Last night’s performance of Hamlet by TNT Britain at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center was the last of this run.  It was wonderfully performed, with an excellent use of of sound, music, and dance.  This is a typical feature of TNT’s productions, and the performers are specifically engaged on the basis of their ability across the performing arts.  The performance last night included a good deal of singing, accompanied sometimes by simple instrumentation, and nicely choreographed movements. 

TNT seeks to perform Shakespeare’s work much in the way that it would have been done in its own day, so the sets tend not to be overly elaborate, and make excellent use of the simplest devices.  In this performance of Hamlet, much use was made of puppets, masks, and simple costume changes that allowed the actors to play multiple parts (it was performed by 7 actors).  In 2 sequences with the players, the troupe performed a “puppet show” in which the puppets were acted by humans.  The choreography between the “puppet” and puppeteer was very important for this to work, and it was pulled off beautifully.  This sort of choreography was seen at various stages in the play, and pulled the whole together very nicely.

The ghost was similarly well presented by the troupe, and also made use of choreographed moves between various members of the cast (including his voice — his lines were spoken by all of the male actors in the cast).  When Horatio first encountered the ghost with the two guards on the wall, the guards were holding long spears.  As the ghost disappeared without speaking, the lights above the guards and Horatio flashed, and the guards, in carefully choreographed moves, waved their spears back and forth, as if to fight off whatever evil was threatened by the flashes in the heavens above them.  This was as Marcellus was speaking the lines, “We do it wrong, being so majestical, / To offer it the show of violence; / For it is, as the air, invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery” (1.1).  The overall effect was of a sort of truncated dance sequence.  Such choreographed moves were used throughout the play to highlight similarly important themes and thoughts presented in the dialogue of the text.

One of the very nice aspects of the way Stebbings staged Hamlet was his ability to choose a key metaphor in the play and highlight it for the audience through various stage devices.  The whole performance began with a sort of dance sequence, with two actors holding a blue cloth and waving it like the sea.  Hamlet struggled in the sea, as if drowning, while Ophelia led the rest of the troupe in singing a mournful tune.  As Hamlet finally emerged from the sea, he and Ophelia shared a tender moment together, but ended up being torn apart as the action of the tale began.

This sequence nicely set up several things that unfolded later in the play.  Firstly, it made the audience aware that the setting of the play was near the sea.  Later, we saw Hamlet stand on the edge of a precipice, preparing to throw himself down the cliff into the sea.  He stepped back, and began the “To be or not to be” (3.1) speech.  As he spoke the lines, and as his subsequent confrontation with Ophelia unfolded, there were sounds of the sea and a light musical accompaniment in the background.  Ophelia joined him on this spot for the “get the to a nunnery” confrontation, and he nearly threw her off the edge and into the sea.  Instead, he ended up kissing her in a way that was simultaneously passionate and violent.  (There’s a nice photo of the confrontation on this review.)  

This playing of the confrontation between Hamlet and Ophelia, of course, foreshadowed the later death that Ophelia did endure.  Once again, the opening sequence and the metaphor of the sea were skillfully employed as we learned of Ophelia’s death (4.7).  In this scene, Laertes and Gertrude stood on an elevated platform, one on each side of the stage, as she told him of Ophelia’s death.  While Gertrude gave her moving description of the scene, Ophelia walked out from behind Laertes, draped in the blue cloth that was used in the opening scene to represent the sea (in which Hamlet struggled).  She crossed in front of Laertes, singing the same mournful tune we heard in the opening sequence, and walked across the front of stage.  Her brother stretched out his hands to her as he spoke of his grief, creating a very touching effect.  It was one of the better performances I have ever seen of this scene.

