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Last night we went to go see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which I am going to attempt to write up very hastily because tonight is the LAST night it's in Boston and it was great so if anyone is inspired to make a last-minute booking they have the chance.

This is an all-dance essentially ballet production; no idea how it would have read or how comprehensible it would be if one was not familiar with The Story of Hamlet but as someone who does know the Story of Hamlet, it does a really beautiful job at being a Hamlet -- one of the friends I was with said afterwards 'I could hear the soliloquies in my head when Hamlet was doing solos' and I definitely also experienced that effect.

The cast was pared down to Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and R&G, and each of them had their own specific dance style that evoked their character. R&G in particular I thought were really striking, a sort of matched slithery jester style that involved a very different kind of physicality from Horatio or Laertes, and Horatio's style was sort of similar to theirs but a much more classical ballet jester with cartwheels and so on -- there was one part where they were dancing a pas de trois where they were all essentially dancing the same, and then Claudius shooed Horatio away and R&G immediately got slitherier. Horatio and Hamlet also did the play-within-a-play as a pas de deux, backs facing the audience with horrible comic mask-faces for the king and queen in the play on the backs of their heads, and it was so funny and creepy and fantastically disorienting.

Ophelia was fantastic, the Ophelia-Laertes-Polonius relationship was very intense -- Polonius was a sort of classical ballet wizard with a big staff that he used in all his dancing, which I thought was very funny but also very effective -- and Ophelia's madness was a really beautiful and awful sequence with mirrors and all of the cast emerging out of them, first just hands grabbing for her and then everyone surrounding her and pulling her in different directions. (The show was Not leaning away from incest vibes in all directions either, Hamlet planted one on Gertrude's lips at the end of Polonius' death scene; afterwards another friend was like 'maybe I am forgetting the plot of Hamlet but who was the woman in the room when he killed Polonius? Isn't that normally his mom??' WELL.)

The ballet also added a couple of dance bits to evoke scenes that are not actually in Shakespeare's script and thus heighten relationships; there's one that I loved when Laertes goes away to France that's Laertes going in one direction with his little rucksack and Hamlet and Horatio coming the other way after having just seen the ghost, and they pass each other agonizingly slowly and then have a fraught farewell handshake, and then during the dancing with Ophelia's corpse scene (POOR OPHELIA, they are straight-up hauling that actress around and fighting over her limp body while Horatio chases after Hamlet like 'PLEASE CHILL OUT, PLEASE BE NORMAL') there's a part where Hamlet and Laertes just kind of fall into each other's arms for a moment and cling and start to grieve together and then Claudius runs up and hauls them away from each other and they start fighting again. Gertrude also gets a beautiful little solo bit to change into mourning clothes for Ophelia's funeral where she dances in a fraught way with Hamlet's sword and is doing the sort of rocking-a-baby ballet motion, which despite having no words is a really nice bit of Gertrude interiority that you don't usually get.

Let's see, what else ... oh, the ghosts! The ghosts are all done with big tricks of shadow and light and are extremely, extremely cool. Also Horatio steals the tablecloth to pretend to be a ghost during the big breakfast scene to try and explain to Hamlet what's going on and it's very cute. I think the thing that worked least was the big finale, which looked extremely cool (Laertes and Hamlet both had big long streamers attached to their swords and they fought with them) but did make it very difficult to track who was poisoned at any given time. But overall strong recommend for Hamlet enjoyers and very curious to hear what anyone who was not previously a Hamlet enjoyer made of it if they happened to see it.

Threaded | Flat

This sounds really cool!

I'm full of jealousy! This sounds awesome.

That sounds really cool! If it's ever streamed to cinema or put out on DVD (ha!), I'd be very interested to see it.

The dropping of the Fortinbras plot does put the focus very much on the relationships, which is what ballet excels at, rather than the political situation which is less amenable to balletic conventions. It's also fairly common theatrical cut (which Michael Bogdanov would not approve of!).

My current Hamlet reading (of the First Folio text) even gave me some ways in which you could interpret the Polonius/Ophelia relationship as incest. It's a bit of a reach, but no doubt someone has done it. Hamlet/Gertrude is a fairly common interpretation, though I can understand that one might get confused by it!

This sounds incredible, and I love your description of it. It never occurred to me that you could dance Shakespeare but I can really see it!

This sounds fantastic!

OH MAN this sounds fantastic— and I had literally just admitted to myself, after a couple of good-faith tries, that I am perhaps Not A Ballet Person. (I am very much A Hamlet Person, though.)

Wow, thank you for writing this up! It sounds amazing.

Sounds amazing!

I sent this link to my daughter & her partner, who live in Jamaica Plain, in case it fits in their schedule. It sounds SUPER cool!

there's a part where Hamlet and Laertes just kind of fall into each other's arms for a moment and cling and start to grieve together and then Claudius runs up and hauls them away from each other and they start fighting again.

This kind of interacting interiority reminds me of the production of Hamlet I saw in high school where each character had a shadow/reflection/double and also sounds really cool in its own right.

Edited 2025-03-01 18:47 (UTC)

Oh, this sounds like good stuff! I love it when different characters get different dance styles; it's such an easy shorthand but so seldom done, because it's hard to get that kind of mix! Guillaume Côté did some wonderful productions for the NBoC; I'm glad to see he's branching out.

I wonder how I'd react to the Ophelia stuff; I have strong opinions on "throw the woman around" contemporary partnering. That said, when it's Like That on purpose, as a commentary, I think it can be really effective. In fact, I'm thinking of another Shakespeare adaptation here, Wheeldon's Winter's Tale.

Glad you had this experience!!

That sounds super cool! I've seen a couple of Shakespeare ballets now and he really does seem to adapt well to the medium. Maybe because I do know the stories, maybe because the stories are about the sort of Big Emotions that dance is good at portraying?

I love your description of the Ophelia staging especially - her madness with the mirrors and the cast grabbing at her, and then after she dies everyone else literally throwing her around. It's a beautiful evocation of the way everyone in the play treats her. And interesting that Gertrude gets a little extra time to mourn her: it's clear in the play that she does care about Ophelia, but I don't know that it's often highlighted.

As you know I ALSO just saw a Hamlet on Friday, and I was really struck by Horatio's "oh god please be normal" when we get to the part where Hamlet is announcing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and oh I'm just going to jump in Ophelia's grave now. He is truly trying SO hard. He came up to Denmark to visit his college buddy who just lost his dad and somehow this has escalated into a roomful of death??

Whoa, VERY cool! I love the idea of ballet tacking all sorts of stories--I saw a community ballet production of The Magician's Nephew once.

Polonius as a classical ballet wizard--awesome! And I like your description of R&G "a sort of matched slithery jester style"--sounds perfect!

gnashes teeth

Oh this sounds so cool! I hope it travels to someplace nearer to me at some point.