Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 11 Number 2, August 2010
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UPON WATCHING THE 2010 HAMLET IN ASHLAND, OR
They got the wedding kransekage right
the cone shaped stack of marzipan-filled cake rings
with little Danish paper flags stuck into it
and, yes, some of those costumes you could see
on the streets of Elsinore today
(and I think I spotted the Danish
anti-nuclear power decal on his guitar case
when Laertes trundled off to France).
The players from the city formed
a hip-hop troupe and Hamlet himself
seemed, yes, (that word) seemed
in Dan Donohue's rendering
to be a rap-influenced white poet infatuated
with long vowels
(the things they learn down there in Wittenberg)
perhaps to suggest to his mother that matter hints at mater
or to make hip slant rhymes
leaving all nobility of mind behind from the start
so no loss when he died. (It made sense that this Hamlet
would entrust his story to this doltish eternal student, Horatio
who'd seemingly no philosophy but to dress as a tramp)
He had to die this boy, we wanted him to die
this youth, this eternal youth (a flab
they might have called him in Danish) who just did things
in mannered but by no means manly ways
there was no life in him, no animating principle
only the shell of behaviour
unlike Ophelia as rendered by Susannah Flood
an intelligent, self-possessed young woman
in a world where such possession cannot be had
(and so out of joint with Laertes and Polonius
but then no one gets to choose their family)
who was being forced so deeply into emptiness
that she had to drown herself in a halfhearted current
with stones in her pocket to ensure success
(Flood was the one to show us how
unconsoled despair may ruin more than a mind).
I half hoped she would pop up in some other dimension
(even as a ghost) where we could see a play about her
and maybe Claudius as rendered by Jeffrey King, a player
who also (in a better a better kind of seeming) seemed able
to make choices that portray the flow of the kinds of emotions
(in this case ambition's gushing well and the always
too late and useless regret) and views of the world a man like him
– or in the case of Flood's Ophelia – a young woman like her
could be living through. It is not a matter of what the actor feels
(though that may be a shortcut in preparation
with the caveat that in this tradition the job
of the actor is more to keenly observe
and reproduce than it is to self-express)
it is a matter of whether they can (also) portray
a persuasive possibility of such a person in such and such
a situation where such and such and such become
indistinguishable suches and we all – performers and audiences -
end up having our cake and eating it too.