{"id":635,"date":"2024-06-06T04:37:01","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T04:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/?p=635"},"modified":"2024-06-17T18:20:53","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T18:20:53","slug":"a-very-moving-hamlet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/a-very-moving-hamlet\/","title":{"rendered":"A Very Moving Hamlet<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Patricia Keeney<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hamlet. <\/em>Based on the work by William Shakespeare. Designed and directed by Robert Lepage. Co-designed and choreographed by Guillaume C\u00f4t\u00e9. Composer: John Gsowski. Dancers: Guillaume C\u00f4t\u00e9, Greta Hodgkinson, Robert Glumbek, Carleen Zouboules, Lukas Malkowsky, Bernard Meney, Natasha Poon Woo, Connor Mitton, Willem Sadler. Produced by Ex Machina\/C\u00f4t\u00e9 Danse\/Dvoretsky Productions.Seen in Toronto, Canada, at the Elgin Theatre in April 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It begins with nervous theatricality. Sombre drumming. Red plush curtains. Flickering chandeliers. Yawning space. All signalling tone and style. The kind of pared down \u201cset\u201d we have come to expect from contemporary directors in their focus on actor and text. Except in this case, it is dancers and skeletal text. A figure in black. Hamlet, the doomed prince\u2014lithe and stretched with portent\u2014looms, with his back to stage action, as a tormented shadow over everything to come.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Guillaume C\u00f4t\u00e9 as Hamlet before the action, contemplating all the roles he must play. Photo: St\u00e9phane Bourgeois<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

But why do the play as dance? That is the question. Yes, Hamlet<\/em>\u2019s history with dance goes back as far as an Italian ballet of 1788. This may have to do with the amount of action going on in a drama that is also highly psychological, intellectual and political. As designer and director Robert Lepage puts it, \u201cThere\u2019s a castle to defend, spies to stab behind the arras and the fencing-match finale.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lepage himself has a past with Hamlet<\/em>. This Qu\u00e9becois wizard of theatrical form identifies the play\u2019s central struggle between thought and action that keeps calling him back. Perhaps the most surprising iteration was his first one. He describes his one-man techno production of Elsinore<\/em> by his company, Ex Machina, in 1995 as \u201ca tentative exploration of the intricacies of Hamlet\u2019s thought and times and in some sense of my own.\u201d Fittingly Lepage played all the parts.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Gertrude (Greta Hodgkinson) hovering in an agony of guilt and recrimination and over her murdered husband. Photo: St\u00e9phane Bourgeois<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Guilliame C\u00f4t\u00e9, principal dancer, co-designer and choreographer, danced his own first Hamlet<\/em> with the National Ballet in 2012. Finding that version \u201cmore about psychology than story,\u201d he wanted to develop Hamlet further as a man \u201ckeenly attuned both to his . . . inner struggle and political power dynamics.\u201d His is a Hamlet, tortured by the belief that his uncle Claudius has actually murdered his royal father and usurped the throne of Denmark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

C\u00f4t\u00e9\u2019s fraught figure veers from shock and mourning to the o\u2019er-hasty nuptials of his mother Gertrude with the traitorous regicide. A lively staccato violin skips and twirls everyone to the marriage feast in expected celebratory fashion. It throbs louder and louder as a surtitle flashes: \u201cOh that this too, too solid flesh would melt.\u201d The merry-makers dissipate and Hamlet whirls to centre stage, his arms, the whipping windmills of his restless mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is heavy breathing. To sliding violins, the telltale ghost quivers up from a vast cloth that covered the festive table to become an accusatory shrouded corpse. Such visual moments are Lepage\u2019s stock in trade. Under the surtitle \u201cThere is something rotten in the state of Denmark,\u201d Hamlet\u2019s terrible vision rises higher to the sound of tinkling bells while the backdrop fills with the ominous shadows of Gertrude and Claudius, the treacherous two that torment him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gradually music and imagery entwine. One ceases to consider sound separately. It is not incidental but essential, fully integrated as part of an intricate emotional and physical pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We move with the dance in creative service to story. A fusion of classical and contemporary, it is beautiful and expressive though not surprising. Following an emotional arc that arises from action conveyed through gesture and visual device, it enhances high points of tragedy, moments of comedy and ultimately the precipitous drop into psychological disaster and death.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The ‘Alas Poor Yorick\u2019 scene in which Hamlet (Gillaume C\u00f4t\u00e9) is tormented by the now dead Ophelia (Carleen Zouboules), seeing her face in the death’s head. Photo: Matt Barnes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

