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A CurtainUp
Review from the Stratford Festival
Hamlet
Shakespeare's longest play seemed just that in the current Stratford production. Cut to a playing time of merely three hours, this Hamlet felt like a full reading -- except when Paul Gross took stage. Then, through his intelligent and articulate reading of the Prince, the play gained a life that was engrossing and even at times illuminating. That the rest of the cast failed to match Gross' performance left this viewer saddened. Paul Gross is a Canadian television star (his Royal Canadian Mountie character in Due South has also played due south of the 49th parallel) whose debut at the Festival deserved a stronger supporting production. Obviously an attempt to bring in a new audience segment, this Hamlet might have thrilled and charmed the less sophisticated theatregoer.
Benedict Campbell's Claudius should at least have equalled his Oedipus or Marc Antony in previous Festival seasons, but his is a flat when not bombastic usurper. Likewise, Domini Blythe (in her seventh Festival season) fails to find a direction for her Gertrude, thereby diminishing the tension between mother and son and making Gertrude's self-discovery in the closet scene even more difficult than usual for us to accept. The rest of the cast, save for Mr. Gross, is competent but uninspired.
Can a good deal of the responsibility for this lacklustre reading of this great stage piece rest with Joseph Ziegler's direction (in his Festival directorial debut)? I fear it must, for many members of the company have offered effective performances in other Festival productions: even Jerry Franken's Duke Senior in As You Like It, another middling production this summer, was more interesting than his Polonius; and Juan Chioran's Jaques, one of the best things about that ill conceived presentation, far outshone his Ghost of Hamlet senior. The production appeared to lurch from scene to scene (on Christina Poddubiuk's rather traditional dressing of the Festival Theatre's thrust stage) and was perhaps best characterized by where the director placed the single intermission.
Most students of Hamlet as theatre, in contrast to its purely literary or psychological or thematic dimensions, know that the theatrical climax of the play occurs in the "mousetrap" scene (the players' scene, Act II, scene iii) -- the close of which is the most obvious place to break the play. Mr. Ziegler, however, chose to place the interval in the middle of the prayer scene with a blackout as Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius because the king is at prayer. This choice (the second half of the play begins with the freeze action of Claudius' famous speech, " My words fly up, my thoughts remain below...") almost totally destroys the magnificent irony of Hamlet's decision not to take his uncle's life ("am I then revenged, / To take him in the purging of his soul, / When he is fit and season'd for his passage?").
This was a missed opportunity to use a popular television star to broaden the Festival's audience base. Too bad. . .
HAMLET
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Joseph Ziegler
Cast: Hamlet - Paul Gross; Claudius - Benedict Campbell; Ghost, Player King and Gravedigger - Juan Chioran; Gertrude - Domini Blythe; Polonius - Jerry Franken; Laertes - Graham Abbey; Ophelia - Marion Day; Horatio - David Keeley; Rosencrantz - Evan Buliung; Guildenstern - David Kirby; Osric - Damien Atkins
Set and Costume Design: Christina Poddubiuk
Lighting Design: Louise Guinand
Sound Design: Jim Neil
Festival Theatre at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario
Festival Website - http://www.stratford-festival.on.ca
Running: May 3 to November 5, 2000
Running Time: 3 hours, 10 minutes including one intermission
Review by Joe Green based on June 30, 2000 matinee performance |
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