Hamlet, Generations, Death

Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Stratford, Ontario, Canada




We’re in Stratford, Ontario for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. We flew all day Monday while the stock markets continued their free fall due to the credit crisis. It’s an economic event that will affect more lives than any in a generation and most people, including a significant percentage of our representatives in Congress, simply don’t understand it at even the most basic level, from the integration of modern economies to the importance of credit markets, or even what they are. We landed in Toronto at rush hour and joined the vast river of cars on Highway 410 passing Toronto with the setting sun in our eyes for most of the drive. The barely rolling plain made it seem as if we were driving from nowhere into nowhere.

Mostly, this part of Canada is thickly settled, like much of New England. But thirty miles outside of Stratford, the country became bucolic at last with neat, family farms and occasional stands of maple and oak predominating the fall landscape. Stratford itself is affluent and much larger than its namesake. A large park surrounds the river in the center of town and we recognized several sights from “Slings and Arrows,” the Canadian television series that was filmed here a few years ago.

In the afternoon, we saw “Hamlet,” directed by Adrian Noble, guest director and former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. We’d seen another version of “Hamlet” that he’d directed in London in 1992. Then, Kenneth Branagh played the title role. Both of us were very interested to see a Stratford Festival Company production of the play because of their reputation. We were also interested to see how Noble’s vision of the play had evolved.

A good half of the audience were high school students from several schools judging by the variety of uniforms. They were appropriately rambunctious and noisy in the lobby but settled quickly and were mostly a polite and attentive audience. After intermission, they greeted the return of the actors with wild applause, shrieks and whistles as if it were a rock concert. Interestingly, they laughed twice: once when Hamlet stabbed Polonius who collapsed pulling down a large drape - perhaps they thought it was unintentional although it wasn’t – and again when Gertrude succumbed to the poison.

Ben Carlson, who played Hamlet, is a husky, slightly paunchy young actor who uses broad gestures. No one would doubt him in a role as a high school football player. Hamlet is more of a stretch. I thought he was dreadful in the early scenes. Then something surprising happened. The scene with Polonious and Ophelia saying farewell to Laertes, which is so often static and tired, was played with delicate depth and emotion which revealed several powerful emotional turns. For example, Ophelia was honestly excited to tell her father of her relationship with Hamlet which made his rebuke surprising and stinging. Much credit has to go to the relatively young actor, Geraint Wyn Davies, who, for the first time in my experience of many productions, made Polonious, empathetic, interesting and complex. We’d seen something like this before, in an Ashland, Oregon production, when the actor playing Claudius had made so much more of the role than I’d ever thought possible. This time, it seemed to elevate everyone’s performance. And while the production was not great it was good which is no small achievement with such a complex work. As in 1992 I found Noble’s vision of the play-within-a-play scene and the dueling scene to be both static and destructive of willing suspension of disbelief. I’d hoped for more from his imagination, particularly given his Henry IV production with the late Robert Stephens and Michael Maloney. Nonetheless, the kids loved it and gave it a rousing standing ovation. No doubt for some it will be one of the most memorable theater experiences of their lives.

This production was performed, as it often is now, in 19th century clothes, which to my mind brings very little to the play. I’ve read and studied the play on and off for thirty years now and I find my view of it continues to evolve, yet another indication of its greatness. Perhaps, I’m under the influence of the apparent generational conflict in the current presidential election, but I think that’s an aspect in the play that is unduly neglected. It’s a Renaissance play and should be performed as such. I see Claudius and his court as a late medieval culture with the stasis, stratification and ceremony that connotes, whereas Hamlet and Horatio are educated renaissance men, comfortable with innovations of the new age, among them, theater. Thus, Hamlet’s almost scientific strategy to use the play within the play to test Claudius’ guilt is truly innovative, which it most certainly was when Shakespeare wrote the play.

In the evening, we forewent our tickets to Caberet and watched the presidential debates to see if either would say anything of depth about the current financial crisis. Neither Barak Obama nor John McCain said anything new. I was disappointed in them both, particularly in Obama whom I expected to rise to the occasion and offer something both innovative and inspiring to demonstrate the value of his leadership. He could have.

