Add me to the distracted multitude

By the time you walk out of the Broadhurst Theatre, you will find yourself filing Jude Law, Hamlet As Played By, under Animal Grace, Unlikeliest Definitions Of. One of the joys of this Hamlet (besides being able to praise the man’s theatre chops) is being totally captivated by Law’s moment-to-moment physicality. He doesn’t just act the part, he dances it in incredibly fluid fashion, with a mind-body connection that’s inhumanly supple. This is no self-obsessed star turn; this is a generous actor who moves into a pose or a gesture which totally embodies the line he’s speaking and then smoothly swings into something completely different based on what he’s going to say next, and it’s all so effortless that you can’t tell whether the song is driving the dance or the dance driving the song.



Driving is not just a good word to describe Law’s performance (this is no melancholy Dane -- when Law’s Hamlet puts on an antic disposition, he doesn’t step into a different car, he just floors the gas in the car he’s already driving), it’s also a good word to describe the evening itself, at least while Law is on stage. The verse is treated like real speech, which means you get to hear famous lines as casual conversation, and there is a briskness about everything and nearly everyone that serves both the play and the production well.

But when Hamlet is off in England, and the scene-carrying duties fall on a negligible Ophelia and a whiny Claudius, you might as well be marking time till the Gravedigger scene. Seriously: during Ophelia’s mad scene? The bottom drops out from under the play faster than a broken elevator in the Empire State Building. Mostly because Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ophelia isn’t so much bad as non-existent. She’s the acting equivalent of a green screen: the actors all face her and talk at her trusting that there will be an actual performance inserted later via the magic of CGI. And meanwhile every actress over 20 in the audience is thinking “I could mainline anti-freeze and still do the part better than this.”

O what a potentially great acting opportunity is here o'erthrown!

It’s such a nagging flaw that you could spend a couple of drinks at Smith’s bitching about it (like I did with DJ, Shannon and Taliesen) and forget the brilliant lighting design, the riveting quiet moments (best ever “Were you sent for?” scene between Hamlet, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern), and Matt Ryan’s solid Horatio, among other things.

Overall? This is right up there with seeing Geoffrey Rush in Exit The King: (a) you’ll get the same kick out of watching someone run a marathon when all you ever thought he could do was run wind sprints; (b) while there’s a lot of good work being done by most of the rest of the cast, there’s no question that the weight of the play falls on the shoulders of the lead actor; and (c) you’ll kick yourself if you miss it. So don't.

Countrie Matters: the flashback that never made it

While going through all the stuff I wrote that never made it into the new play, I found this, which I wrote very early on (in late February, while I was still in the "what is this play about again?" stage). It's too good to disappear, so here it is. It takes place instead of (or in addition to) the Ophelia/Laertes scene that's in the first act of Hamlet:

LAERTES: Once more, farewell, my sister. I am for Paris
To lay a rose upon our mother's grave.

OPHELIA: And zinnia and rosemary for me.

LAERTES: Ophelia,
For you I will unflower all of France
And make a garden of our mother's tomb.

OPHELIA: Laertes,
If you were not my brother, you would be
The mirror of my earthly aspirations.
What of our father? Is he still unmoved
By your departure?

LAERTES: Oh, as still as stone
To look at, but beneath his flinty skin
Bubbles a pit of molten disapproval.
He is incensed against my trip to France,
And had I not petitioned to the King
To grant my leave, I would be cribbed here still,
A baby woodcock in my father's snare.

OPHELIA: You blame the rosebud for its prickly thorns,
Forgetting that our father was not nettled
Until occasion forced him to be fretful.
His parents dying young, he never knew
The steady anchor of a governor,
But like a lost and frightened boy, marooned
Upon an empty ship, he was constrained
By cruel fate to play both crew and captain,
To give the orders and to see them done
And sail his life without a map or guide
Through reckless waters to a reefless shore.

LAERTES: Yet see what time has done to that bold youth,
For now the wreck of his life has become
Our reef. Each time I try to plot the course
Of my pursuits, he bulls onto the bridge,
Wrenches the wheel away, and runs for shore,
As if my life is his to live his way
In compensation for the debt I owe
To him for bringing me into the world.

OPHELIA: And yet, in his cold way, he loves us still.

LAERTES: When he says love, he means obedience.

OPHELIA: And is it any wonder? Yes, he commands
Like a scarred captain on a battlefield--
But his life has been his mortal enemy--
Taking our mother, who became an angel
Almost as soon as she became a bride--
Stealing his youth and all his cherishments
And leaving in their place a crushing burden
That would have driven Atlas to his knees.

