The Guthrie Theater's 60th anniversary production of its inaugural play, Hamlet, is lucid, conservatively staged and, generally, well-spoken. As is true of all performances of Shakespeare's "poem unlimited" the abyss yawning between that poetry as staged in the mind of a reader and the poor shadows strutting and fretting on stage is distressing; Shakespeare's diction and the surreal argument of much of his verse deserves to be intoned in vowels of thunder or inscribed against the sky in incandescent letters and, so, the more sober, level-headed and logical the performance (and the Guthrie production is all of these things), the more pointed the problem of reconciling the words as read and imagined and the text as declaimed on stage. Hamlet makes thematic the gulf between imagination and action -- the melancholy Dane is forever imagining bloody acts that he can't commit -- so, paradoxically, the more paltry, even skimpy, the production, probably the truer it is to Shakespeare's baffling intent. But the problem with Hamlet as a theatrical experience is that reduced to its plot elements, that is, to its action, the play makes no sense and the peculiarities of its last act, in particular, defeat the enterprise. Shakespeare was a great master of theatrical spectacle and effects, but Hamlet's introversion and paralysis defeats theater -- I think this is why we have several folio variants of the play and explains the text's inordinate length (3880 lines); the poet labored over this play more than his other works I think and realized that he couldn't quite get it right for the stage -- hence, the sprawling, digressive character of Hamlet: Shakespeare is casting about for a solution to the problem that he posed for himself -- how to make a play out of inaction.
The Guthrie's 2021 productions lacks frills. The set, the unadorned Wuertele Thrust Stage, is completely utilitarian. Budget has to go somewhere and, so, Orphelia and Gertrude had frequent costume changes. Claudius, played as a glad-handing Boris Johnson or Prince Charles, was regal in handsome blazers, although in one scene he appeared in his night-gown, an alarming and kitschy apparition. The supernumerary players wore military garb like Ukrainian lieutenants or the Honduran National Guard. The ghost was lackluster and mundane; Hamlet's father made his entrances like a man striding onto a subway platform, a sort of spectral commuter dressed like a storm trooper as imagined by the late, lamented Village People -- the ghost wore mirror sunglasses in the manner of a Southern sheriff in a car crash romp movie. The numerous cuts necessary to keep the play to a manageable three hours or so were implemented in a seamless manner. A number of parts were doubled or even tripled -- I think the obsequious Osric, the Player King, and one of the guards on the ramparts at the beginning of the play (possibly Marcellus) were all acted by one player. (I assume that the gravediggers with their broad Scottish brogues also played other roles in the show.) The only innovation was an animated black and white projection, cunningly displayed on various flat surfaces on the stage that presented the so-called "dumb show", "The Mousetrap" adapted from "The Murder of Gonzaga" -- that is the play within the play performed by a rather feckless traveling company of actors and wrought to catch the "conscience of the King" I've seen this effect in other theatrical productions, I think, last in the Minnesota Opera version of The Magic Flute and its effective but distracting. When the Ghost orders Hamlet to revenge him, a glittering pattern of pearl-shaped orbs fluttered around the stage, also a distraction in my view, but an interesting effect. Moody, nondescript music was provided by a on-stage figure who is behind a console and looked at bit like the DJ in a nightclub. (When a flutophone recorder is required on-stage to make a point against the hapless Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, Hamlet simply strides over to the musician takes his instrument and, then, uses it harangue the two courtiers.) Although the Guthrie is very progressive -- all shows begin with a dedication to the Anishinaabe people on whose misappropriated land the theater is built (I would guess the tribes would prefer rent to this virtue signaling) -- several of the characters, particularly Osric, were overt Gay caricatures, broadly played for homophobic (I thought) laughs. Polonius was also conceived in broadly comic terms and was, in fact, very funny. The actor playing Hamlet was well-spoken and convincing, although, of course, no one can give an account of the role sufficient to its rhetoric and diction. And, by the fourth act, my sympathies had shifted to the calmly practical Claudius and Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude -- you long for them to shut up the snarky Hamlet by giving him "quietus with a bare bodkin." There was a moment of inadvertent comedy when Gertrude declaimed her spectacular verbal aria describing Ophelia's suicide by drowning. After twenty lines of exquisite poetry portraying Ophelia's watery demise, Laertes, her brother, asks: "So she's drowned?" rendering the entire previous verse meaningless. It's as if Laertes, who completely lacks in gravitas in this performance, hadn't heard a word that the Queen said. The actor playing Gertrude speaks these splendid lines very well and they have that peculiarly Shakespearian quality of being both gilded and ornamental as well as intensely meaningful. (Otherwise, the Queen uses a screechy register in her speeches that was difficult for me to understand.) The idiotic duel and multiple poisonings in the last act were all effectively choreographed but the lighting was bright and clinical, exposing, I think, too much of the folly of the proceedings. The effect in general was that the Guthrie provided a reasonable map to the play and its various events, but that, somehow, the play itself was missing in action -- the map, as they say, is not exactly the terrain.
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