Hamlet
- Written by William Shakespeare
- Directed by Lee Wilson
- Starring Graham Abbey, Brenda Bazinet, David Ferry, John Jarvis, Brendan Murray, Jane Spence and Jeffrey Wetsch
- At Fairy Lake in Newmarket, Ont.
Shakespeare in a tent by the water. It was the basic formula on which the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was founded more than half a century ago and one that remains in use across Canada, from Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, to Saskatoon’s Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, to the York Shakespeare Festival on the banks of Fairy Lake in Newmarket.
The connection between mighty Stratford and little York is especially strong this year. The Newmarket festival, produced by Resurgence Theatre and now in its 12th season, is presenting Hamlet with erstwhile Stratford leading man Graham Abbey in the title role.
The venue may be small, but Abbey still brings his A-game – as do his nine co-stars, which include veterans Brenda Bazinet, David Ferry and John Jarvis. They and director Lee Wilson seem determined to prove that outdoor Shakespeare needn’t be superficial and trendy.
Wilson gives us a Hamlet that’s long on text and short on clever concept. He leaves the famously lengthy play largely uncut (the show’s running time is three hours with an interval), while opting for a bare-bones staging. It’s as if he took Gertrude’s command to Polonius, “More matter with less art,” as his credo.
The play’s the thing here, and so is the playing. Like many modern actors, Abbey makes the Danish prince a man of action. (We might have expected that from an actor who stars in CBC’s cop show The Border.) He also treats him as a barely contained vessel of wrath. In his first scene, he fairly vibrates with bottled-up grief and rage at his father’s sudden death and his mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle Claudius.
His intensity informs every one of his scenes and speeches. He sacrifices Hamlet’s introspective and philosophical sides as a consequence, but he also creates a sense of burning urgency – the time is out of joint and, damn it, he’s got to set it right. Even his moments of ebullience are intense, as he abruptly leaps into the crotch of a tree, or goes sprinting off into the stand of evergreens that serve as a natural backdrop beyond the tent’s open back wall.
Abbey is riveting, but we’ve seen his style of Hamlet before. Ferry and Jarvis, in contrast, offer refreshingly quirky spins on the roles of Claudius and Polonius, respectively. Ferry provides a sly, at first almost comical, interpretation of the usurper. As the newly crowned king, his Claudius speaks self-consciously in the carefully constructed cadences of a novice politician, occasionally collapsing into a guilty man’s stutter.
The real comedy, though, comes from Jarvis, who plays the adviser Polonius not as a doddering old fool, but as a jovial busybody. His character proves so popular that when mistaken for Claudius and accidentally killed by Hamlet, there was a gasp of dismay from the audience on opening night. Happily, Jarvis reappears later to garner more laughs as a gravedigger. With a company of 10, there is a lot of multiple-role playing.
There is also fine work from Jeffrey Wetsch as a hot-headed Laertes; Brendan Murray as a sensitive Horatio; and Jane Spence, whose mad Ophelia, complete with pale skin and sunken eyes, is vintage Bedlam. But Bazinet, as a wan and worried-looking Gertrude, never seems to have her moment.
There was something about Jarvis’s twinkling Polonius that reminded me of a character in Dickens. It’s an impression reinforced by Ming Wong’s handsome costumes, which relocate the play from the medieval period to the early 19th century.
But, wardrobe aside, there is no attempt to put the tragedy in a different historical context. Wilson, whose only set designer here is nature, has clearly left that kind of thing to the directors with the big budgets and big ideas down in Stratford. He just trusts in the words and his actors, serving up a back-to-basics Shakespeare that will please newcomers and purists alike.
Hamlet runs until Aug. 29.
