The king of infinite space: Finding Shakespeare in Buenos Aires, Part Two
This weekend, lots of wonderful things happened. On Friday night I went to a bar that is in a former mansion, it was absolutely gorgeous (if far too expensive for its own good). On Saturday I went for lunch in Palermo Viejo with my friend Sara, and not once but twice a band of clowns passed us by and invited us to their show. (We didn't go.) And then today, Sara and I saw something that made me so unbelievably happy, I can't even begin to relate my levels of happiness.
In San Telmo, there is a lovely cafe which has a theater on its upper level. And the show currently in that theater is Hamlet. We stumbled across it and I insisted that we must go, and we are very, very glad we saw it. It was really spellbinding. It's amazing how they can choose to barely cut the show (it ran three and a half hours) and it didn't feel like overkill at all. They did a couple of truly interesting things with it, which I'll talk a bit about here, but I'll save the rest for another time, perhaps.
Firstly-- they added things (which I normally strongly dislike, but worked all right here, for some reason). They added a bit of a prologue, and turned the Player King into a sort of narrator-esque character; they made it as though Hamlet were a play being put on by a troupe of players, and then the Mousetrap was the play-within-a-play-within-a-play. This made room for the Player King to have more of a part in his own right, which was interesting, they gave him a French accent and named him François. His narration was all their own invention, and covered many of the cuts they made, which was useful, even though they didn't cut much.
Secondly-- because it was presented as actors playing actors playing Hamlet, they owned right off the bat that their Hamlet was played by a woman, but the character of Hamlet was in fact male. They made no effort to hide that he was shaped like a woman, but because they owned it, they didn't have to. She was unbelievable. My host mom says she's very famous in Argentina. Her whole physicality was just so perfect-- from the grief to the feigned madness to the biting sarcasm-- and her voice was spot-on as well. Beyond that, the other interesting casting decision was to cast Horatio and Ophelia as the same person, both played by a woman; she was also mindblowingly incredible. One of the hallmarks of a truly fantastic double-casting is when the two characters appear so different that you need to do a double take to tell they're the same person, and that happened tonight. Before I get into why their Ophelia was awesome to watch-- the second-most-interesting thing they did with her was to have Horatio and Ophelia kind of merge into one beings right before Osric comes in towards the end of the play. The actress took off her Horatio-signifying overcoat and glasses and lay with her head in Hamlet's lap, and he was stroking her hair and speaking to her the lines he's meant to address to Horatio, but of course at that point Ophelia is already dead. I loved it, because it was kind of like saying, "He's been feigning this madness all the while, but what actually pushed him over the edge is Ophelia's death." He loved her and she's gone and he believes it to be his fault, and he's so consumed by guilt that he is, in his mind, merging the two people he loves best in order to feel as though he still has them both, but he doesn't. Beautiful; fascinating; really well conceived and executed.
Thirdly-- their conception of Ophelia. I hesitate to say I liked it, because it's kind of a monstrous thing to like, so first let me explain that I never really got Ophelia. When I first read Hamlet I wondered why the Ophelia plotline was even there; I didn't understand why Shakespeare would write such a character, and more than anything, I didn't really understand why she went mad. Even after Phoebe explained to me that Ophelia is there to be Hamlet's collateral damage, I still didn't get the part about why she should be driven crazy by Hamlet killing Polonius. Grief, I can see, yes. Madness? Not so much. That always seemed to me a little unbelievable. But in this production, they went out of their way to imply that there was something not quite right about the way Ophelia interacted with her father and brother-- specifically, they went out of their way to imply incestuous or near-incestuous relationships that they each had with her. And yes, gross, awful, bad. But on the other hand, that made me buy the insanity. It makes much more sense to me that if she was already overly fragile, more so than your average innocent young girl, then she would be more susceptible to going insane at what would provoke normal people to extreme grief and no more.
