Boston Globe, November 29, 1991, by Kevin Kelly. "A handsome but dull Hamlet" ----------------------------------------------------------- STAGE REVIEW HAMLET Play by Shakespeare Directed by Ron Daniels. Set and costumes by Antony McDonald. Lighting, Frances Aronson. Music, Claire van Kampen. Sound, Maribeth Beck. Fight choreography, Alexis Denisof. Produced by the American Repertory Theater in collaboration with Pittsburgh Public Theater At: The Loeb Drama Center, through Jan. 12 The last time I saw Hamlet he was doing the boogaloo in the African bush at the North Shore Music Theater. Right now at the Loeb, in a joint production by ART and Pittsburgh Public Theater that began at the Royal Shakespeare Company, he's trying to keep his balance in a vast, modern, seaside Elsinore about to sink like the Titanic. A wall of storm- tossed water is visible through the window in the main room, a kind of empty replica of a grand salon on a 1930s ocean liner. Hamlet walks the tilting decks with his head into the wind. Aha! The whorl of his frenzied mind and, yes, the spume of civilization! Drowned in madness, shiny with sweat, hair standing up like a corkscrew (or a question mark), he stumbles out one night in soiled pajamas to caution Ophelia in, perhaps, the single most dramatic reading the scene has ever earned. So far so good; so far, much promise. Why, alas, is the rest of the evening so dull? Not from lack of trying. Director Ron Daniels has imagined "Hamlet" yanked out of time - to detail, of course, its timelessness. The overall design - by Antony McDonald - is sparse modern, with high spacious rooms, floors aslant and the sea about to wash us all away in a sweep of history. Elsinore's outside walls (one white, one red) suggest the sides of a pyramid, a castle buttress, a high-rise, an ocean liner's hull. When the play opens, Claudius and Gertrude are dancing (enveloped together), he in uniform, she in velvet, and the Graustarkian image is wonderful. Any moment Claire van Kampen's music will slide to "The Student Prince." It turns instead to dramatic thuds and streaks of atonalism. Style gives way, partially, to substance. As close in age as Hamlet and his mother are, the imminent bedroom scene would be expected to include the usual lick of incest. But Daniels is oblique, not obvious. With Hamlet's madness established in the minds of everyone on stage, Gertrude looks upon her afflicted son with as much loathing as terror. He's her distraught child in PJs. Long ago her actions may have cradled his craziness. The central image here is psychological torment, nothing particularly revolutionary about that. Daniels suggests it's a torment that has already infected the family, the state, the world. More than one "noble mind is here o'erthrown." Yet Daniels' real interest seems to be dislocation itself, mental derangement so inward that it's a universe per se. It's as though Hamlet's major philosophical decision is to hum along with his anguish for the purpose of taking it as far as it will go. In the title role Mark Rylance does the cuckoo riffs like a cuckoo determined to sing. Despite repetitiveness, there are times when he's very moving (his hangdog uncertainty, his confrontation with Ophelia, which begins with such sweetness). There are times when he's just on the other side of acting, communicating solely with his wounded shyness. There are times when he - or Daniels - makes self-conscious choices: facing upstage in an ankle- length black coat, he mumbles the beginning of the first soliloquy; parading downstage, shading his eyes from the lights, he offers - in our laps - "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I"; ridiculing Polonius, he swivels like Elvis; when asked how he is, he gives a thumb-up. Rylance is a good actor; perhaps, indeed, better than that. He takes us deep into Hamlet's paranoia. He's not meant to be poetic, yet he has a nice, offhand, American way with the Shakespearean line (he grew up in Milwaukee). Around Rylance is some work that's acceptable work, and some that's not. Christine Estabrook is fine as Gertrude, one of the few actresses I've seen who react both emotionally and physically to the rapidly accumulating guilt and pain (Estabrook's tremulous pity as she watches Ophelia disintegrate is an acting class in itself). Stephanie Roth, slinky in white satin and ready for "Private Lives," is an interesting Ophelia except that she's a little too stagily nuts. Alvin Epstein, tight as self-righteousness can make him, is a crisp, clear, nonsensically no-nonsense Polonius (who gets murdered, by the way, not behind an arras but on Gertrude's bed). Derek Smith is good as Laertes; Jeremy Geidt is good as the First Gravedigger (he also plays Voltemand); Thomas Derrah and Michael Rudkoe are good as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But, alas, poor Claudius. Mark Metcalf, as the king, probably would be better biting Sigmund Romberg than Shakespeare. Metcalf speaks the lines as though they were as indigestible as tofu. Steven Skybell is part of the furniture as Horatio. Miguel Perez - in Frances Aronson's shivery green light - is an "Exorcist" spook as the Ghost, then oddly slack - pallid - as the First Player. The dumb- show episode - with Perez, Candy Buckley and Jon David Weigand - is done as a shadow play. That's not exactly novel - at Tuesday's preview it seemed imperfectly projected - but it provides a moment. And this "Hamlet" needs them. Running three hours and 15 minutes (with the play's five acts divided into two and the break coming after the third act in the text), there are long stretches when I found myself waiting not for the next turn of plot (nor for one of Ron Daniels' scattered insights) but waiting, instead, for the set to open upstage and reveal the towering height of the pictorial waves (it's a powerful image, particularly against the trapezoid castle). There are other visual moments to remember: the Ghost materializing in Gertrude's room announced by the ectoplasmic swirl of a voluminous, billowing curtain; one character, then another (Hamlet, Gertrude, Ophelia, Claudius) positioned against a bare castle wall to be diminished by the room itself, like lost souls in an asylum. And there is, at the end, some really spectacular swordplay, blades cutting blood out of the air as Hamlet and Laertes slash their way to "silence." But, finally, what the evening comes down to is a specialized take on a masterpiece seemingly rich enough to be interpreted any which way. The evening also comes down to an oxymoron: a "Hamlet" bleakly beautiful, interestingly dull. Photo: Mark Rylance plays Hamlet and Mark Metcalf is Claudius in a scene from the ART production. (Photo credit: Richard Feldman) ----------------------------------------------------------- Bentley's Bedlam http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.