Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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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.

 

P.K. Brask