TV or Not TV? I Hate Hamlet at NCRT

Another version of this review has appeared in the North Coast Journal.  There are additional notes below.

Several blocks from where a royal henchman cleverly castigates Shakespeare to his face in Redwood Curtain’s Equivocation, some contemporary Americans (and a distinguished ghost) are very conflicted about the Bard in the 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet, now onstage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka.

 After the TV series that made him famous was cancelled, Andrew Rally (played by Evan Needham) has been rediscovering himself as an actor in New York. His agent (Gloria Montgomery) encouraged him to audition for the title role in a Shakespeare in Central Park production of Hamlet, and he is cast.

 His romantic and virginal new girlfriend (Jennifer Trustem) swoons for the Shakespearian hero she wants him to be. But he immediately has second thoughts, especially after his Hollywood director (Anders Carlson) brings him a deal for a network series about a crusading young teacher in an inner city school who also has superpowers (he can fly, “but only about ten feet up. See, we’re keeping it real.”)

 All the action transpires in a vintage Manhattan apartment that Rally’s real estate agent (Kristen Collins) has found for him. It just happens to be the former abode of actor John Barrymore, whose 1920s Hamlet became legendary. A seance summons Barrymore from the beyond to advise Rally on his own portrayal of the conflicted Melancholy Dane.

 Should he or shouldn’t he? To be or not to be? TV or not TV? Does he hate Hamlet, or himself?

 I Hate Hamlet is a comedy by Paul Rudnick, rich in jokes but with a bit more substance than it pretends to have. It is also awkwardly constructed, especially at the start. With all the set-up, exposition and unfamiliar New York and German accents, the first act at NCRT wobbled gamely forward until Anders Carlson as the irrepressible Hollywood director infused the stage with comic energy. The character certainly provides it, with lines like: “Am I like the most self-obsessed person you’ve ever met? My answer? Yes.”

Carlson's character is also very funny on the supposed obsolescence of the stage.  After theatre and movies came television, he says.  "That's like, art perfected...I mean, when I go to the theatre I sit there and most of the time I'm thinking, which one is my armrest?"

The first act climaxes with a sword fight between the reluctant Rally and the buoyant Barrymore (choreographed by Jasper Anderton) that sparkles like the champagne Barrymore is simultaneously imbibing. Christian Litten is a lithe and athletic Barrymore, and even looks like the actor, especially in Laura Rhinehart’s costume that reproduces Barrymore’s Hamlet togs as seen in old photos.

 Most of what the play says about Barrymore is historically accurate and relevant to Rally’s dilemma. Barrymore was the theatrical equivalent of a sitcom actor until he triumphed as Hamlet on Broadway and perhaps more impressively, in London. Then he left for Hollywood.

 Director David Moore and cast seem to have elected to do a fairly subdued version of this sometimes raucously produced play. That choice perhaps allows for more human feeling in the Barrymore-Rally scenes in the second act—in any case, this is where Needham and Litten especially excel. Gloria Montgomery also delivers a moving set piece in Act II.

 On opening night some comic timing and delivery wasn’t yet sharp, a not uncommon occurrence. There seems to be more potential in the script for vocalizing (and projecting) some lusciously comic lines. Fortunately there are three more weekends in the run to discover such opportunities and possibly make a funny show funnier.

 Calder Johnson is scenic designer, Telfer Reynolds designed lighting, Michael Thomas the sound, Laura Rhinehart properties as well as costumes. I Hate Hamlet is performed weekends at NCRT through October 11. 442-6278, www.ncrt.net. 

[Aside]: In portraying a stage legend, I Hate Hamlet's 1991 Broadway production itself became legendary. The brilliant English actor (and former Hamlet) Nichol Williamson was increasingly erratic in his performance as Barrymore. In the sword fight one evening, he swatted costar Evan Handler in the back. Handler immediately exited the stage and kept on going, out of the theatre and out of the play forever.

I Hate Hamlet: Additional Notes

Why John Barrymore?  Why is he the Hamlet actor that returns from the beyond to counsel our TV-star protagonist in I Hate Hamlet?  After all, there have been more recent and therefore more familiar Hamlets: Laurence Olivier certainly was identified with the role, while Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole famously played it.

