Bard to the bone

The character of Hamlet is an eternal touchstone of theatre, and various recent and current productions are uncovering new sides to the Dane while staying true to Shakespeare and to their own visions

IT’S BEEN LIKE Groundhog Dane on the Irish boards of late, with no less than four productions of Hamlet having run nationwide in the past 12 months.

There was Pan Pan's The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, where three actors auditioned before the audience for the right to play the Prince. Then there was the Icarus Theatre Collective British transfer, directed by Max Lewendel, whose run at the Tivoli recently ended. The other two productions derive from the one company, Second Age, who marked their 21st year last year with Marty Rea in the title role, a performance which won him the Best Actor award at the recent Irish TimesTheatre Awards. Since Conor Madden, to whom Marty passes the mantle, was one of the three wannabe Dane's in the Pan Pan piece, there is a sense of ingemination symbolic of a play that gets its strength from repetition.

"The most important thing is not to think about the comparison," says Aoife Spillane-Hinks, the 25-year-old director of this newest Second Age Hamletwhich opened last week at the Helix. "In fact, I thank God they were so good. It means people have engaged meaningfully with Hamletfor over a year now." She sees each production as merely another part of the conversation. Her own will focus on that deep humanity which courses through the text.

“It’s got this immediate relevance because it describes a very basic experience – a very violent coming of age – that all the characters go through. At some point or another, we all realise the world is different to what we thought it was. The difference here is that the people involved can’t afford to make the mistakes which we all need to make.”

The script of Hamletis a dexterous cloth. Cut it one way and you have your Oedipal Hamlet. Cut it another and you have a political one. Having gone for a more familial Hamletlast year, steeped in Victorian costumes and conduct, what approach is the company taking in 2011?

“I think the important thing is not to impose anything that isn’t there,” says Madden. “We’re going for modern dress but we are trying not to make it a gimmick. No CCTV. No mobiles.”

“There are so many speeches that are relevant to now,” says Mark Fitzgerald who plays Fortinbras. “This county is so angry and hostile, while in Elsinore, we have the corrupted Claudius who, in turn, has corrupted the state.”

The Rehearsal, Playing The Danewas perhaps the hit of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, won Best Production at the Irish TimesTheatre Awards.

“We made a piece about Hamlet, using our own interpretation of the text,” says Gavin Quinn, Artistic Director of Pan Pan, which

has previously experimented with Medea, Oedipusand Hansel and Gretel.Taking us into the audition room, we were presented with three differing would-be Danes, each giving their own interpretation on the most regarded role in theatre, as well as a glimpse at the effect it has on the psyche of the performer.

“You need a lot of humility to play Hamlet,” says Quinn. “And a certain amount of intensity. It’s not just about acting. They have to try and find something within themselves, find their own personal connection to

the character and make it clear to the audience.”

A Dane in place (voted for by the audience at the end of the act one), the second act gave us a pruned and disheveled production of the play with a choral delivery of the "to be or not to be" speech, a playful presentation of the players (some local school children who performed Hamletrather than The Murder of Gonzago) and a wonderfully thought-out design by Aedin Cosgrove.

The aim was to make us think and wonder how anyone plays the part. "He's a man, a human being, and that's what is so important to remember," says Madden, surely the only actor in Ireland to play the part twice in one year for two separate companies. "We want to get past Hamletbeing a play of famous lines you've heard before but couldn't make sense of."

His aim is to bring Hamletback to the core of what the play is about. "He's not this amazing philosopher whose really got the world figured out. He is in a world which he thought was one way but it wasn't."

"Traditionally, Hamletis thought of as a play where the lead character is caught between two courses of action and doesn't do anything," says Max Lewendel, artistic director of The Icarus Theatre Collective whose version of Hamlethad been touring the UK before Tony Byrne invited him to transfer the concept to the Tivoli stage last month. "That is a horrific mistake. He's constantly pulled between two directions, to kill the king or to kill himself. But he is really engaged in doing one before something else happens to divert him, causing him to be tremendously self-deprecating or to lash out at his friends."

Hamlet'sdepression is the cornerstone of Lewendel's production. He even wrote an entire piece on it in the programme. "The stereotypical depressed teenager locks himself in his room railing against the world. And while that is often the case, it's not something I want to put on stage. That same person, when they have energy, can be angry and can lash out at the world. They are furious and shout at people and shout at themselves and can do very damaging things." Seeing his father's ghost gives Hamletthe medication he needs to lift his apathy and inspires him to action.

Despite being set in the 1600s, Lewendel’s production was far from your traditional staging. It took large liberties with the text. There’s a female Horatio, a choral delivery of the soliloquies, while almost half the text has been cut.

“It’s a blending of physical theatre and Stanislavsky technique which makes it more kinetic than academic,” says Lewendel. “The soliloquies are the voices in his head and by doing parts of them chorally we can create the chaos caused by depression in a very visual way.

“You have the voices in his head going ‘to be or not to be’, to which he answers ‘that is the question’.”

While no one can really say how Shakespeare should be staged, there are some conservative voices that bridle at those who try to infuse the Bard with modernity. “What you find with theatre in Ireland is that people don’t really challenge its function,” says Quinn. “They don’t really care about form. They just put on the same thing over and over again. It’s pretty much a craft. We’re just making theatre from another point of view. People who say you can’t are Luddites.”

Quinn says it is easy to put on a classic play with a weeks rehearsal and not bother thinking about it for two years, showing no rigor. “But theatre is an artistic process. It’s about investing all your time and imagination, experience and vigour. Not just giving the audience what they want.”

Pan Pan may have their critics but they are in no way as vocal as Second Age’s primary audience. Founded by their current artistic director Alan Stanford and three others in 1989, their raison d’être was not to bring theatre to schools but to bring young people to the theatre.

“We put on shows for the most important audience in the country, and we do it to the highest qulity in every aspect of presentation,” says Stanford. “A schools audience is the closest a body will get to experiencing what Shakespere would be like, played in his own time. If they like it, they’ll cheer, and if they don’t like it, they will mess. So you go out there and win them over. Because that is your job.”

He wishes more audiences were like a Second Age audience. “If something is funny they laugh, if something is sad, they cry, and when they say at the top of their voice ‘ahhhh no’, I think that’s fantastic.”

"You can see Hamletas being one big rehearsal," says Quinn, "with Hamletas the connoisseur of theatre. He advices the players how to act, he is familiar with the theatre of the day and he plays all these roles within the drama. It's like he is the player in a modern drama and the rest are in an antique one."