Mark St. Germain’s stage adaptation of John Updike’s 2000 novel Gertrude and Claudius, a Hamlet prequel detailing the events leading to the old Danish king’s murder and his namesake son’s revenge, strikes me as caught uncomfortably between sophisticated 21st century attitudes and the untamed, post-Christian world it purports to represent. Director Julianne Boyd’s attractive but mannered world premiere production at Barrington Stage Company offers plenty for the eye, but much less for the ear or heart.
Designer Lee Savage’s curved stone walls and turrets could serve as a backdrop for any long-ago tale from Abelard and Héloïse to The Lion in Winter or even Camelot, with some 50 little sconces containing candles that David Lander can light in attractive hues and configurations. As the cast enters in Sara Jean Tosetti’s lush, colorful costumes right off the rack, it’s clear that the game of thrones about to be played out isn’t going to prioritize sweaty reality.
The opening is heavily marked by exposition, as King Rorik (Greg Thornton) at length mansplains to daughter Gertrude (Kate MacCluggage) why she’s been affianced to Denmark’s “Amleth” (Douglas Rees), information she almost certainly already possesses. Then her brusque, plain-spoken intended draws sharp contrasts between himself and louche, adventuresome younger brother Claudius (Elijah Alexander). Things pick up as act one ends with that worthy’s introducing his sister-in-law to the intricacies of falcon training, based on a sequence some feel is Updike’s most effective. The sporting instruction insinuates a provocative metaphor for the desires which seem destined to overwhelm them.
Yet hopes of heat dim after intermission. All concerned seem to be taking pains to portray Gertrude in the most modern of terms as a New Woman, quietly but determinedly eking out her own chosen destiny against the repression of the patriarchy. Which is all well and good, but how is she to become the character we know in Shakespeare? Sporting a knowing smile almost continuously, this Gertrude is utterly in control of most situations, not at all in thrall to forbidden passion and most unlikely to fall under the spell of the usurper who will rashly make her a widow. (St. Germain, like Updike, takes pains to leave her in the dark about how that comes about.) In the witty, winking banter characterizing the better part of their encounters, MacCluggage and Alexander more greatly resemble the jaunty Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing than a transgressing pair who will ascend to power over a corpse.
We hear Claudius talk himself into despising and then damning his brother out of lust for his sister-in-law, but the staging is more polite than sinister, and their eventual coupling feels less like the unstoppable fulfillment of taboo desires than an expression of the natural order of things. That’s partly due to a de-emphasis of any crisis of faith among the characters. Gertrude all but renounces belief in God in an early soliloquy, and a scene in which her maid Herda (Mary Stout) is threatened with earthly punishment and eternal damnation—either of which would surely shake someone of that era to the core—is played for laughs. With dread of the eternal removed, it’s most difficult to have Gertrude pivot at the end to fear for her soul, though the play does try.
The production, so visually striking in its stylization, is not as lucky in its aural elements. Jenny Giering’s music cues, peppered throughout, are medieval-sounding enough but rarely reflect the story’s moment-by-moment moods. And Boyd has cast seven actors who all speak roughly within the same pitch range, so we lose the benefit of other notes to capture our attention.
It must be reported that Rees and Alexander’s ultimate cat-and-mouse confrontation—the one brother hinting that he knows what his feckless sibling has been up to, the other deftly parrying every thrust until all defenses are down—is nothing less than superb. Would that all the writing and playing were as rich with rising tension and subtext as this long, gripping scene.
Gertrude and Claudius opened July 21, 2019, at the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage (Pittsfield, MA) and runs through August 3. Tickets and information: barringtonstageco.org