A short answer is that it was John Barrymore's former Manhattan apartment that playwright Paul Rudnick was shown (some online articles say that Rudnick lived there, but he doesn't make that assertion in his script notes.)  This coincidence sparked the writing of the play.

But there are meaningful parallels between Barrymore and our protagonist as well.  First, however, who was John Barrymore?

Perhaps even in 1991 it was too early to mention that John Barrymore is Drew Barrymore's grandfather.  The first generation of Barrymore actors were Georgiana and Maurice Barrymore (Drew's great grandparents.)  The next and most legendary generation was composed of the siblings Lionel, Ethel and John.  They all are best known now for their movie performances, but they began on the stage.

  Ethel was the first to become a star in 1901, in the unlikely Broadway show Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines by an early Broadway playwright I've been reading a lot about lately, Clyde Fitch (His play Her Own Way was the first ever done by Humboldt State, and is being restaged as a radio-style drama by HSU Theatre, Film & Dance on October 3 and 4.)

Captain Jinks was also John Barrymore's first Broadway appearance. As I Hate Hamlet says, he started with mostly light comedy, but he did try more serious drama before Hamlet, including a role in Ibsen's A Doll's House (again with sister Ethel) and more individually in an adaptation of a Tolstoy play,confusingly retitled Redemption (since that was the title of a different Tolstoy novel.)  He also did an historical drama called The Jest with his brother Lionel--and this made Lionel a star.

John Barrymore warmed up his Shakespeare with voice lessons and a reputedly very uneven Richard III.  But then in 1922 came his triumphant Hamlet.  His erratic behavior and lack of concentration and consistency were on hold for awhile.  He prepared for Hamlet "meticulously," writes famed critic and theatre historian Brooks Atkinson.  The result: "John Barrymore played a Hamlet that most people ranked with Edwin Booth's, by tradition considered the greatest."

Another critic wrote that Barrymore had revolutionized Shakespearian acting by ending the "school of recitation."  Barrymore's performance was "alive with vitality and genius--a great, beautiful, rare Hamlet--understandable and coherent."

John Gielgud, whose own Hamlet would eventually break Barrymore's Broadway record for performances, saw the Barrymore performance and "admired it very much," noting that he had "a wonderful edge and a demonic sense of humour...Of all the actors in my time I felt he must be the nearest to Irving, with the same kind of extravagance and flowery, sinister power."

Barrymore's Hamlet is also notable for his interpretation of Hamlet's relationship with his mother as Oedipal.  This Freudian approach was adopted wholesale by Olivier, especially in his movie version of Hamlet, which he directed. (Gielgud also mentions that Barrymore "cut the play outrageously" so he could extend the scene between Hamlet and his mother that exemplified this approach.)

A few years later Barrymore took his Hamlet to London, and triumphed again.  He then gave up the Broadway stage, moved to Hollywood and made movies, where  he fully earned his reputation for womanizing and especially for drinking (apparently emphasized more in the original I Hate Hamlet Broadway production than at NCRT.)

But it is not true, as stated in I Hate Hamlet, that he never returned to the stage.  He made one last Broadway starring appearance.  In a reputedly mediocre play (My Dear Children) he gave "a first-rate performance," Atkinson writes.  "There was a kind of admirable, if perverse gallantry about this final fling at the stage..." (Atkinson saw this play himself, and may have seen Barrymore's Hamlet.)  This play ran for four months in 1940.  John Barrymore died in 1942.

So the parallels between Barrymore and Andrew Rally, both obvious and subtle, underlie this "boulevard comedy" as Rudnick describes it.  Rally comes from commercial TV but at least part of him longs for artistic challenge and expression (so he auditioned five times for this Hamlet.)  Barrymore came from commercial theatre and was uneducated and untrained for classical roles, yet he pursued such roles and worked hard to excel in them.  Barrymore also knew the temptations of Hollywood--in his case, the movies.

They are both conflicted.  And of course they are talking about the most famously conflicted character in classical drama: Hamlet.

The contrasts between Rally and Barrymore--notably involving women and drink--also figure in the comedy, but the relationship they build in the second act is based on these common threads, as well as one more: the brotherhood of Hamlets.

