SOURCE: Kliman, Bernice W. “A Richness of Hamlets.” The Shakespeare Newsletter 51, nos. 248-249 (spring-summer 2001): 39, 42, 44.

[In the following review, Kliman compares two stage productions of Hamlet, one directed by John Caird and the other by Peter Brook. Kliman praises both productions, particularly the performances of Simon Russell Beale as Hamlet in Caird's play and Adrian Lester's Hamlet in Brook's production.]

In his 1996 film, Kenneth Branagh cast Simon Russell Beale, who already had a distinguished career on stage, as the Second Gravedigger. Branagh darkened the shots with Beale almost to impenetrability and positioned him with back to camera or off-frame. But you can't keep a good man down. In the recent Royal National Theatre touring production, Beale embodied Hamlet, almost miraculously, as a good man in the deepest and richest sense of that bland word “good.”

The concurrent Hamlet by Adrian Lester provides an opportunity to compare two formidable performers and directors. In the Cheek by Jowl production of As You Like It, Lester played a superb Rosalind with wit, intelligence and depth. His character in the Mike Nichols film Primary Colors is as serious and thoughtful as his Hamlet is manic. He has the variety, the vocal and physical range, of all great actors. His portrayal of Hamlet, like Beale's, is a gift to those who love the play. Lester creates a volatile Hamlet who, while without the thoughtful rationality of Beale's, is always fun to watch and never obnoxious.

The productions in which Beale and Lester appear explain in part their differences—though inherent personality has an effect also. John Caird, the director for the NT production, allowed his actors flexibility and opportunities to grow into their characterizations. (Jonathan Croall describes Caird's methods in Hamlet Observed: The National Theatre at Work [London: NT Publications, 2001]). Peter Brook in his Théâtres des Bouffes du Nord production constrained Lester's Hamlet with a severely chopped text and a mechanistic production: both directors put their imprint on their productions but Brook is more heavy-handed, more insistent on having things his own way (as Adrian Lester reveals in a joint interview with Beale conducted by Matt Wolf, The New York Times 8 April 2001, Sect. 2). It would be interesting to see how Beale would work himself out of a straitjacket and how Lester might flourish in a free collaboration.

Both productions might have benefited from the example of the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express (Virginia): in a Hamlet with Thadd McQuade, directed by Ralph Alan Cohen in 1995, the text was barely cut and yet played in about 150 minutes without an intermission. Its pacing was crisp. To achieve the same 150 minutes Brook had to, as he puts it, “prune away the inessential,” the latter defined according to his own inspiration. (I wish directors would prune texts without saying that they are bettering Shakespeare by cutting to the core; instead of leaning on the authority of Shakespeare's “essence” they should just cut.) Caird and the cast shared the work of cutting; after excising much of 1.1, all of Fortinbras, and many lines throughout, the play still runs 210 minutes or more including the intermission.

Both productions abound in long and short pauses in mid-sentence. Without them more time would be available for language. In the disclosure scene (1.2), Caird's Horatio (Simon Day), after “I saw him” stops himself from, it seems, blurting out the revelation of the ghost's visitation, then after a long beat finishes instead with “once” (375: line numbers and quotations, somewhat modernized, from The Enfolded “Hamlet,” SNL extra issue, April 1996). This little touch builds his character; Horatio is careful and Marcelluls has to urge him to tell Hamlet what he has seen. Every pause can be similarly justified perhaps. But effectiveness diminishes when virtually every speech is shot through with stops, and the price in lost language is high. It is not that the fuller text is precious in itself but that it is needed for clarity. Many critics and actors have noticed that the play seems faster and clearer with a more complete text.

