Hamlet at the Guthrie Theater

Or, six bullet points which talk about the specifics of this particular performance and the generalities of Hamlet and theater in general.

1. I enjoyed the show quite a bit. It was nice to see a serious theater company do a serious run at Hamletjust as a play, not as a gimmick. Not punk rock Hamlet, not corporate-world Hamlet, not Hamlet set in the Star Wars universe. Just a very good play, taken at face value.

2. That said, I was a little uneasy going in about the setting. For whatever reason, Joe Dowling, the Guthrie's Artistic Director, chose to set the play in the 1940s. This didn't come across as distracting or gimmicky; the only real effects were in sets and costumes, and the fact that Hamlet and some soldiers use guns (although the final duel is still with rapiers). In fact, the effects of the setting were so minimal that I'm not entirely sure why Dowling bothered. My best guess, which actually makes more and more sense as I think about it, is that the 1940s provide a look and feel that's close-enough to our own lives for us to pick up on a lot of the play's social context that gets buried in a lot of traditional stagings.

Like, in traditional stagings, everyone's just wearing Renaissance garb, making them all look more or less the same, and maybe there's a guard or two standing around with a halberd. Subtleties in Renaissance-era costumes are going to be lost on the audience because the whole aesthetic is so removed from ours. With people in 1940s getups, though, the same visual cues that we use in our regular lives can help reinforce the relationships. Polonius' suit is nice, but not as nice as Claudius', and so on. Having guards in semimodern military uniforms strutting around and subjecting people to intense searches every time they come near Claudius helps reinforce the fact that this is a King we're dealing with here; in a lot of stagings, Claudius comes off as creepy, villainous uncle first and usurping King of Denmark a very distant second (or, as my wife put it: to 21st Century Americans, if a play had the President mysteriously killed and the Secretary of Defense assume his place while the Vice-President just sat and watched, we'd immediately know that something was wrong; but throw royal succession at us, and the old King's brother sounds just as qualified as the son).

3. Much has been made locally about the casting of Santino Fontana as Hamlet, unusual because Fontana is an up-and-comer of approximately the right age to play a college student, not some established elder statesman taking the part to show his chops. I liked Fontana's performance quite a bit. He didn't play the prince as a conflicted-but-magnificent figure hesitating on top of a pedestal; instead, his Hamlet was a recognizable human being who didn't stalk the stage looking for scenery to chew on.

4. This staging offered one fine example of why live theater still offers an experience that you can't replicate with film: the scene with the play-within-a-play performance of The Mouse-Trap was a treat, offering the chance to dart around between the players, Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, and Ophelia, watching each of them react to each other. Being free to move your focus from one to the other is very different from being guided by a camera, and very fun.

5. Unfortunately, this production did cut my single favorite line in all of Shakespeare: Polonius' "I am slain!" It was probably a good cut, since my love for the line is based on how awful it is, but still I was a little disappointed.

And actually, that crap line was pretty important in my ability to appreciate Shakespeare. Recognizing that he'd written some dud lines (and, moreover, feeling confident about my appraisal of "I am slain!" as a dud line) helped me kick Shakespeare off of the pedestal he'd occupied in my mind and instead appreciate his work as actual plays, with good and bad points, rather than as tablets handed down from the heavens.

6. Given that this incarnation of the Guthrie is slated to be knocked down shortly as the company moves to a new facility, the ushers were awfully overzealous about policing where people put their feet.

7. My one real complaint was that the gravedigger clowns went way, way over the top; one of them was so into his "funny" accent that you couldn't even understand him (he sounded a bit like Goofy with socks stuffed in his mouth). There's a difference between comic relief and attempting to teleport early-period Jim Carrey onto the stage. Actually, overdoing it with the comic relief is sort of an endemic problem with modern Shakespeare productions—look at Michael Keaton drooling all over the screen as Dogberry in the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing.

Oh well, you can't win 'em all. Still, good play, good cast, good production, good time.
--Keith Pille