Hamlet No

by Kyla Cathey

interlog.com

"In less than 'a little month' a group of random actors has become a small and tensile Shakespearean acting company." When I read these words, written by director Brian Rose about the recent black box Hamlet No, I thought it was an exaggeration at work.

Hamlet No was Rose's adaptation of Hamlet, Shakespeare's play about revenge, treachery, insanity, grief, and murder in the State of Denmark. Hamlet finds out that his father had been poisoned by his uncle Claudius, who then usurped the throne by marrying Hamlet's mother. Hamlet is charged by his father's ghost to seek revenge, but everyone takes his actions as madness. Eventually, Hamlet gets his vengeance, but only at the cost of his own life and those of half the court.

The object of this production, as explained by Professor Rose on the program, was to see what would happen if one cut out two-thirds of Shakespeare's masterpiece, and gave a group of actors one month to rehearse.

This happy experiment brought about one of the best productions of the semester for the Performing Arts Department. While I did feel that the audience was rushed from scene to scene a little too quickly, I also couldn't help but get deeply involved with the play. Several times I stopped myself just short of joining the actors in applause. While there are obvious shortcomings to cutting out so much of Hamlet, the almost frantic pacing of Rose's adaptation only added to the intensity of the play.

The acting, too, was brilliant. Rachel Gabel's Ophelia was both touching (or touched) and tragic, and probably my favorite character in the production. Adam Lendermon, Morgan Nichols, and Autumn Clack were the other amazing performers of the night, and to stand out among the other wonderful actors had to have taken hard work. The only performances I had trouble with were Elizabeth Klausner's Rosenkrantz and Regina Spano's Guidenstern. That was, however, more due to my memories of Adelphi's production of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead than to poor acting on Klausner and Spano's parts.

Even more, I loved the props or rather, the fact that they were alternately included in the production or not without predictability. In one act, Hamlet and Laertes have at it with non-existant swords. In another, Ophelia is buried in a gunny sack. While the costumes and (lack of) set and props were probably the weakest part of the show, they also strengthened it.

This "No" style of theatre from which Rose's adaptation gets its name uses those same strengths; it blends the poetry of Shakespeare with a simple but stylized form of theatre that draws in the audience.

While writing this review I've been wracking my brain trying to think of any poor aspects of this production, but it was very close to perfect. The choices of set, props, costumes, actors, and even of the scenes themselves were very deliberately made, and made well.

This was a production that I would have regretted missing.