it is Hosner, and not just Hamlet, who admires the performance of this "absolute ... knave" (5.1.137).

When the funeral train arrives bearing Ophelia's body, Hopper and his assistant are deferential and quick to get out of the way, exchanging knowing glances from bowed heads as Laertes questions the priest, "What ceremony else? / ... / Must there no more be done?" (5.1.225, 235). Matthew Baldiga's performance as Laertes is lacking here as he is not able to summon Laertes' pride and anger that seethe beneath his grief; for the rest of the play, Baldiga's Laertes pouts rather than pounces, which results in a duel scene that cannot muster the necessary energy. The swordplay is well-choreographed by Professor Bill Engel, an accomplished fencer and the dramaturge for the play, but without Laertes' fuel for vengeance there is no combustion. Consequently, the final gesture towards reconciliation between Laertes and Hamlet ("Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet" [5.2.331]), both broken sons grieving lost fathers, falls flat.

Following the performance, Hosner, Curran, and D'Amico addressed questions from the audience about the performance and the play. I do not know if this practice is traditional with ASF productions, as this is only the second year that I have attended; if it is not, it should become one of its trademarks. The lively discussions and teaching points about role preparation, paring lines in particular scenes or exchanges, and actor's gaffes perfectly capped an afternoon that began with an energetic mini-lecture, on Hamlet and the genre of revenge tragedy in the early modern period, by Professor Susan Willis, who has served as the principle ASF dramaturge for many years. Like early modern playgoers, and Fortinbras at the end of the tragedy, we find ourselves captive hearers

   Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
   Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
   Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
   And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
   Fall'n on the inventors' heads. (5.2.383-87)

And while Horatio promises "All this can I / Truly deliver" (387-88), Sherman's production of Hamlet delivers, sporadically, "A touch, a touch, I confess 't" and then "A hit, a very palpable hit" (5.2.288; 282).

Notes

(1.) All citations of the play text are from Hamlet, ed. David Bevington (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).

(2.) A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Penguin, 1991), 166.

(3.) Bradley, 94.

(4.) For the wide array of opinions on the ghost's origins, see Miriam Joseph, "Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet," PMLA 76 (1961): 493-502; Ivor Morris, Shakespeare's God: The Role of Religion in the Tragedies (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1972); Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); and Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

(5.) Marjorie Gather, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 469.

Bryan Adams Hampton, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga