"Hamlet" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

OSF photo by Jenny Graham

I suppose it's only appropriate that the last show we saw this season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was "Hamlet." At the preface session before the show, the presenter asked for a show of hands as to whether anyone there was seeing "Hamlet" for the first time, and there were probably ten or a dozen hands. He then asked whether people had seen it multiple times, studied it, performed it, etc. And I sat wondering whether, having seen it eight times already this year, I might have the most recent experience with the play. Who knows?

I had been looking forward to this show, not only because I've been immersed in the play for some months, but also because I quite enjoy the work of this year's Hamlet, Danforth Comins. Having seen him in a number of roles at Ashland, both Shakespeare and others, I've really appreciated the depth and breadth of his work, so wanted to see how he handles this classic role.

The Play

I'll spare you the plot summary. Suffice it to say this was the whole play, though with some lines cut, but not entire scenes, characters, or plot lines. So that is one difference from the Shotgun Players version I have seen so much this year. On the other hand, it's a full, large cast with fixed roles, so that's different, too.

The staging is pretty sparse, as befits the Elizabethan stage, and the costumes are late Elizabethan, too, though the younger generation of characters have some slightly more modern styling to them. It works well. The Ghost, all in gray, drifts in an out of the fog very well, and I liked the way all the wrongfully-killed characters tended to come back to watch subsequent action from above, in the background. This Elsinore has lots of ghosts.

One rather jarring touch that I still don't quite understand is the electric guitars that Hamlet occasionally picks up and plays. I suppose if I analyzed it carefully, there would be some symbolic aspect to it. There is also a musician on the level above who plays guitar and sometimes drums. The program calls it a "soundscape" or some such, but mostly it seemed intrusive. A bit too loud, relative to the (amplified) actors, at least at times. And the part I really didn't get was that Hamlet is aware of this musician guy and interacting with him a bit. It seemed out of place.

The only way I can really rationalize that is that the musician represents the dark, brooding aspect of Hamlet. Indeed, he does sing some of Hamlet's more brooding lines. So I guess I can take him as an externalized element of Hamlet, though that makes it harder to explain his playing in scenes where Hamlet is not present, and I'm pretty sure there are such.

Overall

It's "Hamlet," and it's a very good "Hamlet." Comins is excellent. Even within our small group there is disagreement over whether/when/to what degree Hamlet is mad versus feigning. Michael Elich is a menacing Claudius, drifting apart from Robin Goodrin Nordli's Gertrude. Derrick Lee Weeden is a fine Polonius; he and his children are all African American, which had to be intentional, as it emphasizes the difference between the royal Danes and those who serve them.

Ultimately, this "Hamlet" is the story of three families, each of which sees a father killed and his son seeking revenge, albeit in very different ways. At least one person in our party, familiar with the Shotgun abridgement, felt that keeping Fortinbras in the story adds something. Although I agree, it's mostly from a kind of academic point of view. The story of Fortinbras (both of them) is barely told and even less shown. It's such a thin, sketchy telling that it barely merits comparison with the House of Hamlet or the House of Polonius.

Ultimately, I love the excellence of the overall production and cast, and it's a treat to see a full production and the polish that comes from the artists polishing their single roles over a run of many months. My experience with the shifting casting of Shotgun's production has opened my eyes to some of the many possibilities that the play offers. This provides a great basis for evaluating a single production and the choices the production team have made, which is great.

Postscript

As noted above, we attended a fairly brief "preface" to this production of "Hamlet," where the presenter talked about a number of the ambiguities in the text and how those provide many valid options for interpretation and performance. I was pleased to realize that nearly all of those he mentioned, plus a number he did not, have all occurred to me because of the shifting cast of the "Hamlet" I've been watching all year. Tonight's preface and performance both validated that the time I have spent watching, thinking about, and discussing "Hamlet" have been time well spent. And I think it's safe to say I haven't achieved "too much Hamlet," for sure.