20 September 1992
hen does a play become a classic?
Shakespeare, for one, would have found the question almost meaningless.
When Hamlet first opened, probably in 1601, it was simply the new
play at the Globe or possibly a new version of a fairly recent play by someone
else. Either way, few people in the audience would have known the story,
which Shakespeare probably read in French, in a multi-volume book by Francois
de Belleforest called Histoires Tragiques. Seven years later an English
translation called The Hystorie of Hamblet appeared, but by this
time the play was so well known that the anonymous translator actually used
phrases from it. We are witnessing the birth of a classic.
What happens is that the play enters the collective
consciousness; it becomes part of the way we think. It also becomes itself
material with which to create art again. A classic play is, among other
things, a text that becomes common property, both intellectual and commercial.
In a very basic sense, too, it is essential that the author should be dead,
preferably for a long time. When Visconti travestied Pinter's Old Times,
Pinter could protest. But Shakespeare is all ours. How would he have reacted
to Robert Sturua's production of Hamlet at the Riverside?
It begins, not as per text, but with the entrance
of the Ghost, dressed as a bespectacled old bagman, shuffling audibly, drinking
a dram of water, squatting down with a book. Barnardo and Francisco's entrance
completely loses its tension. Instead, you watch the Ghost and wonder when
they'll notice him. The whole thing depends for its effect on your knowing
that the bag-man is the Ghost and on your surprise that he is not the kingly
figure you expect. Meanwhile Sturua has cut everything that would have contradicted
his reading. Part of the classical condition is that the text can fall victim
to the vision. Horatio and his friends cannot tell Hamlet that his father's
ghost was armed from top to toe, because he wasn't. Hamlet, too, asks fewer
questions, and thus loses that sense of urgent inquisitiveness that is such
a vital part of his character.
But then, Alan Rickman's Hamlet is not
really Shakespearian. He is too utterly pole-axed by grief. He is at a pathological
stage of grieving, where his life seems to move in slow motion, grotesquely
and painfully unreal, and punctuated by aimless bursts of activity. He both
craves and abhors company. Apathetic and brooding, he haunts the stage like
the undead. His relationship with Gertrude is nonexistent, and Geraldine
McEwan playing a nervous, fidgety woman who clearly remarried because she
found life too perplexing, is giving a many-layered Shakespearian performance
all on her own.
Rickman's voice rings strongly, but
with the monotony of nagging pain. His Hamlet is in an intellectual panic,
but he seldom seems to think. It was one of Shakespeare's great innovations
that his speeches actually charted his characters' thought processes; Rickman
suggests that Hamlet is intellectually prostrate. Shakespeare's Hamlet is
not in command of events, that is his tragedy but I've never seen him so
at their mercy, so hunted and spiritually emasculated. Most of the lines
that suggest anything different--his swordsmanship, his courtliness, his
popularity--have been cut. Brilliantly and brutally, Sturua is usurping
the play-- which is ironical, since for him it is, essentially, a play about
usurpation. Coming from former Soviet Georgia, this is something he knows
a lot about; but he carries the idea like a torch into the play and burns
down half of it.
Polonius (Michael Byrne) is both too young
and too innocuous, and his status at court is unclear. Indeed, Elsinore
does not feel like court, but more like a derelict urban underpass where
oddly dressed people pursue obscure ends. The politics of the play are totally
confused. David Burke's Claudius is rock-like, shrewd and devious, but he
panics when in danger, which is bizarre. Polonius puts the crown on his
son's head, as if trying it for size, just when he is advising him about
prudence. Fortinbras (Daniel York), earlier seen feeling up a passing Polish
girl, takes the crown up at the end, but only to throw it negligently away.
Denmark seems not a prison, but an unsuccessful rehabilitation centre.
The whole thing is too one-sided, too psychologically
hectoring, to have the authority of a classic. I do not mean that a classic
is by definition other-worldly or aloof: I mean that it is hard, objective,
questioning. A princely, agile, coruscating Hamlet is challenging in defeat.
Your moral sense is stirred: you ask, Why? How? A Hamlet like Rickman's
crushed into impotence, is merely a victim, set up to be pitied and dismissed.
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