Summary 
Daring version of the revenge story, with a twenties-something Prince a diminutive punk-rocker rebel challenging the establishment against all odds. Modern rock scoring and chilling images of returning ghosts among many effective directorial choices. An excellent production, elevated further by repertory staging with the same cast in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Design
Directed by Doug Finlayson. Costumes by Dan Wilhelm. Set by John Stark. Lights by J. William Ruyle. Sound by David Zerlin.
Cast
Joyce Thi Brew (Ophelia), Susan D'Autremont (Gertrude), Anthony Irons (Horatio), Timothy Kane (Guildenstern), Michael Littman (Claudius), Kathleen Logelin (Player Queen), Michael Milligan (Hamlet), Patrick New (Rosencrantz), Patrick O'Gara (Polonius), Roderick Peeples (Ghost/Player King), Martin Yurek (Laertes).
Analysis
Director Doug Finlayson modernizes Hamlet with youthful and rebellious costumes, a recognizably 1990s punkish-alternative rock-music score, and a waifish Prince Hamlet of only 23 years of age. The intent is to make the Dane's tragedy more palatable for younger audiences, a la the Baz Luhrmann film version of Romeo and Juliet. In a pre-opening interview, Finlayson revealed that he wanted to focus on Hamlet's universal "confusion on how to act" within a generational conflict. The results are for the most part successful, if somewhat jarring, as when Hamlet remembers - and embraces - his departed father to the opening strains of Counting Crows' "A Murder of One," or later, when he embraces Ophelia while the acoustic guitar strums from Oasis' "Wonderwall" play from loudspeakers. Despite the unsettling anachronism, the lyrics from both songs, and especially the latter, have significance in relation to themes from the play, as if Hamlet himself sings to Ophelia, "maybe you'll be the one who saves me."
Finlayson presents the tale as a flashback, beginning the production with Horatio's earnest 5.2 wish to "speak to the yet unknowing world." Then, on a stage concealed by slick black tarpaulins secured with lengths of heavy rope, the death of Hamlet's father is enacted in a dumb show accompanied by pulsating rock music. A half-dozen ghoulish spirits, attired in long black coats with dark hoods, pursue the poisoned King. They each take hold of him by a crimson cape that drapes from his back. The ghouls draw the King toward them, and while he "dies," they wrap him head to toe in a white gauze burial shroud and bind him with ropes. When, as the Ghost, he appears to the watch later in 1.1, he is still bound in the gauze and rope, and during 1.4, the actor wears a hidden microphone that amplifies his voice into a booming bellow that echoes across the outdoor theatre.
Hamlet - aged at 23 by the 5.1.173 line in which Yorick's death is placed at sixteen years past when Hamlet was seven years old - is formidably played by Michael Milligan as a free spirit suddenly restrained. Milligan, his spiky blond hair cropped short, wears black boots and black knee pads over black leather pants, and a black vest over a white dress shirt. Milligan shows the depth of Hamlet's anguish by kneeling, spot lit in the gallery, to deliver a sardonic "Lord's Prayer" and a truncated and bitter "Hail Mary."
Milligan's Hamlet, physically slight and emotionally crestfallen, looks out of place during the boisterous 1.2 wedding celebration that follows the dumb show. Claudius' applauding courtiers take the stage in a gaudy Day of the Dead-like festival that overwhelms Milligan's solemn sullenness. The revelers dance and leap to blaring music, waving bright streamers while they shoot off fireworks and blow whistles, horns, and noise-makers. They wear black masks with animal horns and feathers, bizarre wigs of orange and pink, and are adorned with bones and death-heads.
During Hamlet's 1.4 search for the ghost of his father, the watch's loyalty to Hamlet is portrayed as genuine, in opposition to the Queen, the new King, and Hamlet's "excellent good friends" Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The watch, wearing berets and trench coats, wield swords and flashlights, and they scurry about in the hushed darkness. Later, the Ghost commands them to "swear!" three times, and with each command, one member comes forward, drops to a knee, and clutches Hamlet's sword to join the vow of secrecy.
Claudius, attired in a glistening night-club suit that resembles the concealing tarpaulins across the stage, is portrayed as a slick gangster type. Gertrude wears an ironically white gown with high heels throughout the play, and she is adorned with diamonds, from her ostentatious wedding ring to earrings and a bracelet. Hamlet's rejection of the "o'erhasty" newlyweds' excesses and dishonesty seems natural, especially in light of his youthful sense of rebellion. When the same traits of indulgence and deceit are revealed in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the effect upon Hamlet is devastating because these are not only friends but peers from his age-group. Hamlet must feel buffeted and betrayed from all sides, young and old, friend and family.
The supposed friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flamboyantly overdressed in purple and yellow sport coats with matching shoes. At one point, Polonius interrupts their adolescent leering over the Kama Sutra. The two false friends brandish martini glasses and cigars, toothpicks and olives, and they swagger and constantly pose, embodying the "seems" while Hamlet clearly possesses that "which passes show."
