Historical 'Hamlet' Staged in Sanders

Legendary Boston theater critic Elliot Norton, writing in the Boston Daily Record about the Harvard Dramatic Club's December 1956 performance of Hamlet in Sanders Theatre, began his remarks by saying: "Although this Hamlet is not perfect...it is intelligently conceived and acted; In it the student players continually pass the bounds of usual undergraduate performances." It would certainly be too facile to say that history repeats itself, but Norton's words are, by happy chance, applicable to last weekend's appearance of Hamlet in Sanders, much-hyped as the first production of the play there since '56--and the first dramatic production in that space in a decade. Hamlet was the strongly-crafted realization of what was from the start an astonishingly ambitious goal: to present Hamlet straight and to do it well. If the show didn't yield any brilliant new insights into the classic text, it did pull off the laudable achievement of throwing considerable effort, thought and time into making the play accessible and entertaining to its modern audience.

The Hyperion Theatre Company--the undergraduate Shakespeare group under whose general auspices this production fell--has been pointing proudly to the historical significance of enacting Hamlet in Sanders given the stage's Elizabethan proportions and structure. (You can take a look at playbills and clippings from the last century onward--including Norton's review--in the history of Hamlet in Sanders display that's been set up in the buildings main hall; take a look before they clear it away.) Visually speaking, they're right: Sanders turns out to be a pretty impressive place to do Shakespeare. All that dark wood and those long, ominous shadows, which create such a terrible atmosphere for trying to remain awake during Core classes, turn out to be just about right of Hamlet.

Unfortunately, theatregoers were also reminded of what may be the real reason the building hasn't much been used for drama lately: the acoustics in there can be awful. Altogether too much of the play's rich, multi-textured language was muffled or lost to echoes--shouting lines didn't help audibility. To the actors' great credit, though, this is one of the very few Shakespeare productions in recent memory in which nobody had trouble with their diction: most of these guys knew how to speak Shakespeare as if they understood it, and could make us understand it too.

It would be somewhat unfair to echo Norton in saying that the Hyperion actors "continually pass[ed] the bounds of usual undergraduate performances." They did, however present more polish than the usual undergraduate Shakespeare shows. Brett Egan '99, as Hamlet, was handed the monumental task of carrying the weight of the show upon his shoulders; while it would take more space than is given to an entire review to dissect an actor's performance of a Hamlet, it can be said that Egan did a generally fine job with the role, making his Hamlet sympathetic enough to carry our sympathy and passionate enough to trouble us. His delivery was excellent; he was mesmerizing during the monologues (people were actually watching silently during "To be or not to be..." instead of mumbling along with the words.) Hamlet is such a complex figure that he can be played with any number of possible personalities, styles and underlying motives--Egan's seemed to be a rather ambivalent blend of melancholy, severity and occasional bouts of hysteria. His Hamlet also seemed to be thoroughly lacking in a sense of humor, which was too bad; it's often just that element of irony, of detached awareness of his own role-playing, which elevates Hamlet above being just another melodramatic hero.

The rest of the cast featured numerous strong performances. Paul Siemens '98 as Claudius started out well, striking a deliberately ambiguous balance between jovial sympathy and ominous hints of temper, but later resorted to indicating the kings conflicting and repressed emotions by playing the role with physical stiffness on the one hand, and bellowing anger on the other. Christine Nyereyegona '00 was a regal Gertrude, if rather lacking in subtlety in her bedroom confrontation scene with Hamlet, and Jesse Hawkes '99 was an unobtrusive and shamefully underexploited Horatio. The luminous Ophelia, of Jessica Kaye '00, too, began winningly enough, but she overplayed her madness scenes just slightly. By far the most effective of the supporting cast, Jim Augustine '01 made a hilariously funny, if somewhat unexpectedly young and savvy, Polonius; his lines were among the few humorous ones in the play which got the laughs they deserve. All the quick wit and self-deprecating humor seemed to be on the side of Augustine's Polonius, while Egan's Hamlet wore an unvarying and impenetrable mack of melancholy.

These character performances more or less indicate the nature of the production as a whole: marked by powerful moments and performers who do a laudable job with highly difficult roles, but marred by an apparent lack of a deep cohesiveness in the play's interpretation.

This Hamlet was still remarkably powerful and provocative: to have staged Hamlet competently in the first place is a strong accomplishment in itself, one that a great many companies couldn't have managed. Moreover, the production was excellent when it came to spectacle--a dazzling and chilling set of scenes at the play's center revolved around the play-within-a-play, featuring masks, musicians and a tremendous rendition of "Hecuba" monologue by Player King Dan Berwick '01--and the sword-fight at the end was all it had been cracked up to be. Spectacle, in Hamlet, can go a long way.

The strongest element this production had working for it, ultimately, was the simple--and marvelously complex--power of the text itself. This production did succeed in bringing much of its power out rather beautifully. It looks as if the Hyperion's experiment was successful: they brought one of the most difficult and rewarding plays in history to a large student audience, and they succeeded in demonstrating that Sanders really is (except for those darn acoustics) suitable for Shakespeare. If the production, as Norton wrote of the actor who played Hamlet in '56 (the amusingly named Colgate Salsbury '57), had certain marked defects, it also "manage[d] to do certain difficult things remarkably well." Like staging Hamlet in Sanders, for the masses, in the first place--and succeeding.