The two productions reaffirm what we know—that Hamlet is manifold. The actors could not have been more different: on the one hand, there is Simon Russell Beale, solid and quiet, moving quickly when occasion demanded (getting out of the way of the funeral procession, fencing adroitly) but also capable of focused and generative stillness. One of the finest actors I have seen on stage, he has great range and depth. He is an actor who can let you know what he is thinking, and his thoughts are worth attending to. For once I understood Hamlet: this Hamlet has no desire to be a king, no urge to be a hero. He wants to do the right thing. He is deeply grieved by his father's death and mother's swift remarriage but is incapable of hatred. One admires him because he has a pleasing wit and a serious intellect. One likes him because he is warm-hearted, lovable and sensitive; he is a better person than most people we know. This is not a popular take on Hamlet these days (and it is not Brook's view). Hamlet should be nasty and brutish (but not short), wicked and closer to Iago than to the Romantic Hamlet described by literary critics in the nineteenth century. Beale knows how to do Iago, having played a definitive one a few years ago, but his Hamlet is a sweet, humane person, without being a goody-goody. He can become irritated, as he does with Laertes at Ophelia's grave. One might multiply adjectives to describe Beale; he is multifaceted and every facet gleams. Many of us have wondered how stocky, forty-ish Burbage could have played Hamlet. Very well, I would say, if he was as superb as stocky, forty-ish Beale.

On the other hand, Adrian Lester, who is thirty-two and looks younger, is sinewy and flexible, constantly contorting himself into gymnastic poses. As Brook's Hamlet he may have been directed to portray an unlikable Hamlet, but he does not succeed in that. Physical moves, like hitting his head at “nay not so much, not two” earned laughs from the audience (322). Beale's gestures are smaller; he uses the space between his outstretched fingers to mime the “little month” since his father died (331). He suggests his pose of madness by pulling strands of hair to stand up rather than anything more obviously manic. The hair makes for a little throughline: there is a charming moment when near the end of the closet scene he shrugs off his mother (Sara Kestelman) as she tries to smooth his hair and then smoothes it himself; it is a teenager's gesture.

Vocal as well as physical variety gave Lester his manic energy: from grunts, to shouts, growls and snarls. Beale has a fairly frequent extra-textual “Ha!” to express delight or dismay or irony. Though Beale's vocal range is wide, the production makes him work within the bounds of rationality, loving kindness, bewilderment at the actions of his father (asking him to do what it is impossible for this Hamlet to do) and at the behavior of his beloved mother, and deep sadness about Ophelia.

Beale's Hamlet is the contemplative man who absorbs and wonders; Lester's the agitated man whose physical tics relieve his anxieties. For Beale, since contemplation is Hamlet's nature, the playing of the role and the production's explanation for Hamlet's action and inaction are one. Nervous action does not clarify Lester's Hamlet's nature but is an “outward flourish”—and thus his physicality does not explain why he behaves as he does. The absence of text exacerbates the problem of interpretation: did Lester's Hamlet want to revenge his father by murdering the king? Was he conflicted about this duty or did he think it his duty to resist the ghost? Was he ambivalent about his father, uncle, mother, Ophelia? Not enough text was there to make or even intimate the point, not enough even to flesh out the remaining lines into fertile ambiguities. There is nothing wrong with not being able to “pluck out the heart of [Hamlet's] mystery,” but Brook has cut out too much that is essential—not any particular omission but simply “time to act.” In spite of Brook's rigid stylization, I think Lester could have graced an outstanding Hamlet if more of the text had been available to him; even in this production he is a wonder moment by moment.

Their gravedigger scenes represent the differences between the actors and the productions. Both scenes please; each Hamlet connects significantly with the gravedigger. In both, the same actors play the Polonius and gravedigger roles. Brook's Bruce Myers has a dancing way about him in both his roles; Caird's Peter Blythe (originally Denis Quilley) distinguishes his dignified Polonius from his bluecollar sexton. Lester is gently irreverent with Yorick's skull, playing with it, puppet-like on a stick, as the gravedigger watches delighted. Similarly, Lester had played with the dead body of Polonius as if he were a puppet. Beale could not have done that. In his mother's closet, Hamlet believes he has killed the king; he is visibly shaken by the sight of Polonius, who falls excruciatingly slowly, and is still alive to hear Hamlet's sad words, “Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger” (2415).

