The Royal Shakespeare Company has launched a month-long residency at Washington's Kennedy Center with Shakespeare's best-known play, "Hamlet," and one of his least-known plays, "Henry VIII."
And, though both plays concern kings who married their brothers' widows, the productions couldn't be more different. Director Matthew Warchus' modern-dress "Hamlet" is a fresh look at an over-produced classic. But the chief distinguishing feature of director Gregory Doran's "Henry VIII" is merely that it offers a chance to see a rarely staged work (albeit, one with an extraordinary depiction of the wronged Katherine of Aragon).
Warchus' "Hamlet" accomplishes the nearly impossible -- it takes a play everyone knows and imbues it with a sense of suspense. This is a "Hamlet" that actually makes you wonder what's going to happen next.
It's not just that the director has lopped off between a quarter and a third of the text and rearranged some of what's left, it's that he and his magnificent lead actor, Alex Jennings, have found an eye-opening approach to both the character and the play.
Dispensing with all references to Fortinbras and Norway, as well as the opening scene of the night watch, the play begins with Jennings, in a dark, three-piece suit, spilling his father's ashes out onto the stage floor. Next, a grainy black-and-white home movie is projected behind him, showing Hamlet, as a small boy, playing with his father.
When the movie ends, the back wall opens up to reveal the wedding party for Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and uncle, Claudius. Lurking on the sidelines, Hamlet snaps Polaroids, as if collecting evidence.
From the start, Jennings' Hamlet is resentful, morose, angry and, above all, grief-stricken, viewing the world around him through an almost constant veil of tears. Instead of an indecisive young man, as he is often portrayed, this is a more mature Hamlet. Once he encounters his father's ghost (a disappointingly bland Edward Petherbridge), he knows what he must do and he doesn't waver -- distasteful and distressing as his duty may be.
Nor is there any question of whether this Hamlet goes mad. Jennings makes it clear that he is indeed feigning "an antic disposition," as he tells his dear friend Horatio (an earnest Colin Hurley). This is reinforced after intermission, when Jennings appears in the white-face of a clown as he serves as master of ceremonies for the play he has prepared to incriminate his uncle. By the time Hamlet confronts his mother in her bedroom, the clown makeup remains on only half of his face -- a visual metaphor of his divided nature. A sensitive and loving soul, he is acting against his own instincts when forced to revenge his father's murder.
