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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.
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.
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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.
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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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I have rejected ever since any interpretation of Gertrude and Claudius where they are not sincerely into one another.
And same with Hamlet--the double having more awareness, sensing a metaworld even as Hamlet muses on what's beyond the life he knows.
Yes! I like that way of pinpointing it.
And I like your imagination of how Ophelia's double should be.
Thank you. Maybe someone will stage it sometime.
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