Hurst has pared the play down to the bones. Fortinbras and impending
wat have gone, leaving a high-powered family tragedy where Hurst
amps up the action and cheerfully mines the inherent horror. In
the graveyard, thunder shakes the theatre as incandescent flashes
outline the grim silhouette of the gravediggers. The invisible
ghost of Hamlet's father pins his victims under juddering strobes
and discordant electronics. What might have been overwrought in
less sure hands captures the tone of the production. The crimes
are incest and fratricide and the foulest treachery, and Hurst
depicts the consequences with the resonance of legend.
Moving
in a contemporary but alternate world where courtiers carry cellphones
and rapiers, the cast dress like they have stepped off the set
of "The Matrix". Dwarfing them is John Verryt's majestic
set.
There
are many high points and no false steps by a cast that combines
some of the country's finest actors--Hurst, Elizabeth Hawthorne
as Gertrude, Paul Barrett as Polonius--with the younger talents
of Jonathan Brugh and Jason Hoyte (Sugar and Spice), hilarious
in their doubled roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the
gravediggers. Hurst's Hamlet is blackly comic, a 40-ish cynic
who is a long way from melancholy youth. He makes the famous,
but tired soliloquies sound fresh again. But the most disturbing
scene belongs to Anna Hewlett as Ophelia, singing her mad songs,
clutching an opened pair of scissors in bloodied hands. Her death
comes as a genuine mercy.
©Copyright
2003, Sunday Star-Times |