Short of doing a tedious textual exegesis or a pedantic comparison of specific lines and scenes, it’s difficult to review another Hamlet after seeing so many of them. We need and want to see more performances of great classic works like Hamlet or “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” or “The Sleeping Beauty” ballet; they should be kept alive. But way past the twentieth one, I tend to give up on ranking the performance and try to describe its virtues and compare its parts to the same parts in previous interpretations. That’s about the best I can do with Stratford’s latest first-rate Hamlet,directed by its great Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino and starring Jonathan Goad.
Goad is at least the eighth distinguished Hamlet at Canada’s great Stratford Festival and lives up to the distinction. His tortured prince is quick-witted and even amusing, very natural and believable in his rapid shifts of mood and manner, likable, genuinely young and virile and effortlessly commands our concentrated attention. But he is tragic only in death and, though very much alive, not necessarily knowable.
Director Cimolino has proclaimed this season to be an examination of “discovery” and his remarkably completely realized Hamlet is lucid and stunning in its varied discoveries. But I’m not sure that we are finally allowed to discover just who and what this Prince Hamlet is. His death is mournful, but neither heartbreaking nor shocking.
Seanna McKenna’s superb Queen Gertrude somehow avoids all the extremes of other Gertrudes I’ve seen while encompassing most of their varied qualities: aware of her seeming infidelity in her rapid acceptance of a new husband, yet genuinely in his thrall, motherly yet aloof, and, in the end, almost heroically asserting her independent selfhood.
Geraint Wynn Davies manages to make King Claudius an ultimately conscienceless villain after seeming genuinely gracious as monarch, truly in love with Gertrude, and disturbed by his multifaceted guilt. An enormously affecting actor, he persuades, attracts and repels with equal ease.
Adrienne Gould’s Ophelia seems real enough but perhaps better suited to play Lady Macbeth. Tom Rooney is an unusually entertaining and sensible courtier as Polonius. He gets the laughs with Polonius’s long-winded, cliché` advice to his son, Laertes, and daughter, Ophelia, but seems more likable and sadly irrelevant to the court than pompous or stupid. And Mike Shara’s Laertes is not just a bold antagonist toward Hamlet but an emotional young man crushed by the deaths of his father and sister. He commands our sympathy more than any other Laertes I can remember.
This whole cast is strong. Even Mike Nadajewski, playing the usually effeminate courtier Osric [one famous Hamlet was reviled by a critic as playing “Hamlet as Osric”], manages a tone of genuine menace under the foppery when he brings Hamlet the invitation to his final, fatal duel.
Cimolino’s usual elegant production is impressively set, clothed, lit, accompanied by effective music and employs strong fight and dance staging. But I’m not sure that setting it in 1914 just before W.W.I. makes a meaningful contribution.
