Hamlet

No, I'm not going to complain about weaknesses in the script this time.

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, receives its umpteen-millionth production at the Denver Center Theatre Company's Stage Theatre (through February 23). After I saw it two weeks ago, I thought I might be helped in sorting out my thoughts by viewing the 1990 film version of Tom Stoppard's existentialist deconstruction of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

This may not have been my best idea.

At least that's what I thought at first. However, as he demonstrated in his masterful script for the wonderful Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard understands the Bard's creative mind about as well as any other thespian out there. For all its absurdity, Rosencrantz... can be read as an actor's attempt to make sense out of a rather challenging script. So much of Hamlet's plot is utterly mystifying. Why does Hamlet play mad? Its only obvious product is to drive Ophelia herself mad, and consequently to suicide, which product serves no purpose of Hamlet's and is rather apparently at odds with his professed love for her. Moreover, as Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern) asks, how is it that Claudius takes the throne after his brother's death when the prince and heir apparent is quite obviously of age to assume the crown? And those are just the beginning of the play's problems, the multitude of which in turn raises the question posed by Theatre Companion: why, exactly, does this play sit at the center of the English-speaking theatrical tradition and the Western canon itself?

Live theatre has the ability to resolve any number of apparent problems with a script simply because the spoken and performed word has an interpretive power not inherent in the printed word. During this performance, I was struck by the powerful and vivid description of depression Hamlet gives in the first act, and also by just how funny he is. Plot and extremely grim ending aside, Hamlet himself comes across as a fully realized human being, so much so that all the other characters become rather flat by comparison. Of course the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are little more than cardboard cut-outs, but the same could be said for Polonius, Gertrude, and Claudius. Only Ophelia in her madness competes with the prince for our sympathy and empathy.

Once again, kudos to the excellent staging. Judging from the costumes, this production is set sometime in the mid-1920s, but that time period seems hardly relevant to the action. Lightly rusted scaffolding at the back of the thrust stage serves as Castle Elsinore's exteriors and interiors, and the torso of a collapsed statue of King Hamlet to stage right, along with a wall of portraits in which the faces are all obscured, visually represent the metaphorical rottenness in the state of Denmark.

Nearly every production of Hamlet is edited for length, so the difficult bits may have been removed from this one. (It's been so long since I last saw this play that I stood no chance of noticing what may have been left out.) Nonetheless, I thought the plot, as a whole, flowed rather seamlessly and logically. Even the bit with the players staging the death of Gonzago made sense, even if it is largely a waste of time. (Seriously: the circumstantial evidence for regicide is so overwhelming that even the thin reed of a ghost's testimony can bear the weight of a damning case against Claudius.) In other words, were it up to me to avenge the death of Hamlet Sr., I would likely have chosen a different strategy, but I suppose I can more or less understand why Hamlet Jr. chose his.

Having said that, Fortinbras' closing speech praising Hamlet still strikes me as entirely unwarranted, but maybe I'm missing something in the prince's character obvious to everyone else. I just can't get over the fact that a good 95% of the deaths in this play are entirely unnecessary, and most are attributable to Hamlet's miscalculations. Not to be judgey or anything.

One last note, sincerely not meant to be as snarky as it will sound: while Aubrey Deeker handed in a robust and manly performance, his actual hairline came nowhere near meeting the expectations raised by this production's promotional materials.