Lantern Theater's hyperactive "Hamlet' (1st review)

One of the many unresolved questions in Hamlet is why Hamlet doesn't immediately succeed to the throne of Denmark upon his father's death. He himself speaks at one point of his hopes of "election," but Denmark was never an elective monarchy. Nor can it be a question of his minority, since Hamlet refers to himself as having known Yorick 23 years earlier, which implies that he's in his late 20s. Hamlet is represented as having been abroad at the time of his father's death, but Claudius could at most have served as a temporary regent in his absence. Why does Hamlet mope resentfully around the palace upon his return, instead of claiming the throne that is seemingly by all rights his?

This isn't a mere quibble; in a sense it's the core of the play. Of course, Shakespeare could have invented a Denmark where other relatives succeed to the throne instead of immediate blood heirs, just as he invented seacoasts for Bohemia. He doesn't, though; he simply leaves us with no explanation of this dramatic anomaly. Certainly the inhabitants of Denmark expect Hamlet to be king at some point; he is apparently popular, and Fortinbras, in a scene cut from the Lantern production, observes that "he was most likely, had he been put on, /To have prov'd most royally."

There has always been an unsettling, almost absurdist quality to Hamlet; time seems to stand still, as in a dream, while the hero of the play makes up his mind to act. But what Hamlet is deciding is to avenge his dead father, when surely the first order of business, under all ordinary circumstances, would be to claim the crown that for a Shakespearean audience would self-evidently have been his.

Once Hamlet is king, punishing the usurper Claudius is obvious and simple; that he is a regicide into the bargain only makes his usurpation the more heinous. But Hamlet fails to act on his own behalf; he waits until he is given a summons to act for his father instead. This inaction creates a conundrum. If Hamlet doesn't claim the throne for himself, then in killing Claudius he too will become a regicide, and presumably forfeit it. In short, by satisfying his father, he will disinherit himself.

With such a choice, Hamlet's position is truly absurd, and his choices are impossible. The problem of the play is not why he fails to act, but why everyone behaves as if he were not who he really is: Hamlet the Dane, King of Denmark. We've all had dreams like this, in which we know we should act but, mysteriously, cannot. Hamlet is that dream, taken to the last extreme: an unacknowledged king being called upon, in effect, to assassinate himself.

A hyperactive Hamlet

I draw out this conceit, patient reader, because the Lantern production now on view, directed by Charles McMahon, takes exactly the opposite tack. It stages its Hamlet as a fast-paced action drama, with its protagonist, Pig Iron's Geoff Sobelle, as frenetically hyperactive and acrobatic. This approach could work in theory: A man who is all motion precisely because he is unable to act. But Sobelle's problem, his flatness of diction aside, is that his Hamlet appears to think he is genuinely going somewhere, embarked on a practical program of action. This gives him nowhere to go at all with the great soliloquies, in which Hamlet tastes bitterly his own paralysis of will.

McMahon chooses to break the play just as Hamlet comes upon Claudius at prayer, unattended and absorbed in false repentance. He has Sobelle come almost on top of him, dagger raised, inches from his back. The sudden thought dawns on him only after intermission that, if the sins of Claudius are indeed being forgiven, his murder sends Claudius straight to heaven.

McMahon's interpretation vs. Shakespeare's

This is what Shakespeare writes, to be sure, but his Hamlet never really bares his dagger. McMahon's staging seems effective, but it also obliges us to take Hamlet's theology at face value; whereas Shakespeare, I think, wants us to see it as another of his intellectual rationales for inaction.

Hamlet's alter ego in the play is Laertes (Andrew Kane), a straightforward and uncomplicated fellow who sees clearly enough that Hamlet is responsible for his father's death, and at least indirectly for his sister's. Laertes is ready to go at Hamlet at once, but his will, too, is blunted by the devious Claudius, who persuades him to pervert his honest (and not unreasonable) thirst for revenge by using poisoned foils in a staged fight.

Claudius is another of Shakespeare's puzzles, as deep in his way as Iago. His murder of the elder Hamlet, and his appropriation of Gertrude, is the one decisive act in the play, from which all unfolds. For everyone else Claudius spins a web of ultra-Machiavellian intrigue that robs them, as Hamlet notes in another context, of the name of action. Like Iago, Claudius is just a bit too clever for his own good, and his plot at last entraps him. Had he simply trusted to the poisoned foil and not used the poisoned cup as a backup, he might, one reflects, still be reigning today.

Strong points

There are good points in this production. Dirk Durossette's spare set, with just the jagged hint of ruin in the background, works well with Drew Billiau's lighting (although the scene on the parapet with the ghost is, I think, misjudged); and Nick Rye's somber, urgent music functions as an effective ground bass. The blocking is nimble, and the fencing match staged by J. Alex Cordaro is as good as any I've seen.

Among the performers, Tim Moyer scores a double triumph as both Polonius and the Gravedigger. Joe Guzman's Claudius and Mary Martello's Gertrude get off wrong-footed, because they're made to mug their affections in the opening scenes. This is a mistake; the newly enthroned Claudius needs to appear regal, not doting in public, and certainly Gertrude's behavior will seem grossly inappropriate in a supposedly grieving widow to others beside Hamlet. Melissa Dunphy's Ophelia was game but a bit shrill to my taste.

Still, this play is Hamlet's. Sobelle scored his points where they were easy, befuddling Polonius and outwitting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but his Hamlet simply lacked inner life. I thought his best moment was his passionate declaration of friendship for Horatio, but that's clearly not where it needed to be.

Casting against type

The fault, however, wasn't solely his. McMahon has shown a penchant for casting and directing against type in his Shakespeare productions, as witness the choice of comic actor Peter Pryor for his Richard III. You might get away with that in a villain, but Hamlet is harder.

So, what is Shakespeare really getting at in his greatest and most problematic play? That question will be asked as long as theater lives. Still, the point I raised earlier may be at least suggestive. Hamlet has no good options; his predicament is absurd.

Whether this quandary stems from the strange limbo of his succession or the gulfs of his own character, Shakespeare makes a larger point too about the nature of tragic action. In Julius Caesar, the conspirators carry out their plot to kill Caesar, only to perish themselves. Macbeth eliminates his rivals one by one, and meets the same fate. Lear divides his kingdom, and lives to weep. The tragic action carries its own moral taint, the point grasped by T.S. Eliot when he spoke of the shadow between intent and act. Hamlet seems to grasp this intuitively as well: "The time is out of joint:--O cursed spite./ That ever I was born to set it right."



To read a reply by Steve Cohen, click here
To read Jim Rutter's commentary and his video interview with the Lantern Theater's principals, click here.
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