In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how typically administrators use the feminine characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I additionally savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether or not within the type of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is both silly, egocentric or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions go for a bodily staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mom in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mom in a black gown, then presses her in opposition to a set of closet doorways. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet additionally fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s within the 2017 London manufacturing by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” on the Brooklyn Academy of Music final yr emphasised Gertrude’s sexuality to an excessive, having her slink and shimmy as if overwhelmed with sexual power. The textual content implies {that a} lady too free along with her affections digs her personal grave.
That features, in fact, Hamlet’s eternally damned love curiosity, Ophelia (memorialized on my proper forearm with a cranium and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail feminine stereotype, and have craved a manufacturing or adaptation that might give this character company — any type of company — throughout the area of her grieving, her insanity and her dying.
Kenny Leon’s in any other case underwhelming “Hamlet” on the Delacorte this summer season did simply that. Solea Pfeiffer performed an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her Seventeenth-century dwelling into the current.
This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and efficiency, raving insanity and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many administrators literalize of their productions general, some utilizing mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s fixed reflections on the expense of motion, others turning to trace on the divide between presentation and reality.
However as a lot as “Hamlet” can function a personality examine, for me the story extends far past a manufacturing’s conceptualization of a misplaced prince with a splintered ego. It is a story that begins and ends with grief.
I’ve a tattoo for Hamlet and his pricey, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked cranium in a crown. Having misplaced my dad virtually a decade in the past, I’m accustomed to the sensation of being haunted by a father who is probably not a literal king however maybe only a patriarch taking the identical low cost photographs from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fats Ham.” Within the play, a Black, queer tackle “Hamlet” in dialog with Shakespeare’s unique textual content, Hamlet isn’t just tied to his father by way of a way of filial obligation but in addition by way of guilt, remorse, disgrace. In Pap I noticed my very own father’s flaws — the spite, the unfairness, the poisonous masculinity. It made me surprise how a lot of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and the way a lot for the steadiness his father symbolized.
