Hamlet at the
Public Theater.
Oscar Isaac, kneeling, and Peter Friedman, supine, in Hamlet.
The first
casualty in Sam Gold’s production of Hamlet,
which opens July 14th at the Public, is the carpeting. Over the course of the production, a tray of
lasagna, a cup of seltzer water, two large-ish flower pots full of dirt, and
water from a hose allowed to run for upwards of five minutes (the latter three
items mingling into a caked mud by the end of the play) conduct a frontal
assault on the red wall-to-wall that ornaments David Zinn’s otherwise spare
set. This is actually rather fitting,
since the production itself is kind of a mess.
What stops
Gold’s direction from being completely self-indulgent is largely his lead, and
the reason for most of the hype surrounding the production. Oscar Isaac is returning to the Public, his launch-pad,
after years sneaking into international super-stardom as a chameleonic blend of
a character actor and a leading man who stole Inside Llewyn Davis, Ex Machina, and now the Star Wars franchise. Isaac,
a small, shifty-looking figure with hooded eyes, is, far from overwhelmingly
charismatic – indeed, his appeal seems not to come so much from the way he acts as the way he is, all the time. He is not
a particularly secretive person, but it is impossible to imagine what he’s like
when he isn’t on stage or screen, if only because he is so with us then.
Accordingly,
Isaac doesn’t electrify the production upon his first entrance, which he makes
during the live curtain speech, as if to conceal it. It’s only when he leaves, and is absent for
much of the third act, that the audience realizes that the considerable frame
Gold has constructed sags without its tentpole.
“It is too long,” complains Polonius (Peter Friedman) at one point
during a player’s lengthy speech, but Hamlet is rapt, and we with him; it’s
only when he’s gone that the whole thing begins to seem a bit much.
“Much,”
incidentally, refers to the play’s runtime, which is advertised at three and a half hours
but is actually closer to four. This
makes room for some great dramaturgy, most relevantly the play’s open dialogue
with its existence as a play; all of
the monologues are given and directed to the audience, like secrets
shared. It also, unfortunately, leaves
space for terrible dramaturgy, like Gold’s apparent belief that the late King
Hamlet and his brother, Claudius (both played by Ritchie Coster doing Ben
Kingsley) are effectively the same person.
Further, it short-changes the terrific actress Gayle Rankin, whose
Ophelia, given no room to play, is confused and unfounded. It doesn’t help that she has to spend much of
that unfortunate third act singing (there are four separate songs in the act,
and the actors don’t appear to have any idea how to play them – is this a
musical?).
This is
unsurprising for Gold, whose productions continually make choices that are
almost self-consciously weird – the first scene of his Hamlet, which is considerable in length, is played in complete
darkness; his New York Theater Workshop Othello
was interrupted by a dance sequence to “Hotline Bling.” But this is by no means entirely a bad thing
– as evidenced by his decision, bizarre and unconventional, to play the first
two acts of this Hamlet as
comedy. It works. With no apologies, the first two-thirds of
the play are hilarious almost from start to finish – and it’s hugely fun to
watch. Isaac, who spends most of the
play without pants on, is the ringleader of an effective circus of mistaken
identity and pratfalls. Keegan-Michael
Key, late of Key and Peele, plays
Horatio as a frazzled second banana, and nearly steals the show. And it’s great. Really and truly great.
Any complaint with this production
is likely to deal with what the point of the whole thing is, and indeed, as a
piece of drama this version of Hamlet
is almost entirely without consequence. But
like all of Gold’s work, it’s so deeply intimate that by its end one can read
the actors like friends, and Isaac and his company are probably having more fun
doing the play than the audience has watching it. You are likely to forget, upon leaving the
theater, that most of the characters wind up dead, and make a note to invite
them all to your next get-together.
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