Primrose Road

I should start with the observation that at intermission, several disappointed audience members in front of me talked about leaving. And 80% of the row did leave. I suspect that these theatregoers were expecting a performance of Hamlet, and what they saw was a performance about Hamlet.

Throughout most of the play, a 1964 Broadway performance of Hamlet starring Richard Burton was projected onto the screen behind the actors on stage. The film had originally been intended to bring a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers; the Wooster Group's performance commented on the impossibility of bringing a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers.

The stage set was similar to the film's, as though the film was somehow projecting itself out on to the stage. The stage action followed the film's camera angles with the help of a table on wheels and the actors' movements. The actors moved, for the most part, exactly like the actors on film. This exposed how what would have looked "natural" (and perhaps even stagelike) on film was awkward and jerky on the actual stage.

During several scenes, the screen went blank (blue), with only the word "UNRENDERED" digitally imposed on it. These were definitely the moments where this performance became a play about Hamlet, not just about the 1964 attempt to bring theater to movie houses. First, when Polonius speaks to Ophelia and warns Laertes "neither a borrower nor a lender be," we see an "unrendered" screen interrupted, just for a moment, by an interior shot of Polonius' house from Michael Almereyda's 2000 film. The "unrendered" screen appears again after a second, but Polonius delivers his borrower/lender speech in Bill Murray's voice (the audio from Almereyda's film).

Later, the Player King concedes his speech to none other than Charlton Heston, whose melodramatic Trojan War tale from Branagh's 1996 film appears on the screen in Windows Media Player (hmm ... possibly a comment on the word "player" in the digital age?) as a file named "C_Heston.mov." The characters onstage watch, engrossed at first, but then start to get bored, turning away, laying down, chatting with each other.

There was a microphone placed downstage left, where Hamlet delivers (all, I believe) his more "famous" speeches. I wasn't sure whether this was meant to suggest a hackneyed Hamlet, a self-absorbed Hamlet, or perhaps a rockstar Hamlet.

The only decision that didn't work for me was having Gertrude and Ophelia played by the same actor, who made sure to leave parts of Gertrude's dress hanging out beneath Ophelia's following her purposefully hasty costume changes. The Gertrude/Ophelia conflation has been done before, and it is, in fact, the subject of (too) many psychoanalytic "Hamlet loves Mom/Hamlet's a misogynist" readings. The Wooster Group's production did, however, rather amusingly call attention to the fact that Gertrude and Ophelia couldn't be on stage at the same time -- at "The Murder of Gonzago," after Hamlet left his mother's side for "mettle more attractive," he noted to himself, "well, we'll have to skip over all this Ophelia stuff, won't we?"

Ultimately, I believe that what made this Hamlet "new" (something not easy to do with Hamlet) was the fact that it was neither a straightforward staging of Hamlet nor a straightforward "quoting" of Hamlet, but rather a play about quoting Hamlet.