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[Theater reviews]

Down-to-earth Dane
Simon Russell Beale’s Hamlet is a mensch

BY CAROLYN CLAY

HAMLET
By William Shakespeare. Directed by John Caird. Designed by Tim Hatley. Lighting by Paul Pyant. Music by John Cameron. Fight direction by Terry King. Sound by Christopher Shutt. With Simon Russell Beale, Simon Day, Sylvester Morand, Peter McEnery, Sara Kestelman, Peter Blythe, Guy Lankester, Cathryn Bradshaw, Edward Gower, Christopher Staines, Paul Bazely, Janet Spencer-Turner, Chloe Angharad, Michael Wildman, Ken Oxtoby, and Martin Chamberlain. The Royal National Theatre production, at the Wilbur Theatre through April 29.

“Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt,” exclaims Simon Russell Beale’s disarmingly accessible Hamlet, staring at his own clumsy hands with bemused wonder. Moments earlier he had peered curiously down at them, balanced on their thumbs as if on tiptoe, atop what could be his father’s bier. He hasn’t even met the Ghost, and already this Hamlet, awash in grief, is alienated from the very hands that are meant to be the agents of dead dad’s revenge. Indeed, Russell Beale’s waspishly intelligent but depressive Dane is as estranged from his body as he is from his resolve. Never mind that said body is not your regulation Hamlet machine — slender, black-clad, and 30ish. Who cares, when this increasingly disheveled teddy-bear prince, skulking around Elsinore with his divinity student’s duster hugged around his girth, makes us understand utterly what it is to be so self-aware yet so self-sundered that action is impossible?

Russell Beale is the soul of the Royal National Theatre Hamlet on view at the Wilbur Theatre and headed for the wilds of Tucson, Phoenix, and Minneapolis before a brief New York engagement. The production is being touted as “the Hamlet of a lifetime” (that bit of hyperbole cadged from the headline on a British review), which it’s not. But John Caird’s dark and stately staging has much to recommend it. Not least is that it’s of one of the most fascinating plays ever written. That’s an obvious plus brought home by the play’s opening on the same night, in the same neighborhood, as Les Misérables, which Caird helmed with Trevor Nunn. Hey, I knew where I wanted to be.

Caird’s Hamlet nods to Church, with a haunting ecclesiastical score by John Cameron and a looming set that’s both cathedral and prison, though not to State: Fortinbras and his advance on Denmark are eliminated from the text. In the absence of the Norwegian, Hamlet’s stolid friend, Horatio, is the outsider brought in to bear witness. At the beginning, he strides on through a brightly lit fissure in the towering back wall. At the end, in a bit of heavy-handed imagery, the fissure becomes a cross, and Horatio goes out as he came. And Denmark once again closes in on itself, its inhabitants taking up their posts in little lighted cells along the wall — like Beckett’s dead waiting to re-enact their drama, or like Hamlet’s pals, the Players, preparing to do more or less the same. Indeed, the production’s spare furnishings consist of 15 chandeliers, lowered and raised in various configurations, and a scattering of theater trunks that are hauled about and rearranged to suggest a precipice, various chambers of Elsinore, and the churchyard where Hamlet and the Gravedigger join poor Yorick — what’s left of him — in a merry trio.

Politics having hit the cutting-room floor with Fortinbras, the emphasis here is on Hamlet’s existential and familial drama. His is the ultimate dysfunctional clan, with son inconsolable, mother remarried and unavailable, and gape-mouthed dad, well, too dead to be of much comfort. But Claudius notwithstanding, these three constitute the family, as is made chillingly clear in the “closet” scene, when a sweet if ghastly tableau finds Hamlet, on his knees like a small boy, being simultaneously clasped by Gertrude and the Ghost. Indeed, by this point, Gertrude seems to have accepted her familial destiny: at the end of the closet scene, she yanks Claudius’s portrait from around her neck and slams it into a trunk.

At the center of the production’s secular, domestic trinity is Russell Beale’s schleppy Hamlet, intellectually caustic but emotionally bereft, patrolling the castle in cowlicks, shirttails, and a cassock so long it’s all he can do not to trip over it (he did once on opening night). Sitting atop a beshawled trunk with Horatio, following the enactment of “The Murder of Gonzago,” he’s less the crafty captor of “the conscience of the King” than a pudgy kid in sweatsocks, sobbing his sorrow. As has been pointed out, the RNT production doesn’t leave you wondering why Hamlet, rather than his uncle, did not succeed his father as king of Denmark. With or without Fortinbras on the march, this fellow is too tender and self-effacing to balloon into the royal “We.”

