That high school production with the doubles sounds really cool.
It was the first production of Hamlet I ever saw and I suspect it would have been more effective if I had actually seen at least one regular Hamlet to have formed my own ideas of what its main characters were thinking or feeling before watching them enacted by black-clad doppelgängers in Goth whiteface, but I have remembered pieces of it to this day: primarily that however regally and distantly Gertrude and Claudius appeared together in public like a marriage of state and convenience, their doubles were all over one another and occasionally the furniture with what looked like genuine affection as well as lust and a great motive for murder, and that while Hamlet was delivering "To be or not to be," his double just wandered down to the front of the stage and sat there, staring out into the audience the whole time as if seeing them where Hamlet couldn't. I don't remember how most of the other principals were handled, which is maddening. Ophelia should have been a trapped and horrified, sane observer of her own mad scene, but I am not confident that the director thought of it. I am confident of remembering that people's doubles persisted after death, so there were a whole lot of ghosts on the stage by the time the curtain fell.
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Date: 2025-03-02 09:01 pm (UTC)It was the first production of Hamlet I ever saw and I suspect it would have been more effective if I had actually seen at least one regular Hamlet to have formed my own ideas of what its main characters were thinking or feeling before watching them enacted by black-clad doppelgängers in Goth whiteface, but I have remembered pieces of it to this day: primarily that however regally and distantly Gertrude and Claudius appeared together in public like a marriage of state and convenience, their doubles were all over one another and occasionally the furniture with what looked like genuine affection as well as lust and a great motive for murder, and that while Hamlet was delivering "To be or not to be," his double just wandered down to the front of the stage and sat there, staring out into the audience the whole time as if seeing them where Hamlet couldn't. I don't remember how most of the other principals were handled, which is maddening. Ophelia should have been a trapped and horrified, sane observer of her own mad scene, but I am not confident that the director thought of it. I am confident of remembering that people's doubles persisted after death, so there were a whole lot of ghosts on the stage by the time the curtain fell.