Finlayson accentuates the multitude of betrayals that drives Hamlet to murder: first, Gertrude's incest and the revelation of Claudius' fratricide; then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's lying and spying; and finally, Ophelia's dishonesty and obedience to Polonius. Ophelia is played as a callow teenager, all giggles and playfulness, then cowering in supplication before her father to obey his commands, much like Hamlet, driven to his knees before the Ghost. Hamlet and Ophelia share some of the lines from the 3.1 "to be or not to be" speech, and Ophelia - ironically, an eventual suicide - stops him from ingesting a bottle of pills by insisting, "perchance to dream." The scene culminates with her lie to Hamlet, while the seething Milligan desperately gives her a final opportunity to be faithful to him and not to the eavesdropping Polonius: "where's your father" - "at home, my lord." Again betrayed, the disheartened Hamlet crowns her with a pretend-crown and commands her to "get thee to a nunnery." After Hamlet exits, Claudius' disturbed comment that Hamlet's behavior "was not like madness" is followed by an abrupt blackout, except for a wavering spotlight on the devastated Ophelia. Ophelia screams, "what a noble mind is here o'erthrown," a tragic commentary on Hamlet and one that applies just as readily to herself.
The players' arrival in 2.2 presents Hamlet with a diversion as well as a device. The troupe is portrayed as subversive sub-culture to which the student-actor-poet-philosopher Hamlet understandably clings, although he reveals Polonius-like pedantry during his verbose discourse to the actors. The players wear black leather and combat boots, bandanas and headbands, and they sport tattoos and earrings. Significantly, they immediately set about untying all but one of the tarpaulins that conceal the stage, just as their performance will ultimately reveal the conscience of Claudius. Once the tarps are removed, ladder-like stage adornments are exposed as rickety and uneven, comprised of splintered wood. Hamlet crouches in the gallery of the newly revealed stage, and his fervent wish to "catch the conscience of the King" is accentuated by another sudden blackout that signals the first of two intermissions.
The players perform The Murder of Gonzago with white-faced puppets of king, queen, and murderer. The puppet face of the murdered king is removed to reveal a skull, and the actor tosses the "face" from the gallery to the stage below. Milligan's agitated Hamlet takes over the performance, leaping into the gallery to seize a spotlight and shout at Claudius until the King cries out, "give me some light." Hamlet's alienation continues in the subsequent scene, during which he descends toward vengeance and therefore distances himself from the love and poetry of his youth. His refusal to kill the praying Claudius, however, is counterpointed by Laertes' sputtering 4.7 insistence that he would readily cut Hamlet's throat "i' the church." Hamlet's impetuous stabbing of Polonius results from a tortured lashing out that seems natural and reflexive, much to Milligan's credit. When Polonius collapses behind the arras, he grasps and pulls down the last of the ropes and tarpaulins and completely reveals the stage. Hamlet becomes horrified, in great part with himself. When he lambasts Claudius to his mother as "a murderer and a villain," he pauses and looks down at the body of Polonius, realizing he has become a murderer and a villain himself. All is revealed, and Hamlet's path is now irreversible. As Finlayson mentioned in an interview, Hamlet's world at this point "spins off its axis."
Alternative rock music accompanies Ophelia's 4.5 madness scene. Barefoot and wearing her father's coat, she clutches a wreath of flowers. Ophelia's sincerity is accentuated by the presence of Osric, a sycophantic attendant, just as Hamlet's melancholy was a contrast to the garish Day of the Dead festival. While Ophelia laments, the serpentine Osric lurks, less in sympathy than in duty. Attired in a flashy red and black leather jacket with the collar turned up and sunglasses even at night, he wears lipstick and has long, slicked back hair. His artificiality presents a glaring opposite to Ophelia's sincere grief. Osric spends most of his stage time at Claudius' heels, and during 4.7 he obediently collects the discarded letters Claudius tosses about.
The 5.1 gravedigger scene is brief, with Ophelia's grave signified by overturned chairs around a shallow trap. Amid rain-and-thunder sound effects, raincoat-clad mourners concealed beneath hoods and umbrellas carry Ophelia's corpse onstage. Ophelia's form is wrapped in ghostly gauze and rope, exactly like Hamlet's father. During the tussle with Laertes - "dog will have his day" - Ophelia eerily rises like a ghost and, within a spotlight, walks out of the grave and offstage. Hamlet, the only one to see her, cries out, apparently in the dread realization that like his father, Ophelia has become a perturbed spirit who will "walk the night" and "fast in fires."
The 5.2 duel scene begins with a reiteration that "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" as well as Hamlet's mockery of Osric's gestures. As the swordfight begins, Polonius and Ophelia appear on one side of the gallery, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern then emerge to silently watch from the other side. As the duel accelerates, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears on the high platform, ethereally backlit with white light. While the swordplay is energetically choreographed and realistic, the actual bloodshed is impressionistically presented with flowing crimson cloth. This choice somewhat dilutes the dramatic intensity of the scene, but the emotional impact of the bloodbath is nonetheless compelling. Hamlet even slashes Osric, who collapses upstage to not only add to the body count, but to complete Hamlet's rejection of Claudius' shallow and artificial court.
Finlayson's production concludes with the frozen image of ghostly presences above and the newly dead below. After Horatio's memorable "flights of angels" remark, Hamlet's only friend stands to re-deliver the lines that opened the play, giving the production circularity as well as closure. Much credit for the effectiveness of this production goes to Milligan as a complex and endearing young Hamlet, but most of the credit must go to Finlayson for his interesting and daring choices, especially in terms of costume and music.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.15, No.4, Fall 1997.