LAERTES: A weight he flaunts and uses to drive us
Down to our knees when we stand up to him.
He lives to make our voices speak his words,
Like a musician who can only teach
By playing all his students' notes. Oh please,
My sister, while I am away, do not,
Do not let him play you. Make your own music.

OPHELIA: Sweet brother. How you do forget my place.
I am my father's instrument, until
He finds a likely man to call my tune.
They say Prince Hamlet is a fine musician.

LAERTES: Not so--he is an instrument--a lyre.

OPHELIA: There sounds an envious note.

LAERTES: Ah no, Ophelia--
'Tis admiration--would my tongue could spread
The honey from a flowered phrase like Hamlet.
All I can do is beg you to remember
That his warm voice and all the pregnant words
Which he delivers in his vows of love
Are but a whisper to the shout of blood
Which seals you as the sister of Laertes.
Despite your worth, Prince Hamlet's will is not
His own--he is the son of kings, and you
And I are but the children of a tyrant.
What choice he makes cannot be circumscribed
Beyond the line of which he is the issue,
For he himself is subject to his birth.

OPHELIA: As are we all, who share the sacred blood
Of family. If I looked in your heart,
I would see something of our father there.

LAERTES: And something of our mother.

OPHELIA: I wish I knew her.

LAERTES: I see her only vaguely, a ghost in velvet.

OPHELIA: And I perceive the wheel of time, which made
My grandmother bring forth into the world
A little boy who never knew his father--
And he in turn brought forth a little girl
Who never knew her mother. What is left
To come round to our children, yours and mine,
But the blessing of a full and happy family?

And that's it. I wrote a note to the effect that this is where Polonius comes in and says something stupid, but I never got around to writing it, so insert your own version of a "To thine own self be false" speech here.

To B-Day Or Not To B-Day

Elsinore by Moonlight

Random thoughts about the Hamlet in the Park:

Michael Stuhlbarg. Probably the most manic Hamlet I've ever seen, which is not a bad thing at all. It really makes "Now I am alone" a potent moment when, for the last 20 minutes, you've been watching a guy bounce around the stage like a little kid who just had one brownie too many, a big smile on his face, saying anything that comes into his head; and then when he's alone that mask drops to the ground along with his father's coat. That's the brilliance of this performance: you can actually see the words coming into Hamlet's head. Stuhlbarg isn't reciting -- he's thinking out loud, in that high-pitched voice of his that switches back and forth between fiddle and violin, now grating and edgy, now lyrical and sweet. During intermission, my friend said: "I thought it was Joaquin Phoenix until he opened his mouth and I could actually hear him."

Hamlet and Hamlet. Running time with intermission: 3 hours and 15 minutes. Cuts I noticed in the script: no Second Gravedigger; no "Our ship got attacked by pirates;" and (oddly) the moment just before "To be or not to be" that contains Polonius' set up ("With pious action we do sugar o'er/The devil himself") and Claudius’ response ("How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!") (Disclaimer: I might have totally missed it because I couldn't take my eyes off Lauren Ambrose, and was much more interested in her than in anything Claudius had to say.) Kudos to director Oskar Eustis for creating that rarity of Public Theatre evenings, one in which all 20 actors are not in 20 different plays. Double kudos for not having an Interpretation into which the text must be shoe-horned. (Which makes the final moment a powerful kick in the teeth.) On the "Did Gertrude know anything beforehand?" debate, the verdict is out (thanks for nothing, Margaret Colin). On the "Did Hamlet sleep with Ophelia?" debate, hell to the yes (thanks for everything, Lauren Ambrose). [Sidebar story: when John Barrymore was asked "Did Hamlet ever sleep with Ophelia?" back in the day, he replied: "Only in the Chicago company."] And on the mad/sane debate, this Hamlet is always mad with a purpose. Does he ever really lose it? Yes, with Ophelia -- and it breaks your heart.

The Meh. Andre Braugher and Margaret Colin just didn't do it for me as Claudius and Gertrude. Braugher was likable but bland; his soul-searching monologue was more like a rant, going up and out instead of down and in. He had an odd "Whoo hoo!" moment when the treaty with Fortinbras was announced -- it was like a Yankees fan watching Rodriguez hit a home run -- and if memory serves me right, his whirling of Colin in a victory hug was their only passionate moment. After which Colin made a point of straightening her skirt, which got a laugh, but epitomized the Nancy Reagan vibe in her character. And that cool public distance sure didn't help her when she got to the "Ophelia is drowned" speech. I have to say, if she was actually using her performance to suggest possible reasons why Gertrude would marry her brother-in-law so quickly, then I missed it entirely. Overall, I didn't get any chemistry between the two of them, and that's the one thing these two characters need.

