Arcadia England

By Kitty Stevens

Everyone who went to high school has heard of and read Shakespeare (whether they wanted to or not), and many argue that his plays are outdated and irrelevant today. However after experiencing Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Globe in London Wednesday night, I couldn’t disagree more. If it was outdated, how could the taunts and turns of phrase in Hamlet written over 400 years ago still make audiences chuckle and groan?

In the Globe, you get to experience plays as you would have in Shakespeare’s time (minus the rotten tomatoes and smell of plague). This means a standing pit near the stage, no microphones, minimal instruments and sound effects, and an open air pavilion at the mercy of the weather. Oh yes, and of course, having the tallest person in the theater standing in front of you-that’s how rotten luck has always had it. But for £5 (or a little over 6 and a half dollars), it’s difficult to complain. It’s all part of the Shakespearean experience, although there were elements in the play itself that held me back from truly feeling like I’d hopped in the Doctor Who TARDIS and traveled back in time.

Having never personally experienced Hamlet in any way (not even knowing the plot), I went into the theater with an open mind (and comfortable shoes). Every indication throughout the performance told me it was a comedy, from Hamlet’s dirty, unkempt clothes and bright red suspenders hung over one shoulder to the clever, backhanded comments he threw at the people he despised. Had I known the play was a tragedy, I might have felt a sense of foreboding as the audience watched Hamlet sink further into madness (or maybe pretends to?), but as it was, Hamlet’s wit and energy had me laughing.

What stuck out to me more than the scripted dialogue was the casting choices in this version of Hamlet. A good portion of the cast is gender-bent. Not too surprisingly, as it was performed in the Globe and in theater history only men were allowed to act, Ophelia appeared on stage in a lovely white dress… and he towered over his fellow actors on stage. Shubham Saraf played a very convincing Ophelia, and broke the hearts of the audience with his grief-stricken madness after the death of Ophelia’s father. The pain in his voice and expression as he distributed flowers during a monologue (that he sung, no less,) felt honest and raw and sent the audience into a collective grimace of guilt for not being able to somehow help the depressed and despondent daughter.

Ophelia wasn’t the only gender-bent role in this version of Hamlet. In fact, Hamlet and Horatio both were played by women and the soldiers and other ensembles were mixtures of men and women as well. Hamlet was played by Michelle Terry, who took a page out of Hamilton creator Lin Manuel-Miranda’s book and both directed and starred as the lead role for her first season as artistic director at the Globe. Terry’s Hamlet was a clever, boisterous prince who took pleasure in mocking those around him under the guise of madness, and never seemed to stop racing about while on the stage… except for one very quiet, thoughtful pause in which he gave the famous “To Be or Not to Be” speech. In this scene, Terry knelt at the very front of the stage and delivered the speech straight to a single member of the audience, her eyes locked on theirs as if Hamlet was asking – begging – them specifically to advise him on what to do. Her performance was captivating and full of energy.

The key detail with these gender-bent roles is that it didn’t take away from the experience or change how the characters’ actions were perceived. Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia did so well in their parts that the actors’ genders faded into the back of my mind, completely irrelevant to believing the characters on the stage. The main goal of any actor is to convince the audience that they are the character, and the cast of Hamlet succeeded with this.

To further modernize the 400-year-old play, Hamlet’s cast included Nadia Nadarajah, a woman who is deaf. Nadarajah played Guildenstern, one of Hamlet’s friends. Her deafness led to an interesting dynamic when she was on stage, and felt so organic that I had to ask a friend who had actually read the play if Guildenstern was originally a deaf character. When interacting with Guildenstern, Hamlet signed what he was saying, making grand gestures that fit well with the character’s disposition. The signing felt like just another visual element, and made it that much easier to root for Hamlet, in a way, because the character was so inclusive in his friendships.

Following the trend of modernizing the play, many anachronistic elements (outside of the unchanged script) were casually slipped in and left as givens. For me, this was a bit more jarring of an experience, and distracted slightly from the words being said, but not because modern elements were present. Modernizing the entire play wouldn’t have been a problem; the problem arose from the fact that the modernization was only half-done.

Soldiers stood in leathers and silver armor right next to a Horatio clad in a modern overcoat and scarf. The king and queen wore classic costumes for the era, and Hamlet walked in with a stylish black winter coat and a beanie. The gravedigger wore an orange construction vest, and yet Ophelia was wearing period clothing. The visual juxtaposition of classic and modern felt less organic than the modern casting choices, and only sufficed to distract from the dialogue, which is one thing you can’t afford to be distracted from in a Shakespeare play.

Other than the distracting costume choices, the Globe’s new take on Hamlet was well done. The gender-bent roles and inclusive, modern cast were refreshing and successful in making a nearly half-millennium-old play captivating for contemporary audiences.

Hamlet will run at the Globe until August 26th, 2018. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on-2018/hamlet.