In the graveyard scene, Beale thrills to see the skull of someone he knew and loved: it brings home to him the meaning of death as the ghost's visitations and his killing of Polonius have not. From Hamlet's intimate knowledge of Yorick, the gravedigger realizes who he is and with a gesture questions Horatio, who nods a response: instantly the gravedigger whips off his knit cap and holds it to his chest. Mitigating his sadness after his warm evocation of Yorick, Hamlet tops the skull with the gravedigger's cap and smiles wryly. Beale's Hamlet does not impose his melancholy on others. In Caird's version, the scene is a significant marker on the curve of the performance; in the Brook it seems a separable delight.

Caird is more inventive than Brook with the text; his readings are sometimes brilliant. This king (Peter McEnery) wants Hamlet to remain at the court not to spy on him but to become his son, to complete the takeover of his brother's life: thus, he warmly kisses Hamlet on the forehead, hands on his shoulders, just as later the ghost will also put hands on Hamlet. There are no innate villains in this Denmark. Hamlet's disrespect for his father's spirit in the “Old Mole” sequence has been variously explained away; Caird and Beale suggest it derives from anger at the ghost's (Sylvester Morand's) ranting revelations. The ghost's demand is likely to result in Hamlet's death—as Beale's Hamlet realizes even if the ghost does not.

On a smaller scale, many have tried to tease out a meaning for Polonius's “And let him ply his music” to Reynaldo. Here it is a way for Polonius to change the subject from something salacious to something harmless for Ophelia (Cathryn Bradshaw) to overhear when she bursts in. Reynaldo (Edward Gower) is deliciously silly, a worthy servant to a sometimes verbose and dense but never vicious Polonius.

The production makes more of Ophelia than most do. In the first court scene, her connectedness to Hamlet is lovely as she mourns with him, standing comfortingly behind him. Told by Polonius about Hamlet's love, Caird's king (Peter McEnery) turns to Ophelia to ask “Do you think 'tis this?” (1181), giving her presence and dignity. In the nunnery scene, this Ophelia signals with a gesture that her father, whom she says is at home (1786), is actually present unseen. Hamlet's anger is directed at her father more than to her though he faults her also for playing a part in this entrapment. After the nunnery scene, realizing that their relationship is over, she reads, then tears the letters she had tried to return to him, then tenderly places them in her reticule; she will later withdraw these fragments and deliver them as flowers. The relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is deep and poignant.

Beale's Hamlet would not insult Polonius crudely; when Polonius reacts to “These tedious old fools” (1262), Hamlet, feigning innocence, indicates that it is his book, not he who says that.

Though Horatio is his special friend whom Hamlet detains to listen to words usually kept as soliloquies in other productions (at the end of 1.2, 1.5 and 3.2, for example), Hamlet is sweetly genial to all. He is delighted to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It is only when Guildenstern starts pressing him about ambition that he becomes bewildered and begins to understand them. His disappointment, however, does not deteriorate into bitterness.

Textual illuminations like these often radiate throughout the play. The queen has been moved by the play-within to rummage in her chests for the painting of her first husband whom she had forgotten till reminded by the player queen's declarations of fidelity. Gertrude kisses his image over and over; later Hamlet points to that picture and the picture in her locket to compare the two husbands (a fresh solution to the two-picture problem, and a relief from the ubiquitous double lockets of so many productions)—but he can be more gentle than most Hamlets because she has already recognized her faithlessness. Thus Hamlet's “Mousetrap” successfully achieves one great purpose, awakening his mother's conscience. She separates herself from the king, refusing to exit with him at the end of 4.1 and 4.7.