Russell Beale, who’s almost unknown in America (he played the Second Gravedigger in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet film), has long been an English actor I’ve admired. I was lucky enough to catch his Olivier Award–winning turn as the scheming Mosca to Michael Gambon’s Volpone and to see him flouncing about in a high pompadour, like a plump brunet Lumière, as George IV in the negligible Battle Royal. A longstanding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and then a fixture at the Royal National, he has won numerous awards, including the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his Voltaire/Pangloss in Candide and the London Evening Standard Award for Best Actor and the London Critics’ Circle Award for Best Shakespearean Performance for Hamlet, which opened in London last summer.

Certainly he is the compelling reason not to miss this Hamlet, though we Americans can usually learn from British Shakespeare productions. Even in a staging as presentational as this one, without a great deal of flair on the part of the supporting players, the solid English actors command the Bard’s language with authority. For example, Sara Kestelman’s dragonlike but maternal, ultimately shamed Gertrude renders the ravishing description of Ophelia’s drowning (“There is a willow grows askant the brook”) in all its sorrowful beauty before she turns to Claudius to hiss the word “drowned” like a shrew. The royal couple, having hastily posted to incestuous sheets, are clearly through.

Among the other actors, Peter McEnery is a dashing hippie Claudius, his wavy gray hair caught back in a ponytail, his emergency poison supply in (fittingly when you consider the orifice through which he attacked old Hamlet) an earring. This is a smug, controlled, but hardly dangerous villain. McEnery has two electric moments, though: when Claudius disrupts the play within the play, all silent and suspended threat, and when, confronting a smart-ass Hamlet in the wake of Polonius’s murder, he holds his arms out and walks right up to the point of the young prince’s rapier. That Hamlet, already addled by having accidentally killed Polonius, doesn’t revenge his father here proves he hasn’t the stuff to do it, even if the murderer’s heart is presented with a note reading, “Stab here.” (One does wonder why, in the light of such obvious ineffectualness, it’s necessary to whisk Hamlet off to England.)

Peter Blythe does effective double duty as a non-doddering Polonius who airily presents Laertes with the famous “precepts” in a frame, even seeming to make fun of them a little before tucking them into sonny’s trunk, and the chatty Gravedigger. Christopher Staines and Paul Bazely are an unusually vigorous team as the not-quite-interchangeable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, here palpably affronted by Hamlet’s treatment of them. (Russell Beale, for his part, does not disguise his contempt for the toadying twosome once he worms it out that they’ve been sent for.) Cathryn Bradshaw is a pert rather than romantic Ophelia whose madness takes the form of a rather daffy music-hall sketch — though her subsequent appearance in the remnants of her dead father (fur-trimmed coat, shoes, and cane), which she leaves in a heap on the floor like a totem, is effective.

As for the star, it’s easy to dwell on what an unconventional Hamlet he is. But Russell Beale is not the dog to which Samuel Johnson compares a woman preaching: primarily notable for being cast against type. His handling of the familiar soliloquies is superb: “To be, or not to be” sounds freshly thought, the lure of “sleep” as an end to “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to” palpably keen. Moreover, Russell Beale’s Hamlet is as intense as he is gentle: witness the urgency with which he marks Ophelia, leaning toward her in an agony of love and loathing before almost begging her to “get thee to a nunnery.”

And though the production is three and a half hours long, don’t think of leaving early. Russell Beale is at his best in the play’s fifth act, first in the churchyard, where he regards Yorick’s skull with schoolboy’s delight and mortal wonder, and then when he surrenders to his fate, acquiring the stature that has heretofore eluded his alternately desolate and agitated prince. A calm descends on this Hamlet as he accepts Claudius’s invitation to a fencing match with Laertes. The prince who was a hair’s breath from suicide at “To be, or not to be” sees this contest as both the fulfillment of his destiny and a win-win situation. “The readiness is all. . . . Let be,” he quietly tells the nervous Horatio. Then he removes his long coat and, defying previous clumsiness, fences so nimbly you’d swear he was Errol Flynn. Informed that Laertes has used an envenomed sword and mortally wounded him with a scratch, he awaits the inevitable with a quizzical smile. Then he dies with an eerie dignity, on his feet, collapsing only at the last onto Horatio, who bears the bulky body down. In the end, Russell Beale’s sweet, sad Peter Pan of a failed hit man is a mensch.

Issue Date: April 19-26, 2001