Because of the opening sequence, it seemed that the Hamlet-Ophelia relationship was foregrounded in the TNT production.  There was nothing at all Freudian in the representation of the Hamlet-Gertrude relationship, which has gotten to be so commonplace over time.  Instead, it was Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia that was important, and we watched a heartbreaking circumstance destroy whatever affection there might once have been between them.  In a very nice touch, this relationship was mirrored in the Gertrude-Claudius marriage. In one of our earliest encounters with the royal couple (the first in which we saw them alone), Claudius brought a goblet to Gertrude, and she drank from it.  He then also drank from it, and leaned to kiss her.  In a sort of sudden, almost violent move, her head fell back, and he leaned to kiss her on the neck.  This was a nice bit of foreshadowing of her eventual death of the queen, and was connected to the Hamlet-Ophelia pairing by the fact that the younger couple sang powerfully and sensually in the background as the king and queen enacted their mime.  In this way, it seemed to me that the production emphasized the cost of the “rotten” state of the nation in the personal lives of those embroiled in the politicking. 

Ophelia’s madness was wonderfully played by Sophie Franklin.  Her “bawdy” songs were accompanied by her interaction with Hamlet’s coat, which he had discarded in their confrontation on the precipice above the sea, and she wore to begin the scene.  To end the sequence, she stuffed the coat up her nightgown, making her appear pregnant.  She got up and moved off stage, waddling like a woman heavy with child.  It was a very poignant image of the barrenness of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, and really all of the relationships we saw staged.

It was interesting to note that Ophelia’s madness came at the time the three men in her life were absent.  This was emphasized by the placement of Polonius’ dead body on the stage, while mention was made of the absence of both Laertes and Hamlet.  Of course, a feminist reading of the text would point out how she was helpless to function in the patriarchal society in which she lived unless she had some male authority figure standing over her.  That seems to be a fair assessment of what confronted us on the stage.

Laertes returned in style, brazenly reentering the world from which he had been absent.  He, accompanied by two friends, raged out onto the stage, shouting at the top of their lungs.  All three ran straight to the front of the stage, jumped down off of it, and stood in front of the first row of the audience shouting madly, then jumped back up onto the stage.  It was a nice effect to demonstrate the disparity between Laertes and Hamlet.  Laertes came in as a man of action, not hesitating in the revenge he believed he should take on behalf of his family, and apparently feeling no qualms at all about killing another person. Hamlet, as we know, was much slower to act, and questioned whether it could really be right to take revenge.

This brings up one of the greatest strengths of the TNT production of Hamlet.  It seemed, in watching it, that director Paul Stebbings had a very clear idea of his interpretation of the text.  As he describes in his director’s notes, his interpretation is something of a departure from what we have seen in the playing of Hamlet, at least since Olivier’s 1948 film.  Stebbings does not see Hamlet as stymied by indecision, but as caught in a real moral dilemma, and seeking truth through all the murkiness of ambiguous ethical standards.  In the director’s vision, this traditional notion of Hamlet as plagued by indecision is challenged by the Dane’s managing to speak the truth only through feigning madness.  The idea that truth can be reached through pretending, of course, must have real appeal to anyone who places much value on the illusory world of the theatre — truth is reached through deception on the stage every night, one would like to think — and gives a hint as to why the play-within-the-play might be so important. 

For me, I thought Hamlet’s madness seemed more real and less feigned in the TNT production than in most others.  For one thing, the lines in which he tells Horatio that he will pretend to be mad were left out.  Also, I thought his encounter with the ghost lent itself to more of a man walking on the edge of madness, with the ghost touching his hand, leaving him momentarily insensible as a result.  But one way or another, real or pretended madness, it certainly did accomplish a real highlighting of the inner struggle of Hamlet to deal with the moral bind that he found himself in, and he did not come off so much as a man afraid of action as simply someone overly caught up in his own problems.  Self-absorption was this Hamlet’s tragic flaw.

There was much that was good about the production, and it just confirms to me all of the good things I have heard about TNT’s ability to stage Shakespeare’s work.  Stebbings and the troupe clearly understand how to read a play, and then bring it to life in a way that demonstrates their reading of the text.  Their reputation as one of the finest traveling drama troupes around is clearly deserved.

© 2008 Shelly Bryant