It has occurred to me that perhaps one could interpret Hamlet that everything that happens, happens because Hamlet has very little understanding of what the difference between love and lust is. I base this not-entirely-thought-out position on his line in the scene in Gertrude's closet, he says something about "You cannot call it love" because Gertrude is an older lady. But anyways, that's a line of thinking for another time.
Oh, goodness gracious me. What an absolutely lovely performance. O God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
In San Telmo, there is a lovely cafe which has a theater on its upper level. And the show currently in that theater is Hamlet. We stumbled across it and I insisted that we must go, and we are very, very glad we saw it. It was really spellbinding. It's amazing how they can choose to barely cut the show (it ran three and a half hours) and it didn't feel like overkill at all. They did a couple of truly interesting things with it, which I'll talk a bit about here, but I'll save the rest for another time, perhaps.
Firstly-- they added things (which I normally strongly dislike, but worked all right here, for some reason). They added a bit of a prologue, and turned the Player King into a sort of narrator-esque character; they made it as though Hamlet were a play being put on by a troupe of players, and then the Mousetrap was the play-within-a-play-within-a-play. This made room for the Player King to have more of a part in his own right, which was interesting, they gave him a French accent and named him François. His narration was all their own invention, and covered many of the cuts they made, which was useful, even though they didn't cut much.
Secondly-- because it was presented as actors playing actors playing Hamlet, they owned right off the bat that their Hamlet was played by a woman, but the character of Hamlet was in fact male. They made no effort to hide that he was shaped like a woman, but because they owned it, they didn't have to. She was unbelievable. My host mom says she's very famous in Argentina. Her whole physicality was just so perfect-- from the grief to the feigned madness to the biting sarcasm-- and her voice was spot-on as well. Beyond that, the other interesting casting decision was to cast Horatio and Ophelia as the same person, both played by a woman; she was also mindblowingly incredible. One of the hallmarks of a truly fantastic double-casting is when the two characters appear so different that you need to do a double take to tell they're the same person, and that happened tonight. Before I get into why their Ophelia was awesome to watch-- the second-most-interesting thing they did with her was to have Horatio and Ophelia kind of merge into one beings right before Osric comes in towards the end of the play. The actress took off her Horatio-signifying overcoat and glasses and lay with her head in Hamlet's lap, and he was stroking her hair and speaking to her the lines he's meant to address to Horatio, but of course at that point Ophelia is already dead. I loved it, because it was kind of like saying, "He's been feigning this madness all the while, but what actually pushed him over the edge is Ophelia's death." He loved her and she's gone and he believes it to be his fault, and he's so consumed by guilt that he is, in his mind, merging the two people he loves best in order to feel as though he still has them both, but he doesn't. Beautiful; fascinating; really well conceived and executed.
Thirdly-- their conception of Ophelia. I hesitate to say I liked it, because it's kind of a monstrous thing to like, so first let me explain that I never really got Ophelia. When I first read Hamlet I wondered why the Ophelia plotline was even there; I didn't understand why Shakespeare would write such a character, and more than anything, I didn't really understand why she went mad. Even after Phoebe explained to me that Ophelia is there to be Hamlet's collateral damage, I still didn't get the part about why she should be driven crazy by Hamlet killing Polonius. Grief, I can see, yes. Madness? Not so much. That always seemed to me a little unbelievable. But in this production, they went out of their way to imply that there was something not quite right about the way Ophelia interacted with her father and brother-- specifically, they went out of their way to imply incestuous or near-incestuous relationships that they each had with her. And yes, gross, awful, bad. But on the other hand, that made me buy the insanity. It makes much more sense to me that if she was already overly fragile, more so than your average innocent young girl, then she would be more susceptible to going insane at what would provoke normal people to extreme grief and no more.
It has occurred to me that perhaps one could interpret Hamlet that everything that happens, happens because Hamlet has very little understanding of what the difference between love and lust is. I base this not-entirely-thought-out position on his line in the scene in Gertrude's closet, he says something about "You cannot call it love" because Gertrude is an older lady. But anyways, that's a line of thinking for another time.
Oh, goodness gracious me. What an absolutely lovely performance. O God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.