Playing Hamlet is a kind of rite of passage for actors (which is partly why there is a new Hamlet somewhere in England almost continuously.)  Especially for a young actor it is the most complex role, offering the most challenge and the most breadth of opportunity for interpretation.  (Lear is the equivalent for older actors.)

David Warner Hamlet 1965

There is a kind of brotherhood established by the actors (a few of them women) who have played Hamlet, and a feeling established in theatre lore that after playing Hamlet an actor is never the same.  You get some sense of this in the conversation that David Tennant has with other Hamlets like Jude Law and David Warner  in the BBC's "Shakespeare Uncovered" series, which is viewable on YouTube.  I remember Tennant talking about this brotherhood of Hamlets and the mystique of the role in an interview, which I can no longer find.

A personal note: I don't recall actually meeting Paul Rudnick when we were both writing for Esquire, but I heard about him from mutual friends and editors.  The word was that he was very funny, and very New York.

A new generation of Hamlet-to-Lear actors: American Kevin Kline, his Hamlet in the 80s (I saw this one at the Public Theatre in NYC) and recent Lear; British actor David Warner, in what Patrick Stewart calls the Hamlet of his generation in the 60s, and a recent Lear.

David Tennant and Patrick Stewart open Hamlet;
David Warner in the classic 1960s Hamlet;
archeologists excavate what is believed to be the
foundation of the 16th century theatre in London
where Shakespeare worked and learned his craft.

Shakespeare in the News

Yes, it's time again for the Shakespeare in the News roundup. Tonight's headline: Dr. Who and Captain Picard Star in Hamlet!
Well, it's true. The Royal Shakespeare production has opened, with David Tennant (Doctor Who on the BBC) as Hamlet, and Patrick Stewart (formerly of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but more recently the prize-winning lead in Macbeth) as both Claudius, Hamlet's stepfather, and the Ghost of his father, the King who Claudius murdered.

"The hype, it seems, was justified," began the Guardian's roundup of the reviews. Michael Billington, the Guardian's critic, one of the most eminent in the UK, wrote (according to this story) that Tennant has no difficulty making the transition from the BBC's Time Lord to Shakespeare's Hamlet, a man "who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space". Indeed, Tennant - "active, athletic, immensely engaging" - is one of the funniest Hamlets Billington has ever seen, who goes on to say that, overall, it is "one of the most richly textured, best-acted versions of the play we have seen in years". The only thing that is missing is an insight into Hamlet's philosophical nature, something Billington partly attributes to director Gregory Doran's cuts to Shakespeare's longest play, resulting in some of "the most beautiful lines in all literature" being lost.

This was pretty much the consensus view: Tennant was very good but not (yet) great, and Patrick Stewart was brilliant. Another reviewer wrote that his performance as Claudius was the "strongest, scariest" he'd ever seen, "acting of the highest order." Others also mentioned the cuts in the text as too severe, resulting in more of a revenge drama.

Billington also wrote of Tennant, "He is a fine Hamlet whose virtues, and occasional vices, are inseparable from the production itself...This is a Hamlet of quicksilver intelligence, mimetic vigour and wild humour: one of the funniest I've ever seen. He parodies everyone he talks to, from the prattling Polonius to the verbally ornate Osric. After the play scene, he careers around the court sporting a crown at a tipsy angle. Yet, under the mad capriciousness, Tennant implies a filial rage and impetuous danger: the first half ends with Tennant poised with a dagger over the praying Claudius, crying: "And now I'll do it." Newcomers to the play might well believe he will. Tennant is an active, athletic, immensely engaging Hamlet. If there is any quality I miss, it is the character's philosophical nature, and here he is not helped by the production."

Hamlet is a defining role for an actor. As Canadian actor (and star of the TV series Slings and Arrows) Paul Gross commented, actors are considered pre- or -post Hamlet. It's self-defining even for actors who never get to play the role. In their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead DVD interviews, both Gary Oldman and Richard Dreyfus are wistful about missing their chances to play Hamlet--both felt even at that time that they were too old. Dreyfus held out some hope for being able to do a radio version, but even that seemed unlikely. Al Pacino (on his DVD called Babblelonia) felt thwarted in doing any Shakespeare when he was young because he was too ethnic.

