Hamming Up Hamlet
Saturday, June 7th by scott malia
Cleveland Shakespeare is opening its season with a unique point/counterpoint approach to one of The Bard’s plays. The Shakespeare Festival will present Shakespeare’s Hamlet (sad to say, but you do have to specify whose version nowadays) and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. One issue the article did not make clear is how closely intertwined the productions will be. While they will presumably use the same set for both plays, the biggest question is whether or not the actors will play the same parts in both plays. If so the two plays will truly be presented as inversions of each other.
From an audience perspective, this should create an unusual viewing experience; how unusual will depend on the order in which the productions are viewed. Seeing Hamlet in all its dour glory one evening and then watching it upended and deconstructed the next could prove to be a heady delight. The reverse order would be a trickier observation. Even if an audience member has seen both plays before, viewing Stoppard’s comic take-off first might make the following performance more challenging. After having made the characters and story ridiculous, how seriously will the audience be able to take Hamlet the following evening? Will the tragedy elicit unintentional laughs due to references from the previous night’s performance? Conversely, will this ordering serve to highlight the dark irony in Hamlet that is so often overlooked in production? After all, Hamlet doesn’t end well, but that doesn’t mean the sulky Dane cannot find a few chuckles in his own melancholia.
