The Rest is Silence

dreamthinkspeak are best known for their site-specific theatrical installations that take buildings and spaces and transform them magically. Unlike Punchdrunk whose pieces are grittily surreal, detailed and material, dreamthinkspeak work tends to be mercurial, ethereal, poetic. They’ve often worked with texts but usually literary ones, like The Divine Comedy or Crime and Punishment. But this time they’ve created something in dialogue with a play, perhaps the most famous play in the world: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

What is the form of this piece? The audience enters in a large square black space. The walls are dark windows. There is something that looks vaguely like a skylight in the centre of the ceiling. As the performance begins, these dark windows are illuminated: either elegant projections play on their surfaces, or the lights reveal them in three dimensions as rooms in the family home of Hamlet. There are around ten rooms in all, some of which transform into other rooms. Many of the rooms connect and we see characters move from space to space. The actors are always behind perspex. When they speak they are amplified. Sometimes their images are captured on video and projected on other walls. The audience stands, walks around, some people sat on the floor. Scenes are reflected in the other walls. Occasionally, images are projected down onto the skylight.

What have they done with Hamlet? Like almost everyone, they’ve cut the text. As this show runs around 90 minutes, they have gone obviously further than most. Indeed, they’ve transposed scenes, spliced others together (notably Hamlet’s renunciation of Ophelia with the scene in Gertrude’s bedchamber). The most radical transformation occurs with the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes; they begin, as in the original, briefed by Claudius to make an assessment of Hamlet’s behaviour. But we don’t see that encounter; instead we see them return with copious notes of his strange comments which they repeat to each other with hilarity. Later they come across Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech, ripped up, as if it is a destroyed diary entry. They spend much of the rest of the play trying to put it back together. Eventually, on the fatal boat to England, they think they have done so successfully. Instead they have inadvertently created a hymn to death which prepares them for their own demise. Apparently, every word spoken in this production comes from the Shakespeare.

The setting is modern, hypercontemporary. Polonius’s office desk has an iMac and a Flos Arco lamp. Hamlet’s bedside table has Jo Nesbo novels on it. There’s a feeling of stark, clinical minimalism about the interior designs, which contrast with the wistful, organic shapes of the garden whose image we see, now and again, projected on windows. This modern transposition reflects the approach to the text. The supernatural is downplayed; tough to do in a play that hinges on the appearance of the ghost, but in this version Hamlet does not seem to see the ghost - it is left to us to assume that he has imagined or hallucinated a vision of his father’s murder. The ghost appears to Claudius, but this may be drunkenness. Act 4 is almost entirely omitted, interestingly. There is no Yorick either, no graveyard scene, and no Fortinbras. All of this suggests a somewhat depoliticised Hamlet and, yes, it kind of is, because it’s an internal Hamlet, a Hamlet about the prison of the self. The panoply of perspex boxes disorganise the stage such that no scene has priority over another; often I was led to wonder if the events in one box were being imagined by the inhabitants of another. The production is trying to get into the heads of these characters, though which heads we are in remains in question.

What works? The appearance of scenes, rising or flickering out of the dark, is never anything other than magical. The dead darkness of the box-sets means that characters suddenly appear in new rooms, creating moments of shock and disorientation, which helps create a sense of time out of joint, and a royal palace disturbed and spying. Placing the characters behind perspex paradoxically allows for very close inspection (you can press your nose against the glass) and imposes distance (you don’t feel quite as if you’re breathing the same air). This is sometimes a frustrating dynamic, but sometimes it enhances the frustration of the characters: for around 20 minutes, Hamlet sat alone in a lounge area, silently and blankly facing out, the isolation in the staging enhancing our sense of his social loneliness and mental imprisonment. I felt that Ophelia’s story, too, was made more vivid and more moving because her inability to get through to Hamlet were picked up and reinforced by the barriers between him and us.

There are some very witty transpositions of the Shakespeare. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend a long sequence hysterically reading out things that Hamlet has said; many of these things (‘quintessence of dust’, ‘the king of infinite space’, etc.) are some of the greatest moments of stage poetry ever written, but here they suggest madness, a kind of poetic logorrhoea. This serves not only as a commentary on Hamlet, but also a commentary on Hamlet, and asks questions about our relation to the play, so venerated that maybe it’s not properly read or listened to. I’ve seen four Hamlets in the last four years, know the play very well, but still heard whole speeches I could have sworn were grafted in from another play.