As for Tennant's good-but-not-great reviews, that could change: not only as this production continues, but as time goes by. I remember after seeing David Warner in the film Morgan! I had high hopes for his Hamlet (1965-67.) It was in England, and I never got a chance to see it, but I was dismayed at how dismissive the reviews were, at least the few I saw. Apparently, the reviews overall were mixed. So I was surprised to see, when reading about this new production, that Warner's Hamlet is now considered so highly. Patrick Stewart calls it the Hamlet of his generation, and Billington rates it in his top ten, of productions from 1958 to 2000. (Stewart later acted with Warner in a revival of Warner's Hamlet, as well as in a notable episode of Next Gen.)

This new production also awakens intense envy of London theatregoers, who had the opportunity to see so many great actors take on this role, and for that matter the others in this play. And thanks in part to the wildly popular Doctor Who, but also to the place that theatre has in UK culture, this production is a real event--inspiring, among other things, in a newspaper feature in which critics, actors and other theatrical celebs muse on their favorite Hamlets. Veteran critic Benedict Nightingale writes that he's seen at least 40.

Readers added their favorites in the comments to this article. Though I've seen Olivier, Branagh, Gibson, etc. in their film Hamlets, the only name actor I saw play the role on stage was Kevin Kline at the Public Theatre, and I wasn't terribly impressed.

My favorite Hamlet was my first, the inaugural production of the new arts center at Knox College, where I was a freshman. A student named Jim Eichelberger played Hamlet, and he was astonishing. He went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, was a lead actor at Trinity Rep in Providence before becoming a star of experimental theatre, as Ethyl Eichelberger. He appeared in a production of The Threepenny Opera with Sting in the 80s. But he contracted AIDS, was apparently resistant to drugs of the time, and committed suicide in 1990--in fact, as I see his Wikipedia bio, on this very date, August 12.

Another production I liked a lot was one at the University of Pittsburgh, which had a summer Shakespeare festival, with performances in a kind of round stone castle called the Stephen Foster Memorial--very atmospheric for Shakespeare. A Canadian actor called Richard McMillan played Hamlet (I recognized him a few years ago in a small but substantive role in the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, acting with the great British actor Ian Holm.) I remember that this production started as a kind of postmodern dress Hamlet, but as the action intensified, the actors were all in sober Elizabethan costume. McMillan started out playing Hamlet as a moody young rebel with John Lennon shades, perhaps an echo of David Warner's very 60s hero.

Also associated with the new Hamlet, there was some controversy in England over celebrities possibly overwhelming Shakespearian productions. Director Jonathan Miller was critical (even though he's been known to use famous actors), but Michael Billington defended the Tennant production. It also helps that both Tennant and Stewart were trained and worked in RSC productions. The tradition of going back and forth between theatre and TV and theatre and movies is much more established in England, and Billington finds that a little screen stardom may even improve stage confidence and performance.

But Hamlet isn't the only Shakespeare in the News, not in England, oh no. Here's the breathless beginning to the Guardian story: A shiver of excitement rippled around the theatrical globe as news spread of some grubby red bricks uncovered in a muddy pit off a nondescript street in east London. Sir Ian McKellen will be making his way to New Inn Broadway in Shoreditch, one of many theatre luminaries impatient to see the site where his hero William Shakespeare learned his trade not just as a playwright but an actor.

It's The Theatre (that's what it was called) that's been lost for 400 years. Or anyway, part of its foundation--because the actual theatre was simply dismantled and transported to another location, where it became The Globe. It's believed to be the theatre where Shakespeare first acted, and where his first plays were performed.

Now that the site is known for sure, it can be properly excavated and the dimensions of The Theatre studied. Believed to have been built in 1576, it is where Shakespeare learned his craft. Its foundation was found by archeologists who had clues it might be there, while the site was being cleared for a new building: a new theatre, in fact.

Just the Play

Richard Burton in the 1964 "Hamlet"
on Broadway, directed by John Gielgud.

