Theater: Hamlet

OLD PLAYS

Enter Hamlet, handcuffed, in a wheeled coffin. He looks scornfully at King Claudius and Queen Gertrude sleeping in a bed near by, yanks the blankets from them, climbs out of the coffin. "O! that this too too solid flesh would melt," he moans. Thus begins the strange version of Hamlet that Director Joseph Papp presented last week at his Public Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. In his years as producer of New York's open-air Shakespeare summer festival in Central Park, Papp has proved his ability to do the Bard straight. This time he does Shakespeare free and fancy. To a background of mind-bending rock music, his characters speak of Denmark, although they are costumed to suggest a modern military camp. Yet it is abundantly clear that the time and place of the action are any time and any place, no time and no place. Papp, in other words, has located Hamlet deep in the mind of its characters, which, it may be argued, was Shakespeare's intent. The results are uneven, but dazzling and convincing at their best. Papp has drastically shortened the play to a running time of under two hours, compressing both plot and characters. The ghost is presented as an antic extension of Hamlet's own ego — epitomized in one scene in which Hamlet becomes a ventriloquist's dummy on his father's knee. Later, Hamlet also turns up as the Gravedigger, hiding behind a Latin accent; in this guise he delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, thus turning the graveyard scene into a grisly essay on the meaning of death. The players' dumb show is omitted; instead, Hamlet lures his stepfather into mouthing the incriminating lines himself, until the drunken monarch suddenly stops in horror-struck realization of what he has said. The mindless bloodshed of the final scenes is emphasized by having the players settle their arguments in a chilling game of Russian roulette.

This kind of tampering with the text can easily be put down as theatrical sacrilege, for which there is considerable precedent in the annals of performed Shakespeare. But Papp has clearly made a serious attempt to demonstrate the viability of Shakespeare's insights into men's weaknesses in terms of modern theater. His Hamlet is a gathering of fantasies, envisaged by the leading players. The fantasies seldom interlock; emotions are inner, private and unshared, until they clash in a series of brutal, shattering collisions. Shakespeare's language remains undisturbed in this version, but Papp's imaginative scissoring and repasting has sculptured a Hamlet of crystalline tensity.