No doubt, there are adjustments to be made for those of us wedded to the Shakespearean word. One misses, for instance, the amplitude of text as characters parade forth with surtitles: Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius. While this feels too programmatic, it is the dance that defines their space and the roles they will fill. Along with clever imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ophelia is floating fear. Delicate distraught energy. A barometer for tragedy, registering bad weather. Her brother, the break-dancing Laertes teases and plays with her to skittish drumbeats. Polonius their fussy interfering father intrudes with heavy breath and rude pointing beneath the foreshadowing surtitle: words<\/em> becoming swords<\/em> with the slipping of the letter s<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hamlet is a consummate actor, inventing all the roles he needs. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been sent by Claudius to ferret out Hamlet\u2019s true intentions. The harrowed Prince plays his old school chums for the athletic clowns and show-offs they are. What is the purpose of all these pretendings? To survive? To wreak revenge? To love? Endemic to the play, such questions are clearly posed by dance and theatrical design.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Mousetrap scene newly imagined. Photo: St\u00e9phane Bourgeois<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The biggest pretense comes in the Mousetrap scene, the first real coup de th\u00e9\u00e2tre<\/em> of this production. Rows of benches rise to a stage where two dancers perform. They are turned away from us but on their heads they wear face masks. They appear to be dancing for the audience but are actually moving backward towards the rear of the stage. This is the weird world in which poison is poured into the king\u2019s ear. This is Hamlet\u2019s world. Back to front, upside down, topsy turvy. Utterly unnerving in its message to the distracted prince.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his private contrition, guilty Claudius falls before a crucifix while a surtitle flashes his dilemma: \u201cMy words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.\u201d To grinding music Hamlet raises a sword over him.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Greta Hodgkinson as Gertrude, the Mother of Hamlet\u2019s tortured mind before a rack of different costumes representing the women in his life (Gertrude and Ophelia) who so confound him. Photo: Sasha Onyshchenko<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In a flash, we flip to turmoil. Hamlet is a spinning sword without music. Just swirling air. Polonius hides behind the arras listening for clues. Gertrude\u2014set up to interrogate Hamlet\u2014strikes her son. Frenzied, he lunges, thinking to kill Claudius. After a duel between rod and sword, each weapon clinching character, he discovers he has stabbed the interfering nuisance, Polonius, whom Gertrude now kicks away at sword point. The play\u2019s violence, adroitly conveyed in dance turns incestuously suggestive. To an emotional glissando, Hamlet slides down the willowy form of his mother and, laying his head in her lap, kisses her. Full of self-recrimination, he drags away the dead Polonius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ophelia peeks out, the timid witness of this action. Shadows of Gertrude and her murdering lover fill the stage with bowing and kissing. The scene climaxes in an inspired moment of inner torment. The women in Hamlet\u2019s life\u2014Gertrude, Ophelia\u2014dance in many mirrors, before a rackful of different costumes, confounding him in their multiplicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His world is all against him, his mind the enemy he cannot defeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the piece deepens so do its visual dramatizations. Beautiful and terrifying, Ophelia\u2019s death billows before us in silky blue fabric. With stunning effect, she becomes a looming shadow before the wavering scrim, falls into it. Submerged, she is lost in drowning waves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the wrong people are dying.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ophelia (Carleen Zouboules) and company dancing her torment. Photo: St\u00e9phane Bourgeois<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In the final blood bath Hamlet and Laertes fight over Ophelia conveying extreme anguish as they fling her lifeless body around like a rag doll to a female voice intoning lament. In a Chinese opera moment, whirling red and white ribbons on the ends of their swords, they battle to the death, ultimately bringing Gertrude down with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only the faithful Horatio (played surprisingly ungendered by Natasha Poon Woo) remains, ushering in a brave new world to fill the deafening silence of the vanquished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The language of dance is a language that can speak Hamlet<\/em> in Lepage\u2019s words \u201cthrough breath, energy and gestures that can reveal hidden meaning, concealed,\u201d he adds, \u201cby the poetry of the text.\u201d I disagree that Shakespeare\u2019s poetry conceals meaning. Quite the contrary when one considers the number and variety of Hamlet<\/em> versions through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this production the Lepage\/C\u00f4t\u00e9 team adds new shape and colour to a play that never stops giving. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Patricia Keeney<\/strong> is an award-winning Canadian theatre critic, poet and novelist. An associate editor for Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre project, she is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Toronto\u2019s York University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2024 Patricia Keeney
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN:2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Creative<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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