I was reminded of the French Symbolist theatre of the 1890s. A particular staging trope of the Symbolists would be to create a proscenium within the proscenium, with a narrator on the outside and, behind a gauze, other-worldly figures. The Symbolists believed, to oversimplify, in the primary reality of a metaphysical world of cosmic harmonies that underlay the mess of everyday appearances. Their beef with theatre was its immutable materiality which, to them, turned everything into Naturalism. The frame-within-a-frame was intended to suggest that we looked through material reality into something more abstract, conceptual, metaphysical, quasi-linguistic (the Symbolists thought language was uniquely able to expressed abstraction and harmonies and correspondences). But though the audience were supposed to be looking from one world into another, different performances differed about which side was the metaphysical one. At the Theatre de l’Oeuvre, the most successful failure in theatre history, the audience were earthbound adventurers being offered a glimpse of the noumenal by the magicians of the Symbolist stage. But in a play like Maurice Maeterlinck’s Interior, we are looking in on a family Who Have Yet To Hear The Dreadful News. We watch them through the windows of their home (another sub-proscenium) and we see a kind of naturalist performance, occasionally broken by the inhabitants intimations of something more as they paw blindly at the windows. We know that one of the daughters has drowned and we watch in helpless pathos in a way that positions us as Gods or metaphysical beings acquainted not just with a piece of gossip but aware more broadly of the terrible omnipresent pathos of Death.

This is what I thought was going on here. The play has been somewhat stripped of its supernatural appurtenances but we supply them instead. We are constituted as witnesses who know the characters, the play, the real history; hell, we even know what is going to happen. We rise like Gods above the action observing what fools these mortals be. The barriers between us and the actors then became a question: is the barrier protecting us from the actors or the actors from us? Are we helpless witnesses or are they helpless victims? At one moment, Hamlet thumped at the perspex in frustration, meanwhile audience members stepped right up to the windows as if in a reptile house. We yearned for each other, I think.

But then the thing started to fall apart a bit. I was enjoying the stripped-down quality of the piece and for a while thought we might not get the deaths of Polonius or Ophelia, the whole trip to England, the King at prayer, and instead a static moment of personal-political crisis, a governing power with a wayward son. But then the plot started crowding back in. Polonius gets killed, Claudius as prayer does not; Ophelia drowns and the hapless Ros & Guil are disposed of in the North Sea. I had a pretty good time, certainly for the first hour, but eventually I felt the play defeated them. Its weight that they tried to lift off our backs, dragged them down. Ten minutes before the end, we see the boat to England: we see Hamlet’s discovery of  Claudius’s attempt to have him done away with; we also see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finally piece the wrong ‘To be or not to be’ speech together. Both events seem to seal their fate and the projection shows us the boat, in the middle of a grey, empty sea. An iris slowly closes on the image, like the end of a silent movie. I longed for this to be the end, the bold end, Hamlet escaped from not just the court, but from his own play too.

But instead it was back to Elsinore. By the time we get to the last act, all invention has gone: in fact, the staging of the sword fight as a fencing match was virtually identical to the National’s Hamlet in 2010. At this point, it felt like a failure of nerve, too great a respect for the text and a desire to tell the story, that in doing so the company abandoned their attempt really to question the play, its priorities, its status in the literary canon and the deforming effect of that on the quality of our attention. Instead we just got some decent Shakespeare behind glass and it ended up as exactly the museum piece it was trying not to be.

This is to say that I admired it for the most part and felt ultimately frustrated that something more rigorous and vigorous hadn’t been pursued right to the end. The show seemed ambivalent about whether it came to bury Hamlet or the praise it. In one superb sequence we see three of the rooms transformed into Hamlet’s bedroom, but, we come to understand, at different times, and we see Claudius, Gertrude, and R&G all variously discovering ‘To be or not to be’. They start to read it, the words cascading over each other, joined by Polonius who has got the message. Does this erase the text, get past the awful iconicity of it, fracture it, break it apart, reduce it to sound, semantemes, phonemes? Or does it become a pure tribute to the glory of the Bard? I wasn’t sure and I’m not sure the production was either. I like ambivalence and ambiguity, but this seemed uncertain, cautious.

I see that dreamthinkspeak have had a go at Hamlet before. I suppose I’d be interested to see their third attempt. Will they have the boldness to take the play further apart?