A 'Hamlet' better than good
Griffin Stanton-Ameisen is not a great Hamlet. And that's a very good thing for Delaware Shakespeare Festival's fantastic production of Shakespeare's tragedy in Wilmington.
WILMINGTON – Griffin Stanton-Ameisen is not a great Hamlet. And that's a very good thing for Delaware Shakespeare Festival's fantastic production of Shakespeare's tragedy.
A great Hamlet would involve the director or actor trying to put a distinctive stamp (jester, drug addict), attribute (incestuous, impotent), or interpretation (Oedipal, political, feminist, whatever) on the role. Usually this attempt would include a celebrity (Ian McKellen, Jude Law, David Tennant).
Stanton-Ameisen uses clear intonation and vivid body language to paint a haunting, natural, valid response to a father's sudden death, a mother's hasty marriage to a far inferior suitor, and a supernatural mandate to take revenge on a usurper of the throne.
His Hamlet is a man unmade, not a churl or a brat or a depressive but a prince, bound by duty and law. Stanton-Ameisen roars and stumbles, rankles and retorts with remarks both snide and openly hostile. He walks on unsure feet, and director David Stradley retains the speech in which Hamlet vocalizes any audience's apt concern: "Am I a coward?" he bellows. "Who calls me villain?"
In his readings of the play's three famous monologues, Stanton-Ameisen touches deftly on themes of mortality to ask us how we would risk our too-brief lives to counter injustice. A "great" Hamlet, by contrast, might leave audiences wondering "why is he swinging on monkey bars?" and whether Shakespeare wrote the part for an acrobat.
Stradley's straightforward production centers the play on the royal family and Hamlet's uncertain quest for revenge. Scenes flow naturalistically, amplified only by Christian Clark's original cello compositions. A solid cast of 15 helps flesh out this arena of intrigue, using the text to give full measure to the source of Hamlet's frustration, despair, and cowardice.
And where a great Hamlet plays to connoisseurs, this superb production plays to the play itself, capturing in 21/2 hours (I would have watched this cast perform all five) the essence of the tragedy. It shows that it is not a "great" performance that makes Hamlet great, but the sublime poetry, well-constructed plot, and torturous themes that have, for more than 400 years, frustrated our best attempts to fully comprehend them.
THEATER REVIEW
Hamlet
Presented by the Delaware Shakespeare Festival through July 27 at Rockwood Park, 4651 Washington St. Extension, Wilmington.
Tickets: $13-$35. Information: 302-415-3373 or www.delshakes.org
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