Lauren Ambrose. An alabaster acting god. The “Watch every emotion register on my face” style of acting which, in Claire Danes, comes off as affected and technical, always feels like the real thing with Ambrose. She hurts so much you just wanna hug her, and then sneak a look at her face to see how she’s taking the hug. How good is she? If there’s a god in heaven, she will get to play Hamlet in the next 10 years. And it will be talked about for the next 50.

Ophelia. The hardest thing for an actress to do as Ophelia isn’t the mad scene –- it’s the stupid “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” monologue after the Nunnery scene. The more she gets emotional about Hamlet telling her to get to a nunnery, the bigger the leap to channel that emotion into a speech that says “He coulda been a contender” instead of “Why are you DOING this to me?” [Just the existence of this speech after that scene is a window into (a) how Shakespeare’s characters constantly surprise you, (b) how in Shakespeare rhetoric always takes precedence over everything, and (c) how Shakespeare’s boy actors were expected to play their female parts.] Even in the best of productions, this speech is a pothole, which means the only way to get past it is to hit the gas and try to convince the audience (and yourself) that Hamlet isn’t really like this, honest, and it’s all my stupid fault because I listened to my father. It’s the acting equivalent of an Immelman Turn, and Ambrose comes the closest I’ve ever seen to pulling it off.

Sam Waterston and Jay O Sanders. The anchors. Waterston makes Polonius proud and blind and helpless. There's a moment after the nunnery scene where Ophelia reaches up to him as he stands on the scaffolding, reaching up as if to beg him to come down and take her in his arms, and the look on Waterston's face is shattering. (It's a visual that Ambrose echoes in the mad scene; nice touch.) As for Sanders, there are probably people in the audience who will think that the Ghost, the Gravedigger and the Player King are played by three different actors. Praise doesn't get any higher than that.

Fresh Eyes and Ears. I went with a friend who had never seen a production of Hamlet before. She gasped when Polonius died; had a hard time remembering who Claudius was because (Hamlet trivia) he’s never once called by his actual name in the course of the play; got a little confused about what happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (because the pirate ship scene was cut); and loved every minute of it, not the least because all the catch phrases and famous lines that she knew as “Hamlet quotes” were spoken as part of the play itself, so she could hear them literally for the first time. It’s not true that she turned to me after Hamlet’s “The rest is silence” and said: “He dies?!?" But at the actual end of the production she did turn to me and say, "Whoa -- that’s not in the script, is it?” “Hell no,” I said, “but it’s great, isn’t it?” “God, yeah,” she said, “what a kick in the teeth.” So, uh, stay to the end, people.

And yes, okay? I do hang out with people who have never seen Hamlet before.

Or Not To Be

No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant
To be," says Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock,
As if to say, "Oh let that poisoned cup
Pass from my lips," as if to justify
His simpleness before it can be challenged.
No one has poured the man a stoop of wine
Or held it to his lips, or cast a slur
Upon his character, yet there he stands,
Deflecting punches that have not been thrown,
Protesting shadows to protect the light,
And saying what he is by what he's not.
Such words are flowers from a seed of doubt
Or guilt -- they blossom in the turbulent
Rich soil where a soul's roots ripen and grow;
And like a man who, racing from his fears,
Runs all the quicker into what he dreads,
He has, by giving answer to a question
No one has asked, touched on a silent Truth
Within himself, and given it a tongue.

Why not Prince Hamlet? Why then are we here,
Scarred by the whips and scorns of Time, if not
To seek the hidden spring which coils around
The name of action, and reveal its heart?
And if we cannot say “Yes!” to that, then
What do we say "Yes!" to? How can we bear
To clean and dress the mortal wound of life
If we touch not the hand or ponder not
The arm that strikes the blow? It's not enough
For us to shine a light upon this life
And then ignore its shadow -- in that dark,
The truth lies hidden, and each time we try
Illuminating it, it darts away,
Hiding behind us like a frightened child
Whose eloquence cannot express his fear
Except with one unending wordless scream.
That is the No that echoes every Yes,
And if we mean to be more than we are,
Then we must hear them both, and in our hearts
Perceive how one is born out of the other,
As vengeance sometimes pecks out of the egg
Of duty, or as love hatched unawares
Becomes a cuckoo in the nest of hate.

