SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF THE FAMILY

HAMLET
Performed by The Aquila Theatre Company as part of Shakespeare in American Communities: Shakespeare for a New Generation, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts with Arts Midwest
Directed by Robert Richmond; written by William Shakespeare and adapted by Robert Richmond
With: Daniel Marmion, Darren Ryan, Jay Painter, Richard Sheridan Willis, Andy Paterson, Natasha Piletich, Andrew Schwartz, and Emily Bennett
At Maine Center for the Arts at the University of Maine at Orono
April 11, 2006

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

What do you do if your beloved father, a great leader, has just died, and your mother already has her eye on another man? What if that man is your father’s brother? What do you do if your uncle and your mother get married when just one month has passed since your father’s death? And finally, what do you do when your mother insists that instead of returning to school, you stay at home with her and her new husband? When pressed by your friend, you might respond with sarcasm: “Thrift, thrift…the funeral bak’d meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” You might also be forgiven for feeling angry, depressed, and unbearably sad. To make matters even worse, your mother’s response to your grief is essentially “Get over it. People die.”

This, of course, is the plot of Hamlet, and The Aquila Theatre Company’s outstanding performance of this intense, demanding play makes it perfectly clear why Hamlet would say, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world.” Those of us who have mourned the death of a loved one know exactly how Hamlet feels, even if we have never had to deal with the complications that confront the prince.

And the complications do indeed abound. Poor Hamlet! Not only does he have to deal with the living, but he also must deal with the dead, with his father, whose uneasy spirit will not rest until justice is served. When the play opens, Hamlet’s father reveals that his death was, in fact, a case of “murder most foul” and that the killer was none other than his own brother Claudius, the very same brother who married Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet’s father wants vengeance. In short, he wants his son to kill Claudius. Hamlet agrees, but this only adds more weight to an already heavy heart, so much weight that Hamlet is not sure if he wants to go on living, which leads to the famous “to be or not to be,” speech.

Shakespeare, not content with one dysfunctional family, throws another one into the mix so that the play can have a double-story, a device much favored by the Bard. Along with Hamlet’s murderous uncle and inconstant mother, Shakespeare gives us Polonius, his son Laertes, and the doomed Ophelia. Polonius, the king’s minister, is a meddling fool who disastrously misinterprets the intentions of just about everyone. The contradictory but touching advice he gives his son is more than canceled by the terrible advice he gives Ophelia, who is in love with Hamlet. Forget him, Polonius tells his daughter, Hamlet’s too good for you, and Ophelia, dutiful, compliant, and firmly bound to her father, does what she is told, even when it involves lies and betrayal. Later, when the tragedy has spiraled completely out of control, we learn that Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, had hoped that Ophelia would marry her son. But there is no marriage for poor Ophelia, who, in her own way, is as much of a fool as her father.

Even worse, when Hamlet feigns madness to try to judge the intentions of those around him, Polonius is certain that Ophelia’s rejection of Hamlet is the cause of the prince’s madness. Hoping to prove his point, Polonius convinces the queen to let him eavesdrop on a conversation between her and Hamlet, and this ends up being the minister’s undoing. Hamlet, thinking the hidden Polonius is Claudius, mistakenly kills the minister. This, in turn, is the undoing of Ophelia, who is unable to bear the death of her own father, and unlike Hamlet, Ophelia’s madness is all too real.

However, despite their different responses to death and loss, Ophelia and Hamlet share the same problem. They both suffer terribly from parents whose grip is so tight that the two young people are unable to break away to become independent adults. At times, it almost seems as though Hamlet and Ophelia are under a kind of wicked enchantment, one that paradoxically draws them together and keeps them apart, a spell that is impossible to break, even with the death of a parent.

These family dynamics—charged, to say the least—form the hot center of Hamlet, and in lesser hands, the whole story might have descended into a diverting but overwrought soap opera. But Shakespeare’s beautiful use of language, his understanding of human nature, and his sympathy for his characters turn this play into a great work of art.

The Aquila Theatre Company, which has a troupe that performs throughout the country, brought such clarity and energy to Hamlet that the whole play snapped into focus. The Company’s fine staging, stirring use of music, and tight cast, for the most part terrific, came together to make this production of Hamlet the best I have ever seen.

Natasha Piletich’s Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, was dark, alluring, and self-centered, a woman confidant in her power to hold in thrall the men in her life. Richard Sheridan Willis portrayed the murderous King Claudius with an aging playboy’s charm that just barely concealed his jealousy, ambition, and lust. As Lord Polonius, Andy Paterson was suitably fussy and controlling, an ass unredeemed by the faintest glimmer of self-knowledge. Hamlet, of course, is one of the most important roles, and Andrew Schwartz played him with all his glorious contradictions—moody, attractive, manic, despairing, thoughtful, and trapped, a man of integrity who is forced to dissemble.

The one discordant note was Emily Bennett, whose Ophelia was a weak-voiced little mouse. While I understand how this might be an interpretation of the dutiful daughter, Bennett’s performance of sane Ophelia was so limp and pallid that it was impossible to conceive of how Hamlet ever could have been attracted to her. Not surprisingly, the onstage chemistry between Bennett and Schwartz was nonexistent, and if the rest of the production had not been so outstandingly good, this might have sunk the play.

Interestingly enough, the case was quite different when Ophelia became mad, and Bennett discarded her mousy persona to play a woman so convincingly crazy that the performance was painful to watch. I will not make further comment about this disparity. Much has been written about the wretched Ophelia, and it is well beyond the scope of this review to delve into the psychological implications of an actor and her role.

Despite the failure of vision for sane Ophelia, The Aquila Theatre Company’s Hamlet was riveting, moving, and even haunting. Maine, a very small state, was incredibly lucky to get a production of such high quality, and if this company comes to a theater near you, get thee to one of its performances! 

 

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