Last Tuesday, Mer took me on a late-night mid-week date to Kent State to see their production of Hamlet. She had “won” the tickets at CVCA’s auction. We have seen several productions at Kent, and I have generally liked them, so I was looking forward to the production.

The director’s notes were helpful. His vision for the play was to translate Hamlet to the near future, and to stage it in a style that emphasized corruption, scandal, and the hunger for power. He also decided to make Hamlet a Muslim, I think with the idea of making Hamlet even more of an outsider, since no one else was Muslim.

The scandal-vision of the play was evident from the opening of the play. The director felt free to shuffle scenes around, and so he opened the play with the new king, Claudius, singing a rock song while two college-aged girls in short skirts and open jackets (with bras) dance around him. He ends the song with a photo-op with Polonius, and then gives a televised speech comforting the nation about the sudden death of his brother. It worked pretty well. The vision of corruption kept coming back again and again, and it unified the beginning and end of the play. That was a great directorial choice.

One choice that was a great concept but was not carried out well was the treatment of the ghost of the play. The director had the ghost be projected around the stage using multiple projectors and using various speakers hidden around the theater. It was a brilliant idea. What was weird and undermined the effect was the fact that the director chose to make the ghost a computer-animated person. The “person” was real enough to make you do a double-take, but not real enough to maintain the illusion. Also, the ghost moved in general and generic ways, not interacting at all with the actors (because it could not). Finally, the mouth of the ghost never moved. I suppose a ghost could talk without moving its mouth, but it was a distraction that was not needed. The idea could have been carried out with a real actor being filmed backstage, to much greater effect.

The worst directorial choice was when Hamlet runs into Ophelia in the courtyard while her father and Claudius are hiding behind a curtain. The director had Ophelia deliver her lines while tipping Hamlet off to the fact that her father was there. Hamlet understands this and says some of his lines for their benefit. The problem is that by the end of the scene, Ophelia is bemoaning the fact that Hamlet is mad, and she played this to the audience and not to her hidden father. Since she has wink-wink informed Hamlet of the entire set-up, this long Hamlet-is-mad speech no longer makes any sense. By what the text is saying, Ophelia needs to really believe that Hamlet is insane. Hamlet may or may not be mad, and he may or may not know that Polonius is hiding behind the curtain, but it is really important that Ophelia really believe that Hamlet is mad.

The director made the interesting and jarring choice of having Ophelia killed by a king-and-queen bodyguard. The queen’s “Ophelia drowned” cover story becomes cover-up. It worked, but made the queen a much more sinister character than she normally is.

The director also made the strange choice of taking the most famous speech in all of English literature, and he moved it and interspersed it with Claudius’ prayer-speech, where he is trying to pray for forgiveness but cannot. It was an interesting thing to try, but the focus on stage was Claudius, and so it made “To be or not to be” become background and counterpoint for Claudius’ speech.

The acting in the play was mostly good, but it was uneven in places. Claudius and Polonius were brilliant. Gertrude was fine. I loved Ophelia when she was playfully interacting with her brother, but she was less convincing in her mad scenes. I was not a big fan of the female Horatio – I felt as if her delivery was very flat most of the time.

Hamlet was interesting. His delivery of the lines was almost flawless, and he played active scenes and mad scenes really well. However, his early scenes where he is in grief were unconvincing, and his introspective speeches were, as Mer put it, “Hamlet mellow” rather than Hamlet struggling to understand everything that was going on. The fact that Hamlet was a Muslim did not really enter into the play at all in any way that I could tell. If the director had not told me that Hamlet was a Muslim, I would have probably assumed that Hamlet was a devout religious man of some generic religion of the near future. It was not overly distracting, but felt forced.

One of the fun things that happened at the play was that Mer and I sat in front of two girls seeing the play for a class. We were able to chat with them at intermission, and helped clear up some of the things that were confusing them. It was great to get to feel smart.

I am glad I got to see the play. It ran long (about 3.5 hours with intermission), but did not feel long. It was good to see all the various new things the director tried, so I could see what worked and what did not. The strongest choice, to show political corruption, worked really well. The other choices worked less well, but the play still held together.