CollisionWorks

Once again, thanks for the bravery of an unlikable Hamlet -- I’ve never seen the character portrayed so much as a collaborator with his own misfortune. This fits well with a modern perspective on the concluding bloodbath being a self-made rather than star-crossed tragedy. Typically, the only thing that gives this guignol meaning for me is to overlay a feminist reading whereby every wrong turn is taken by walking away from a feminine “frailty”; but through what is also the least androgynous Hamlet performance I’ve ever seen, this is suitably accentuated in absentia, and the meaningless becomes the point. Long before that Bard-in-Basra ending, deft dramatic emphases had well portrayed the fetishization of personal spleen and honor without purpose, from Hamlet to Laertes to our current unworthy scion and his corporate court. The courageous bodkin-ing of “To be or not to be” gives a whole new perspective on Hamlet’s other suicidal protestations as manipulative exhibitionism, and the paring of scenes with Ophelia (if memory serves) makes all his proclamations of love for her a hollow echo of his one true narcissistic attachment (even in this version he is, after all, the one he talks to most :-)). The psychological conception of the ghost was inspired, not as any visible phantom but some solidified word both incarnating and instigating Hamlet’s consuming obsession, a bullet ricocheting out of his own skull. Loved Jerry Marsini’s football-captain Claudius, Bryan Enk’s clammy Scooter Libby Polonius, and the grand obligation and shallow understanding of Stacia French’s Gertrude. A sour prince whose story left a good taste (trippingly?) on the tongue.