We are the gloves of Life -- she puts us on
To wear at weddings, births and funerals,
And we, who feel Life's fingers stretch in us,
Must hope that she will not throw us aside
Until we are unstitched by wearing Time.
Until that day, we are compelled to reach
For majesty; and whether we fall short
And see our crown on an unworthy head
Or bear its shining weight upon our own,
This is our destiny -- to make an end;
To wonder what it is that ends, and why;
To have a care, to take care, and to give
Care back again unblemished. We were born
To say our peace before our piece is done.
What though we fail each time we use our lives
To find an answer? Our success is in
The questioning. The questioning is all.
For we are each Prince Hamlet, and were meant
To be.

(C) Matthew Wells 2008

The Actor Who Wrote Hamlet

The Third Series of Arden Shakespeare editions has produced the best evidence yet that what scholars refer to as the "text" of Hamlet is actually a script. Three scripts in fact: the so-called Bad Quarto of 1601, the Second Quarto (Q2) of 1602, and the First Folio of 1623. How are they doing this? Instead of conflating all three source scripts into a single version that was never produced by the pen of Shakespeare, Arden is giving primacy of place to Q2, both because it was printed during Shakespeare's lifetime and because it's generally recognized to be derived from a copy of Will's handwritten manuscript (what scholars call "foul papers" and theatre people call a "cut and paste draft").

Junking the 300-year-old tradition begun by Nicholas Rowe when he combined Q2 and the Folio to create a so-called complete version of the play, the current Arden edition is (perhaps inadvertently) supplying the best possible evidence that Shakespeare was first and foremost an actor who happened to write plays. Which is a necessary corrective to blowhards like Harold Bloom, who want us to picture Shakespeare in his study writing beautiful lines of poetry and then gagging when he has to hand them over to (barf) actors. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like all playwrights, Shakespeare spent the better part of his time re-writing, whether it be for a road production of an otherwise lengthy play (the only version of Macbeth we have is so short that it's almost certainly a stripped-down touring script) or an updated version of an old favorite (the two versions of King Lear; the "newly corrected and augmented" Love's Labor's Lost).

And thanks to this new edition of Hamlet, you can see the writer at work. How? Because every now and then you're brought up short when a familiar line becomes totally unfamiliar. Like this one: "Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother." The Folio has "good mother," and every conflated edition for the last three centuries follows it. But that's not what was printed in the Second Quarto. You'll look in vain here for the "Denmark's a prison" scene; that's only in the Folio. And in the Folio version? No "How all occasions do inform against me." That's Q2 only. And what are we to make of the fact that Polonius in Q1 is called Corambis? If Q1 is the transcript of an actor's memory of a playing script, does it correctly record an early version in which the character names were different (Rosencraft for Rosencrantz) or is it just the actor's memory at fault? Making things even more complicated: Q1 and the Folio version contain the same "additional" passages which are missing from Q2. So instead of a clear Q1 to Q2 to Folio transmission, you have Q1 to Folio, with a bank shot to Q2. Does that mean we're dealing with two different drafts of the same play? It does to me, but what do I know? I'm no university professor; I'm just a theatre writer who acts now and then.

On one level, this is the most conservative edition of Hamlet I've ever read. Which on another level makes it the most radical edition ever. By in effect unstitching the quilt of Hamlet that has been taught and performed for 300 years and displaying it as three separate blankets, you get a clear and refreshing sense that Shakespeare's true home is the stage, not the study. And any editor who upholds a conflated version of the script as the true Hamlet is also upholding an elitist vision of Shakespeare The Poet -- because God forbid our Great Poem Of Hamlet was written by (barf) an actor. Well guess what? It was. Wrtten and rewritten. So there. And you know something else? The Hamlet we know as Shakespeare's version of the story was performed for 15 years between the time it was written and the time Shakespeare died. As a theatre writer who acts now and then, I'm betting it was rewritten at least five different times during that period. I'm betting that at some point in 1608, Shakespeare walked into the Globe with a new cut and paste draft and said:

Okay, everybody, listen up--this afternoon's show? "How all occasions do inform against me" is out. Prayer scene is out. "To be or not to be" comes two scenes earlier. Advice to the players is out--nobody ever listens to it, and everybody thinks it's me talking anyway, so it's gone. The Mousetrap is in--that means no dumb show, Player King, don't forget this time. The rest of you leads, I got a ton of new lines here. Gertrude? In this version, you're in on it with Claudius. Claudius? In this version I'm actually going to use your name in the dialogue instead of a stage direction so everybody in the audience will know what your name is for once. And oh yeah--the Ghost. Claudius, today you double the Ghost. Laertes, tomorrow you double the Ghost. Friday--Hamlet, you play everybody--what the hell, it's all one big soliloquy, right?