This morning I had email from Carolyn Foreman in Oxford informing me that James Wakelin, a South African bird watcher, ecologist and photographer we’d met in the Arctic, had died in a plane crash in Mozambique. I only knew James for a few days in the informal context of our wilderness experience. But I found him to be consistently gracious, affable and gentile in the very best sense of the word. He leaves behind a young wife and a ten month old son. Today it is raining in Stratford. It’s supposed to rain all day.


Thursday, October 9, 2008
Stratford, Ontario, Canada



And it did rain, sometimes heavily, all day. We drove west on Route 7 from Stratford to see what we could see, in spite of the weather. The two-lane highway led us through more small towns and long stretches of family farms. Each was unique and details like clothes hanging outside on a line, or a new dormer under construction on a 19th century farm house or a small bakery in the center of a town suggested unique and individual stories everywhere. It reminded me of what I’d imagined the Midwest of the United States to be like when I was younger and hadn’t traveled much, before the uniformity of strip malls and suburbanization had changed the landscape. We stopped to take photographs of a grand field of ripe pumpkins. There were more fields of the same just beyond and in places it looked like pumpkins stretched to the horizon. Their spooky brightness in the dreary day was startling.

We drove on until we came to Lake Huron then turned south, following the farms at its edge. Lynn wondered what it was like to have a farm at the edge of the great lake and what it would be like to face the famous storms. Several of the homes seemed low and vulnerable. We stopped when we came to Bay View where we had coffee lattes and shared an excellent, chewy ginger cookie in a small bakery in the narrow main street overhung with willows. Then we drove back

In the evening we saw Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” with Christopher Plummer in the title role. We arrived early and found our seats so we were able to watch the audience arrive. They were mostly older, many in their 70’s and 80’s and I had that rare experience now of feeling like one of the younger members of the audience. As we were waiting, an actor, costumed as the ancient Egyptian god Anubis rose through a trap in the stage and stood perfectly still staring back at us. The irony made me chuckle but it set a mood a great of great age and timelessness which was exactly right. I thought of Shelly’s poem “Ozymandias” which I’d read again when we were in the Arctic. As the lights went down, he disappeared once more.

The lights came up on a hooded figure coming almost out of the audience to face the foot of the Sphinx with whom he then began a one-sided chat, “For I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman and part god - nothing of man in me at all." It was Plummer as Caesar, of course, and I was amazed that though he is in his seventies now, his voice had lost none of its vigor or range. It’s Shaw, so it’s a talky play of course with Caesar having a disproportionate share of the dialogue. But Plummer was precise and strong through out. Moreover, there’s a lot of action in it as well. I couldn’t help but wonder how he manages to do it four times a week. It was a tour-de-force.

Clearly, the Stratford Festival had spent its production nickel for the season on this play, both sets and costumes, which this particular play and cast could wear very well indeed. There was lots of well-made Roman armor, great stone pedestals, and many extras playing the role of Roman soldiers or silent, still Egyptian Gods. One scene drew a collective inhaled gasp from the older members of the audience, which as I said, was the majority. Cleopatra addressed her court, demonstrating a new maturity, authority and will to power gained from her association with Caesar. He, of course, in turn was beginning to give up the latter and moving towards an acceptance of his death. The gasp, however, came because two young female members of her court were bathing nude in a steamy bath.

Finally, I consider “Caesar and Cleopatra” one of Shaw’s “problem” plays, (in the sense that “Hamlet,” “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida” are Shakespeare’s problem plays.) It’s topics: the movement from childhood to maturity foiled against the movement of age to acceptance and death, are difficult ones for a form partly defined by essential and continuous drawing room wit. Like Hamlet in another context, the play and its concept are almost too big for its genre. But like that greatest play in the language it remains better for all that and is probably my favorite after “Man and Superman.” Thank you Christopher Plummer and thank you Stratford Shakespeare Festival. There are rumors it might move to New York. I hope so.