At last a young Hamlet!
Although the text so indicates, by appending the adjective every time he is addressed as “young
Hamlet,” and the plot bears this out, most actors who play the
role are no longer young. Only
a teen-ager could be so upset over a mother’s remarriage. That
he returns from university to attend his
father’s funeral is Shakespeare’s addition to the Danish legend. Making him a student also testifies to his age:
records of Oxford University
in Shakespeare’s day indicate an admission age of thirteen to
fifteen. His being young and vulnerable makes the odds against
Hamlet seem even greater, and his achievement of his goal even
more admirable.
At London’s
Old Vic Theatre Trevor Nunn has directed an excellent modern dress
production, with two twenty-three-year-old
Hamlets who look sixteen. This
dictates that his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
friend Horatio, Laertes, and Ophelia be the same age, while Gertrude,
enacted by Imogen Stubbs, is in her thirties. And
we might reflect on the fact that when Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet”
in 1600 or 1601, his own son Hamnet, who died at eleven, would
have been fifteen or sixteen, the age of his surviving twin sister
Judith.
As impressively played by Al Weaver, his lean,
lanky, curly-haired Hamlet is witty ,
kind, and intelligent, and in turn tense, excitable, sarcastic,
moody and nearly hysterical, although never over the top.
He gains and holds our sympathy, even when he is so accusatory
in the scene in his mother’s bedchamber, being “cruel only to
be kind.” Ms. Stubbs is
excellent as Gertrude, going from empty-headed enjoyment of her
celebrity status as queen to grief when Hamlet confronts her with
his disgust at the sexual implications of her marriage to Claudius,
her character deepening after the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia,
with a moving account of the drowning. She and Claudius (Tom Mannion) make no secret
of the physicality of their attraction to each other.
Mr. Nunn has imaginatively created a production
that is clear, fast-moving, and well-spoken, while modern dress
contributes contemporary relevance.
He has judiciously but sparingly cut the text and shifted
a couple of scenes. He also solves a “crux” that has worried scholars.
When “Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester” is dug up, the gravedigger claims he’s
been there since “young Hamlet was born” and later adds that he
has been sexton “thirty years.”
In the current production the time is amended to “a dozen”
years, because Hamlet remembers that Yorick had borne him as a
youngster “on his back a thousand times.” Most likely Mr. Nunn is just following an earlier
emendation to make the years conform to Richard Burbage, the star
of Shakespeare’s company, and middle- aged when he first played
the role.
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