About classics, it’s steadfastly said that they come by their classification because whenever they’re encountered, they yield new revelations. That’s certainly true with Yaël Farber’s handsome production of Hamlet, imported from Dublin’s Gate Theatre and featuring Ruth Negga in the title role (of whom much more farther down).
What director Farber, also credited for “text edit,” stresses is the omnipresence of death—not that William Shakespeare hadn’t already embedded the element. Even before Bernardo begins the play by demanding “Who’s there?” on the parapet, Farber stages the dead king’s funeral in the production’s stark black-and-white pallet. The dead king is on a slab, surrounded by courtiers, the chief mourner being the distraught prince.
Having established the somber mood, Farber also includes a finale (not to be described here) that suggests more ghosts abounding than a dead king who haunts his aggrieved son in acts one and four. For a chuckle or two Farber even tosses in two additional skulls before the act-five gravediggers exhume poor Yorick’s.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
Farber has the tragedy set more or less today, with Claudius (Owen Roe) in military uniform, Rosenscrantz (Barry McKiernan) and Guildenstern (Shane O’Reilly) in tweeds and, in the early scenes, Gertrude (Fiona Bell), wearing a blue number unmissably modeled after Ralph Lauren’s design for Melania Trump’s 2017 inaugural day outfit.
Susan Hilferty contributes the costumes and the set with its five black doors angled stage right and left and the set of upstage doors that often part so that items, such as Gertrude’s bed, can be glided in. Also prominent from time to time is a green club chair representing a throne.
Smartly counting on John Torres’ tenebrous lighting and Tom Lane’s ominous sound and original music, Farber often succeeds with the work’s most effective sequences, among them almost any featuring Roe’s gruff and bullying Claudius, Nick Dunning’s intense Polonius, Mark Huberman’s gallant Horatio and Gavin Drea’s masculine Laertes.
As Ophelia, Aoife Duffin is particularly poignant during her two mad scenes. This is in a Hamlet revival that has Farber presenting madness as more prevalent than other directors may have done over the past four centuries. Not only Hamlet and Ophelia but Claudius and Gertrude show signs of at least momentary lunacy.
Farber smartly uses The Players—Will Ervine, Ger Kelly, Gerard Walsh—as three Gravediggers and has them, as shadowy presences, facilitate many of the scene changes: door openings and closings and the like. Be assured they are morbidly effective when playing “The Murder of Gonzago.”
As Farber’s Hamlet stalks down its tragic path, the director-text editor (Ben Power is credited textual director) does make a few missteps. In trimming Shakespeare (this treatment runs over three hours with intermission), he’s not the first to eliminate the approaching Fortinbras of course, but here the conquering hero only warrants a single mention.
And with Fortinbras a goner—no closing speech allowed him—other dubious changes will also irk longtime Hamlet partisans. For instance, though it’s hardly an egregious addition, Farber has Ophelia snuggle up to Hamlet while he’s to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquizing. The director brings on yet another interloper—a priest—to absolve Claudius of his murderous sin just before the guilt-ridden monarch is approached from behind by the vengeful Hamlet. A worse decision—surely for idolatrous Bardsters—is Farber’s eliminating Horatio’s prayer at Hamlet’s demise.
Perhaps the worst directorial choice occurs when Gertrude returns to report on Ophelia’s drowning. The speech is one of the best in the entire Shakespeare canon, and Bell delivers it beautifully. Nevertheless, Farber thinks she’ll improve the mesmerizing moments by throwing a column of light on the stage behind Gertrude so that the now-deceased Ophelia can walk along it. This is a superfluous distraction. (Keep in mind that the liberties Farber took a few years back with August Strindberg’s Miss Julie all redounded to the revival’s strengths.)
And now to Ruth Negga’s Hamlet. Needless to say, the actor—known most likely to American audiences for the tough-minded film Loving—isn’t the first woman to take on perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous role. All the same, try as a female actor may, the casting choice continues to register as a stunt. As it plays out, spectators are charged with the enervating task of suspending disbelief.
In her black suit with white shirt slightly indicating a flattened bosom, Negga more than anything comes across as the court tomboy. To her credit, she doesn’t go in for altering her natural vocal timbre. On the other hand and possibly to affect masculine seriousness, she speaks her soliloquies not trippingly on the tongue but with such deliberation she alone might be lengthening the production’s playing time.
There’s Negga’s stature as well. Yes, she does guy-type things, like, once when she sits, throwing a leg over the arm of the above-mentioned green club chair. But she can’t escape looking like a little fellow who, supposedly hanging around with school chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, seems to be their mascot. She gives the impression that if they were all on a varsity rowing team, she’d be the coxswain.
When Negga and the strapping Drea, as Laertes, assume fencing poses, this Hamlet impresses as decidedly outclassed. The foil play that ensues only emphasizes the problem. Donal O’Farrell is the fight director and must have felt he had his challenges, not all of which are overcome.
No one will maintain that Negga’s Hamlet turn isn’t valiant, but it also isn’t persuasive. And who would argue that a less than convincing Hamlet provides a fully energized and realized Hamlet?
Hamlet opened February 10, 2020, at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through March 8. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
