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One thing that's abundantly clear in this revival, distant and confused though it frequently may be, is that this rot is, above all else, institutional. What makes these people susceptible to this sickness is the same thing that allows them to inflict it on others in the first place. Claudius, who killed his brother King Hamlet and ascended to his place on the throne; Gertrude, who bed-hopped to the current king's bed from the last one's; their doddering, scheming attaché Polonius and his opportunistic children... From a very real standpoint, don't they all deserve what's coming to them? This Occupy Elsinore spin on William Shakespeare's classic-to-end-all-classics is evident from the first scene, set at a wedding banquet—or, wait, is it a funeral banquet?—table around which the company sits. (The monochromatic scenic design, which counts thick carpeting, white leather sofas, and a flowered canopy, is by Walt Spangler, and is lighted by Justin Townsend.) As Claudius (Harris Yulin) toasts, each of them is engaged, perhaps, but also oblivious, decked out in luxurious black-and-white finery (by Constance Hoffman) that identify a searing disjunction between In Here, where anything goes, and Out There, where there's nothing they need worry about. And so it falls to Prince Hamlet (Peter Sarsgaard), in theory the rightful heir to the throne, to bridge that gap, by any and every means necessary. Whether or not that's exactly Hamlet's plan is not quite clear from Pendleton's take, but it's also largely immaterial. What matters more is that unlike in most productions, here Hamlet is daft from the get-go. The first words from his mouth are whining, importunate, connected to no sense of titled decorum, and in no way acknowledging that a world outside his field of view exists. In stark contrast to his kin, Hamlet evinces no breeding, no restraint, and, worst of all, no acknowledgment that his behavior is anything other than the only way it could be. The defeated, acquiescent tones of the others hint, too, that this is no new condition, but something to endure rather than fix.
It gives Sarsgaard nothing—nothing—to play, making him the vaguest, most void-tethered Hamlet I have ever seen anywhere. Speech after speech, scene after scene, that neither invokes nor provokes an emotional reaction is a Hamlet first for me, and, I must admit, not one I'm eager to see repeated. To be fair, Sarsgaard executes this expertly, and his opposition to reality is total, as committed a take on this man as I've encountered. And Pendleton does use this to force his way into the psyches of the Claudius and Gertrude, implying that it's the guilt of further taking advantage of the mentally incapacitated Hamlet that pushes them over the edge, and this in turn destroys the court (including Stephen Spinella's Polonius, Glenn Fitzgerald's Laertes, and Lisa Joyce's Ophelia). If you're not going to do things the traditional way, you may as well go in through that kind of a back door. But essentially stripping the title character out of the equation, and leaving the serious dramatic weight to the supporting roles, opens a gaping hole in the center of the play that no reconceptualization, however inventive, can possibly fill. Hamlet is incredibly long (even CSC's severely cut-down version still runs well over three hours), and very intricate; under no circumstances should it feel as flat, as leaderless, as it does here throughout. As with Sarsgaard, the actors are blameless, and there are isolated moments when they cut through the clutter to make an impression. Spinella's understated delusion as Polonius is a wry treat, the quiet guilt pervading Yulin's Claudius is compelling in the few instances we actually get to see it, and Allen makes Gertrude's frustration palpable. Joyce has mapped out Ophelia well enough to pinpoint the exact millisecond she loses it for good, and watching her face register that change, with the lights in her eyes suddenly blinking out, suggests some of Pendleton's instincts were right on target. The overall package, though, is a writhing mess. How else to explain why the sole affecting scene is the last? This time around it can't be the culmination of everything that's come before—nothing has come before—so it instead registers as a race against the clock, with Hamlet using every trick in his arsenal to infect Laertes (who, remember, had been removed from the action for many scenes) before he gets the bloody outcome he's been wanted all the time. There's something legitimately riveting in watching one child of privilege square off against another, in a grudge match that only men of their ilk would consider truly civilized. No, the question they're facing—whether wealth is good enough immunization against the black sheep in the "family" that, well, we just don't talk about—has practically nothing to do with Shakespeare, and if you know Hamlet, you know how it ends anyway. But anchored conflict and sky-high stakes are so rare elsewhere in the evening, you can't be blamed for finding them infectious while they last.
Hamlet
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