HAMLET at the Delacorte.

Last evening I saw the new Hamlet at the Delacorte in the Park. Much of it was good. The cutting of the text was good. The duel at the end of Act Five was good. The actors were all good, some were excellent (Lauren Ambrose as Ophelia, David Harbour as Laertes, Sam Waterston as Polonius, and Jay O. Sanders as The Ghost, The Player King, and The Gravedigger most especially), but I felt that Director Oskar Eustis did not Illuminate the text - what I mean by that is nearly everything was well-spoken, but there was little in the language that was SPECIFICALLY Clear, and there was little in the action as directed that made clear WHY things were happening as they were: So much was done, seemingly, "because that's the way it's always been done". Hamlet treats Polonius badly from the first moments of the "fish-monger scene" but we don't know WHY, Hamlet treats Ophelia awfully in the "nunnery" scene, but we don't know WHY, the Play-within-a-play affects Claudius so powerfully, but we don't really know WHY. The "Advice to the players" was done as it usually is, with Hamlet telling the Players how to do their job, and the Players lovingly listening to him do it (I don't know ANY actors who would react that way - perhaps they were different in Shakespeare's day- but I doubt it, and the text of Hamlet indicates otherwise).

Andre Braugher is one of my favourite actors - I loved him in "Homicide:Life on the Street", so I was really looking forward to his Claudius, and I liked him very much in his scene-work (and particularly in Act IV), but felt that his soliloquies were a bit rushed- I didn't see a man wrestling with "Heaven and Earth" after the Play Scene. Michael Stuhlbarg is a very good actor, but I felt that much of what he was doing as Hamlet was VERY technical, and almost mannered. He seemed to be looking at himself in the role, and almost commenting on it. His best work was in the Gravedigger scene: very simple, very clear, very grounded, and very real.

I saw in the Program Notes that Oskar Eustis saw Hamlet as a man who is "clinically depressed", and that makes some sense of what I saw last night, I suppose, because to reduce the role and the story to such a 21st century diagnosis does both a simplistic disservice.