Review: HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK at Elgin Theatre

Hamlet is so hot right now.

The Prince of Denmark’s story has been in regular rotation for centuries, but numerous renditions of the age-old tale of royal betrayal, feigned madness, and a son’s revenge are converging on Toronto stages this year.

There’s Soulpepper’s upcoming solo Hamlet with Raoul Bhaneja taking on seventeen parts. There’s Canadian Stage’s summer Dream in High Park returning to Shakespeare’s number one hit, not to mention the company’s recent upcoming season announcement featuring the modern-day adaptation of James Ijames’ award-winning Fat Ham. There’s the philosophical backstage shenanigans of hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, starring two of our favourite hobbits, which closes April 6th.

And, overlapping with the latter, we now have yet another twisty take in the form of Guillame Côté and Robert Lepage’s version, where the Danes dance their soliloquies instead of saying words, words, words. Produced by Côté Danse, Ex Machina and Dvoretsky Productions, THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET is on at the Elgin theatre for five short days, and it’s a respectable addition to Ham Mountain, a visually inventive production that never lets its stage magic overshadow the dancers behind and in front of the curtain.

There’s something delightfully self-conscious and theatrical in the way Lepage and Côté’s design uses curtains to hide, reveal, and separate characters. The rich red fabrics ripple behind the dancers as if being pushed by the wind or supernatural forces. They’re dropped to mark a scene change, gathered to form the background to a bedchamber, and in the funniest moment of an otherwise tragic show, quickly parted to show why you shouldn’t listen in on a couple’s private business. The constant incursion of curtains helps underscore how Hamlet is constantly playacting in his attempt to expose his uncle’s treachery, while, perhaps, encouraging us to remember that it’s “curtains” for most of the characters on stage.

When the curtains draw back, they reveal a largely bare stage; our eyes catch on the main fixture, a platform supporting a raised pair of thrones that look like a (highly) elevated and elongated version of our theatre seats. Everything else is mobile, segments of an imposingly long banquet table that also become a bed, a murder site, a pall to bear, and a grave covering. In the famous moment when Claudius temporarily gains his reprieve, caught praying when Hamlet chooses a bad moment to exact revenge, he’s foregrounded against one of these boxes, sporting a cross with a lurid neon red line of backlighting.

The rest of the lighting (designed by Simon Rossiter) comes from hanging candelabra that appear fashioned from antlers, symbols of pride and protection, but also remnants of two animals locked in a pointless fight. This kingdom, Lepage’s design suggests, is built on dead things, a shadow of what it’s supposed to be.

Côté’s choreography tells the well-known story in a relatively straightforward way. He includes all of the moments and hits all of the beats, though he changes the way one or two events happen to simplify logistics. Each dancer has a clear personality and moves with fluidity and intention. Côté himself as Hamlet is moody and hunches inward, when he’s not wielding a sword (sometimes with deadly accuracy, sometimes with the clumsiness of a person who doesn’t have a complete handle on the game he’s playing). Occasionally, his long dance monologues feel a little self-indulgent, but it wouldn’t be Hamlet without a little self-indulgence from the lead character.

Robert Glumbek as Claudius is buff and tough, relying on a powerful musculature to seduce and intimidate. Bernard Meney’s Polonius wields a large staff like a confused wizard, using it for its musicality and ability to disarm an unsuspecting relative. Rosencrantz (Connor Mitton) and Guildenstern (Willem Sadler) cavort around like monkeys, consistently letting their friend slip through their grasp. Ophelia (Carleen Zouboules) flutters through her scenes, passed around by powerful men who claim to love her even after her death, her limp body lolling in their grasp. Lukas Malkowski may be the world’s first b-boy Laertes, contorting himself into breakdancing positions as though he’s pushing the earth down by the shoulder, and Gertrude (Greta Hodgkinson) flips between hard partying and melancholy.

Perhaps the sharpest mover and observer is Natasha Poon Woo’s Horatio, the evening’s sole survivor and its main sense of hope. Poon Woo’s clever Horatio is light-footed and joyful even in the face of adversity, which makes the character’s final fate even more crushing as Horatio takes in the carnage.

While Lepage’s staging largely gets out of the way of the dancers and lets them own the stage, there are a few notable visual treats and surprises. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in a shadow play that dizzyingly alters size and scope before disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared. Ophelia’s madness and death, represented respectively by a mirrored room that shatters apart and a large blue cloth that cradles her lovingly before pulling her downwards, are both quite beautiful. The play within a play maintains our interest via outsized masks (by Danielle Boutin) worn backwards on the players’ bodies, and the carefree, celebrating court makes an unexpected music with objects of revelry.

But what of Shakespeare’s powerful language? We get a hint of this at the top of the stage, with surtitles used sparingly to introduce an entrance or to remind us of a famous line. Cleverly, Lepage transforms the phrases via moving projection, creating some delightfully unexpected anagrams. It’s such a fun, playful device, and I found myself wishing it were used more consistently throughout the play to reveal hidden meanings, revealing the words under the words.

Similar to musical theatre, which posits that feelings too large to be spoken must be sung, and too large to be sung must be danced, the disintegration of Shakespeare’s text distills the proceedings into something more visceral than heady. At the same time, it’s not quite visceral enough to surmount the Hamlet problem, which is that most productions of the show serve more as a comment on the original material than a genuinely emotional experience.

Shakespeare’s text would dictate that “The rest is silence,” but despite the lack of spoken words, that isn’t entirely true. The stage is often filled with amplified, shuddering breaths and wails, as the characters express their pain. Alternated with this quiet, gasping suffering, John Gzowski’s intense music sometimes sounds like an incipient, buzzing migraine, and sometimes resolves into more melodious, driving strings.

It's a bold thing to declare that your version of Hamlet is “groundbreaking,” as this production does on its program cover. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is a truly groundbreaking production (a nearly impossible task), what it is is a show full of sharp, clear intention, striking, consistent visuals, and athletic, impressive movement, which looks at Shakespeare from a slightly different angle. True to Lepage and Côté’s anagram theme, I can say that, with these two artist AT HELM, this show might make you, AH, MELT.

Photo of Guillaume Côté and Natasha Poon Woo provided by Ex Machina

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