Jared Harris, who is making his New Jersey Shakespeare Festival debut as Hamlet, has a distinct advantage over other actors who have played the coveted role. When he sees the ghost hovering over Elsinore Castle (through the magic of digital wizardry) he recognizes him not only as the father of Hamlet but as his own real life father, the renowned Irish actor Richard Harris. His formidable image and voice -- a most imposing performance, by the way -- is a nice jump start for the younger Harris who has formerly cut his teeth with Hamlet, playing Fortinbras with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1990.
Harris also previously impressed this critic with his excitingly idiosyncratic performances with the New York Shakespeare Festival (particularly in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2). Now he energizes Hamlet with a thrust of unexpectedly disorienting rebelliousness. This may not be enough to make the young man, the enigma he is meant to be. And those famed soliloquies on his mind notably "to Be or Not to Be" are disposed of and dispensed with as if induced by a form of repressed schizophrenia. I suspect that the brooding Dane's disposition will survive Harris' substitution of petulance for nobility, cynical aggressiveness for melancholia and willfulness for ambiguity.
All variables, except perhaps the loss of nobility, are welcome as long as they are eventually validated. Unorthodox as many of them seem, I believe Harris does eventually validate his choices as a most unusual prince of Denmark. It is certainly easy to accept this Hamlet's defect -- his slowness to act -- given Harris' almost playful wallowing in the intrigue that will ultimately lead him and those around him to tragedy. That we can sense the terror in Hamlet's confrontation with the specter (it was a familiar face, after all), is easy to accept. Harris is especially effective revealing his distrust of and disillusion with Ophelia, his discovery of the intentions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Gregory Jackson and Adam Stein), and, indeed, his deranged mental state. They are all, under the circumstances, more indicative of his decidedly neurotic, but not particularly morbid, Hamlet.
Some of the doom and gloom undercurrents may still be perceived by those who dig deep enough into William Shakespeare's famed tragedy. Harris, under the crisp and clean direction of Tom Gilroy, chooses to wade schematically through Hamlet's initially immature procrastinations while wearing his inner anguish on his sleeve. Director Gilroy, who is making his Festival debut, is a co-founder and co-artistic director (along with Lily Taylor, the Ophelia) of the theater company Machine Full, seems to have focused most of his attention on addressing Hamlet's basically unstable nature.
Gilroy has also seen to it that the Danish establishment is simply but effectively entrenched within set designer Michael Schweikardt vision: A huge full moon is projected onto a black background set within a pale, abstractly washed picture frame. A pair of red traveling curtains is used to excellent effect for casting shadows, indicating scene changes and even occasionally upstaging Hamlet's petulance and impatience. Rottenness in Denmark, after all, needn't be confined to any century as long as there's a monarchy around willing to act rotten. Gilroy's staging is exceptionally fluid, transporting us poste haste to the battlement, throne rooms, and churchyard. The duel scene, with its gathered nobility, is realistic and quite thrilling, helped by the fine work of fight director Rick Sordelet.
While Miranda Hoffman's costumes, particularly Hamlet's black boatneck T-shirt and pants, make everyone look like they're at a pajama party, it is the blank verse and prose spoken by other members of the cast that tend to be a little sleep-inducing over the three and one-half hour course. However, Harris bravely idiosyncratic behavior (he moons Polonius), if not so much his often garbled speech, should work wonders with audiences who are apt to be too much in awe of the play and the role. The perennial wonder of Hamlet is that it gives the actor, as well as the director, choices. Apparently Harris and Gilroy have made a great effort to bridge the antiquity of the play by emphasizing the abstract and hallucinatory. Only in the second half (the better half), and specifically during the duel with Laertes (Jason Weinberg), do we see Hamlet resort slightly to ease and guile in support of his agenda. Whether or not Harris enters the ranks of great Hamlet interpreters, he is always ready with the unexpected, thereby keeping us involved.
Making their Festival debuts are Maggie Low, who succumbs to the empathetic side of Gertrude, and Lili Taylor, who goes off her rocker with a caseload of ticks, fits and starts, as Ophelia. Ms Taylor, it should be noted, is not your everyday actress (Bway's The Three Sisters; film "I Shot Andy Warhol") and she is no everyday Ophelia, finding, as she does, refuge in enough quirky body language to indicate that Ophelia may have a serious pre-existing physical and mental abnormality.
Bill Raymond's vaguely sinister take on Claudius, "a king of shred and patches" grows on you. But this can not be said William Bogart's Polonius, whose famed advice to his son and others gets tossed off without the prerequisite wit and humor they usually prompt. Of the two gravediggers -- Eric Hoffman and Jay Leibowitz (who doubles as Bernardo) -- Hoffman also plays the role of the Player King with panache and eye-opening eloquence. Other players are less interesting than they should be, allowing us to concentrate on a very interesting Hamlet.
Whatever it is that Gilroy has pulled off, we are certainly pulled less into the disintegrating political aspects of a royal family than into the emotional turbulence of madness and tragedy. Would that he could have used a little more digital wizardry as replacements for some of the supporting cast.