Later she will drop her dried wedding bouquet and her veil, which she had also rediscovered in her trunk, into Ophelia's grave, linking herself decisively with the younger woman, both of whom had loved men named Hamlet.

Through thoughtful excisions Caird cuts knotty cruxes. With Hamlet's lines to the First Player about some “dozen or sixteen lines” (1581-82) cut, Hamlet's idea about using the play comes freshly at the climax of the soliloquy that ends act two (1644-45). Moreover, when Hamlet offers his advice to the players, he is concerned about the correct interpretation of the whole play (which an audience can believe to be his) rather than a dilettante worried about his little addition. With a thrilling transposition, Caird further heightens the effect of the play-within: Shakespeare's Hamlet destroys the effect of his “Mousetrap” by leaping into the action before the play's poisoner has a chance to entrap the king. In Caird's version, the king rises, mesmerized by Lucianus, and virtually acts out the poisoning, mirroring Lucianus's gestures. Hamlet rocks with nervous energy, watching. When the king pauses, Hamlet jumps forward, prompting him to continue with gestures and words: “He poisons him i'th garden for his estate?” as if to say, “Go on, go on.” But the king instead rushes out. One can see why the court might not have caught on to the revelation of murder and at the same time how Hamlet could be convinced.

At first I could not see why Caird placed the intermission in the middle of 3.2 after eliciting from Horatio his ambiguous corroboration of the king's guilt and before the entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At the end of this first act Hamlet, sitting upstage on the king's throne with Horatio next to him in the queen's place, calls for music (2167). The musicians sit with backs to the audience where the players had performed. (Gonzago and Baptista had faced the king and queen sitting upstage but also turned to each other to present profiles to the audience—a clever staging, which put Hamlet downstage, able to observe both the performance and the king.) Ophelia, who had remained standing where she had watched the play with Hamlet, slowly walks across the stage from downstage left to downstage right and off, as Hamlet sits sobbing. The curtain falls. When the curtain rises, there has been a filmic reverse shot: the thrones are now where the musicians had been and vice versa, a visualization of a turning point, or as Samuel Crowl says, a turn “deeper into the private psyches of the play's central characters” (10). Hamlet knows that all is over now: love, life itself. The “Mousetrap,” of course, has put the king on notice that Hamlet is his enemy.

But what of the killing of the king? Discounting the moment in the prayer scene, this production gives Hamlet an opportunity when, after Polonius's death, Claudius confronts him (4.3). Hamlet holds his knife to the king's chest as the latter extends his arms wide, his palms facing outward (a frequent gesture in this production by the king and by Hamlet), calmly daring Hamlet to strike. When he does not, the king turns his right palm upward for the knife, which Hamlet relinquishes. Caird recreates this same picture in the last scene, but this time Hamlet drags the blade of the poisoned foil across the king's extended hand. This is an apt culmination for Beale's Hamlet. If indeed the foil is poisoned, then the king is dead, for the blow itself is certainly not mortal. Hamlet has achieved the ghost's command without betraying himself.

Those who missed his Hamlet can listen to Beale on the Arkangel recording (Penguin 1999); they will at least hear his excellent verse speaking—though they will miss Caird's keen direction. One may hope that Lester will get another chance to explore the role: perhaps he will star in the next filmed Hamlet, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Maybe Caird would be the person to direct a richly meaningful film version.

Note

I saw Beale's performances on 17 April 2001 (in Boston's Wilbur Theatre) and again on 31 May (in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House) and Lester's on April 27 at BAM's Harvey Theatre. My thanks to the Wilbur and BAM staffs for their gracious assistance and to Tom Pendleton for timely rescues. Many excellent reviews have appeared for these productions considered separately (see, e.g., Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare Bulletin 19, 1 (Winter 2001): 9-10 on Beale and 32-33 on Lester and Robert S. Macdonald on Beale in The Shakespeare Newsletter 50, 3 (Fall 2000): 86, 88.