Rediscovering the Gielgud-Burton "Hamlet"

On my most recent visit to Booklegger in Eureka, I found a copy of the first and probably only edition of Richard Burton in Hamlet, a book by actor Richard L. Sterne. In 1964, John Gielgud directed Burton on Broadway, at the height of his Burton-and-Elizabeth Taylor fame --the two actually got married while the play was in rehearsal. Sterne was a young actor in the production, and apparently all on his own, he decided to secretly tape record the rehearsals.

He hid a bulky reel-to-reel of the time in a briefcase, with the microphone pointed through a hole in the side of it. And once when he wanted to record a rehearsal with just Burton and Gielgud, he hid himself as well, under the stage. He stayed there not only for the two hours of rehearsal, but for several hours more until stagehands left, so he wouldn't be discovered.

Then after it was all over he told Gielgud and Burton about it, and they thought it was hilarious.

Sterne also took notes, and then had hours and hours of transcripts to make and edit. The book came out three years later, and probably didn't catch the wave of interest the play generated--it was a Broadway hit, sold out for its entire run. But the result is fascinating to read, more for Gielgud than Burton now, though there is some interesting dialogue with him. Gielgud was in touch one way or another (as participant, theatregoer or student of the lore) with every major production of Hamlet going back to the nineteenth century. Besides the history and how it informed his approach, this book offers some fascinating ideas and insights on directing for the theatre.

That production is also notable because it was one of the first that presented Shakespeare in modern dress--in this case in "rehearsal clothes," with no scenery and minimal set. There was a fashion for this minimal approach for awhile. It was supposed to strip the plays down to their essentials, undistracted by period clothes and elaborate scenery.

Gielgud wanted to do the play as if it were the final run-through before the technical rehearsals, before the costumes inhibit and change performances, and the sets "as beautiful as they are," he says in the first rehearsal, "they sort of cramp the imagination and the poetry--and they are apt to destroy the pace."

For the audience, this style provides the opportunity to concentrate on the acting, the words, and the play itself. Just the play.

Personally, I can't wait for this style to come back, and replace today's orthodoxy, which is to transplant Shakespeare to another time and place, regardless of how appropriate to the play, and the more outlandish the resulting set and costumes, the better. What might have helped directors, actors and audiences alike see the plays afresh has often become distraction and sensationalism, a way to sell the show with the Shakespeare brand while mocking the plays at the same time. The intent also seems to be to reassure the audience that there's really nothing there but cliches and pageantry, so there's no reason to aspire to a deeper understanding. Don't worry, it's just a show.

What excellent productions of any kind actually do--whether they are period, transplanted or minimalist like the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet--is reveal both the depths of the play, some of its complexity, and also the bedrock humanity and human situations that indeed are universal and can communicate to any audience. Done well, Shakespeare's plays are great shows. I suspect that the when this predominant style of presentation fades or is put out of our misery, something like the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet style will return.

But is switching time and place always bad? See the review below of the Kenneth Branagh As You Like It on DVD.

More Slings and Arrows

As in Shakespeare's plays, "Slings and Arrows" has doubling: the continuing story of the troubled romance between a couple with a dramatic history (Geoffrey Tennant played by Paul Gross and Ellen Fanshaw played by Martha Burns--pictured here) plus a romance between different pairings of younger characters: an insecure young movie star and a young apprentice, both acting prominent roles in Hamlet for the first time; a young couple playing the title roles in Romeo and Juliet--star-crossed in their case because up until they began rehearsing together, he was strictly gay.)

There's multiple doubling of plots, as each series focuses on one play (Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear) while at least one other is also being rehearsed (Romeo and Juliet during Macbeth); beside the drama of producing the play, there's some crisis involving the theatre itself, usually involving its manager (Mark McKinney as Richard Thomas-Jones) that also includes a romantic or at least sexual entanglement.

There's also a Hamlet's ghost trying to direct the action (Stephen Ouimette as Oliver Welles) literally the Artistic Director who is killed early in episode one, and haunts the production, even appearing in it by furnishing his skull for Yorrick's. (He returns to haunt Macbeth; don't know about season 3.) Geoffrey won acclaim playing Hamlet but then went mad. To direct this new production he feigns madness--or does he? A question they're still asking about Hamlet.