Hamlet Interview
Written by Dan Cole
Theatre In Preview
There is no shortage of great theatre on offer this season, but yet again we look to La Boite to carve out some of Brisbane’s foremost live entertainment. The company is welcoming some new faces this year and not shying from a challenge with new Artistic Director David Bertlot busily preparing his actors for a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Making his Queensland debut as Prince Hamlet is Toby Schmitz, who has enjoyed critical acclaim as an actor, writer and director in Sydney.
“The story was around for hundreds of years before Will ever got his quill out,” says Toby of the famous tragedy. “It’s a medieval Viking story in some parts, updated by Will and then updated by everyone else since.” Negotiating Shakespeare for the modern audience is a dance of authenticity and relevance. “I have never seen a Shakespearean production with actual ruffles and dublets. I think since the 20s it’s become pretty de rigueur to modernise it, at least in some contemporary way. Those questions (of reinvention) are largely about the design; you have to find your own world where you can still have a swordfight at the end.”
For this production, Bertlot has conjured a supernatural theme. “It’s a pretty spooky play, David has pushed that concept to really infect the set, the lighting and actually the whole design. Elsinore is quite a haunted place and this production of Hamlet is as creepy and hair-raising as possible. What’s been fun over the last three weeks is to find out how much of the plot really sustains that this is a creepy play and perhaps some of this supernatural manifestation is coming from Hamlet himself - to blur the line of that, does the ghost appear or does Hamlet summon it? Just to blur that line has been quite fun and spooky.”
Hamlet in its entirety is insufferably long, so a big question for all directors is how to cut it. “Bertolt’s cut is great. It focuses on a royal family in meltdown and strips back some of the more international plot lines – the war and so on – and places it all in a modern setting. The text is the thing that remains, all you can do is cut parts of it out. The wonderful thing about all Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet, is the fact that you can still do it. Four or five hundred years down the track, the thing still stands up.”
Toby admits that a big part of inhabiting a character like Prince Hamlet is to make him relevant to the modern audience. “I think that everyone’s job as a Shakespearean actor or director is to make it clear to the audience of the time what you’re saying. The best Shakespearean performers, and the most famous as well, have succeeded in doing exactly that, Olivier and Gielgud were very good at speaking to a new batch of people coming through and they went ‘oh I get it now’, but to us its seems somewhat dated. Brannagh is a more contemporary person who really makes you understand what they are saying. So I think each generation has its own kind of ear and youthspeak, as it were, that demands a different reinterpretation of that very heady language.”
Hamlet is infamously complex, in both its language and characterisation, and Toby is relishing the revelations that come from digging through the layers. “My discovery yesterday was - I wonder if he is the right man for the job. I wonder if part of the tragedy comes from the fact that Prince Hamlet doesn’t belong in a Jacobean revenge tragedy. He belongs in something a bit more modern, a bit more introspective but he is thrust into this medieval world. He has a line about ‘mighty opposites’, and the play is full of mighty opposites. He swings from sight gags to deep melancholy, from anger to light-headedness. What I’m learning is you just have to go with it. To analyse Hamlet too much could be a tough thing, when Hamlet is doing a good enough job of analysing himself.”
La Boite’s production of Hamlet runs February 6 to March 14. For information, tickets and to view the rehearsal gallery go to www.laboite.com.au
