"... sympathetic, deeply moving, strongly articulated ..."

July 8, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The role of Hamlet is the Mt. Everest that every serious actor longs, just once, to scale. It is the ultimate challenge, the fulfillment of the desire to be there on the crest, quite alone, and finally understand how vast and complicated human life is — "What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in facilities, how like a god."

Jason Asprey, Hamlet
photo: Kevin Sprague

Jason Asprey has been granted that chance (and challenge) to delve into himself while he ascends, to suffer the anguish, the self-questioning and to understand why not only the great actors (male, and even female) and great critics such as Goethe and Coleridge and even Sigmund Freud, have tried to make the anguished climb and know, as the audience should, that there is no one Hamlet you can pin down, unravel and know, but that the journey each has made is a step in finding the essence of Shakespeare's most illusive character.

In the current Shakespeare and Company production of the play, now running on the Founders' stage through August, Jason Asprey in the leading role provides a sympathetic, deeply moving, strongly articulated character. His Hamlet is torn by grief and indecision. At the gaily dressed court, he wears, as he will throughout the play, only black—the mourning for the lost father dominating, even before he is ghost-begged to revenge him.

Asprey gives us a Hamlet torn between personal despair over seeing his mother changed into a love-sick simpering school girl, his anger at his King-uncle having usurped the throne at a time when the country needs guidance (although he has serious doubts that he, Hamlet, is the man to mend political woes) and his ambivalent belief in a revenge-seeking ghost of his dead father, a man that he now realizes his mother seems never to have loved.

Asprey's Hamlet is an appealing and sympathetic one. He is handsome, agile, and well spoken, can be vehement or gentle, and handles the overly well-known lines (such as "To be, or not to be ...") with his own readings, keeping the poetry, but making it is his own.

This production is well worth seeing and reveling in. Director Eleanor Holdridge has pared the cast down to eleven skilled actors, playing on a bare black stage. There are few props and no scenery. Even the occasional needed chair is translucent. A box can become a grave. A few drops of water evoke the brook in which Ophelia is to drown herself.

The time is timeless, anytime, all time, not modern, not Elizabethan. Costumes are important mainly in color - their flamboyance, Hamlet always in black and white, but the small red blot on his upper arm (where the poison sword will kill him) is there in the opening scene which sets the play in the mind of Hamlet himself, dying as he will at the end, still struggling to understand.

The opening scene is brilliant, and brief. The torture of Hamlet is behind him, and, near death, he mouths key lines from the soliloques that cut zig-zag across all that has tortured him, his duties to a ghost who may be unreal, to his country that may be imperiled by the man on the stolen throne, his dismay at his giddy mother, his insecure love for Ophelia, his own inability to act at all.

Once this brief opening is over, paring the first scene to the bone but orchestrated by amazing sound and light displays, the play can begin with the festivities of the wedding feast of Claudius and Hamlet's mother, Gertrud, the latter looking gloriously happy and young in white gown and bright blue jacket making her seem almost as young as the son who confronts her in his gloomy black coat.

Tina Packer and Jason Asprey
photo: Kevin Sprague

Family relationships play a key role in this interpretation of Hamlet. Tina Packer, (Gertrud) and Jason Asprey (Hamlet) are in real-life mother and son. And even Polonius, whom Hamlet kills, is in real-life Asprey's step-father. As actors, delving into their own psyches, these off-stage relationships have deepened the emotions the actors are able to bring to their roles. Undoubtedly, it has not been easy all the way, but mainly it seems to have been an asset, giving each actor something more to bring to his/her role.

Asprey and Packer are the outstanding characters in the cast. Although Packer has a relatively small role (Shakespeare gives her only 70 lines), the director has given her a few more in the play within a play. (More of that ingenious small-cast solution later.) Packer is absolutely marvelous in every moment on stage, never stealing stage, but when it is her turn, delighting with her ingenuous conception of the role she inhabits.

Dennis Krausnick as Polonius gives a delightful performance, the best I have ever seen of his giving advice to Laertes, joking at his own list of admonitions, but changing pace at the end for the “to thine ownself be true” bit. He bustles about with papers, evidently keeping tabs on contemporary problems, both political and domestic, for Claudius, and later doubles nicely as priest at Ophelia's funeral.

Ophelia (Elizabeth Raetz) is right all the way — in her teasing, joking chat with her brother, in her obedient but reluctant returning of Hamlet's letters, and most of all in her haunting mad scene in which with briars in her tangled hair and only a flower and a few drops of water in a little pool evokes Millais' famous Pre-Raph painting of Ophelia floating on the river.

Nigel Gore as Claudius has a difficult role in this version of the play. Until his final solo scene of guilt, he seems relatively happy in his kingship and wedding, a bit slow to catch on in the play within a play bit as staged, and only really villainous in the final act.

Horatio (Howard W. Overshown) was consistently a stalwart friend to Hamlet, delivering his key lines well. He plays it as Shakespeare has written it — the only character who loves Hamlet enough to take him in all moods and be beside him to evoke flights of angels at his end.

Of the minor, doubling characters, the most delightful and competent was John Windsor-Cimnningham, in his several small roles: ghost, player-king, and gravedigger.

Director Holdridge's over-all conception of the play, streamlining the cast, strategically cutting lines so that the entire play (Shakespeare's longest) ran only three hours with one intermission, and relying on sound by Scott Killian, lights by Les Dickert and costumes by Jessica Ford, to take the place of scenery, worked well most of the time.

One radical innovation will either delight or infuriate. Having limited the cast to eleven, it was impossible to stage the play within the play (Hamlet's idea of thus trapping Claudius into guilt by staging his killing of his predecessor) because it needed several strolling actors and only one person to play them. However, adopting the idea that Hamlet had written out the parts he wanted inserted, Holdridge had Hamlet give scripts to Gertrud and Claudius, and cajole them into acting. Packer played this scene brilliantly, with humor and seemed barely aware of where it was leading. The whole idea is a bold one on the part of the director and, for me, it worked.

As for the famous confrontation between Gertrud and Hamlet in her boudoir, it was played with finesse – no Freudian red bedspreads, although Gertrud was still wearing her stunning red dress. She seemed honestly trying to quiet the excited Asprey and although alarmed at his seeming madness and horrified by his slaying of Polonius, keep it all on key. A remarkably played scene, handled with finesse by both characters.

Reactions to this production will be varied, perhaps more so than with those other productions at this and other summer theatres this season. Patrons are apt to love it, remember it always for its many unusual qualities, for its unique casting and its pace and flair, or they will be outraged that Holdridge has tampered with a masterpiece and angered that the unforgettable moment when Hamlet asks Rosencrantz (or was it Guildenstern?) to play on a recorder, or the wonderful speech in which Hamlet gives advice to the players on how to act a role, have been omitted. So be it.

Much must be omitted in this brief review of a complex play. The fascinating theme of three sons Hamlet, Laertes (Kevin O'Donnell) and Fortinbras (Stephen James Anderson) all dealing with response to the death of a father. And the eerie evoking of time that brings 2006 on the stage when at the play's end Fortinbras and his soldiers dash in with weapons.

I admired much in this production and consider it one worth seeing again in order to revel in the moments that for me worked stunningly, and to catch up with ones I have missed. The pace of the entire play is so smoothly handled, it seems much shorter than the playing time — a plus in any Hamlet production.

And as for Asprey, I'm glad he got to climb that mountain. He was ready for it.

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