Hamlet: The play’s the thing

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Life. Nothing prepares you for it. Who’d have thunk that it would be possible to watch Hamlet being performed at The Globe — yeah, that one — without leaving my drawing room in Mumbai? All because of a pandemic. Or that while watching the high art Hamlet, I’d find myself missing RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I haven’t been to The Globe. Before watching this webcast, my understanding of what the Elizabethan stage looked like was largely informed by Shakespeare in Love. I’m so glad that the first time I saw this beautiful, historic stage, it was as the setting for a gender-blind, colour-blind and disability-blind Hamlet. Directed by Federay Holmes and Elle While, this Hamlet is irreverent, energetic, inconsistent, flawed and yet enjoyable.

First staged in 2018, this Hamlet is set in a cosmopolitan Denmark that lives in many time frames simultaneously. There are many people of colour (though most of the principal characters remain very Caucasian), women guards are on patrol and while Gertrude first appears dressed in an elaborate 16th-century-ish gown and wig, she later slips into a thoroughly 20th century negligée. Some men, like Claudius, strut around in full Elizabethan gear while others wear simple, form-fitting jackets that you can imagine being sold at an H&M. There is nothing uniform about the look of Holmes and While’s Hamlet. It, like The Globe, is straddling past and present.

Hamlet is played by Michelle Terry (artistic director of The Globe); Catrin Aaron is Horatio; Shubham Saraf plays Ophelia. It is a world in which women guards are as unremarkable as sneakers and pants. That’s not all. Nadia Nadarajah, a D/deaf actress, is a superb Guildenstern, which also means Guildenstern’s lines are in British Sign Language (and translated back to Shakespearean English by others on stage).

To take characters like Hamlet and Ophelia (or Guildenstern, for that matter), and do a gender-bender is a great idea because it lets both the actors and the audience examine and explore stereotypes and constructs. In theory, that’s what Holmes and While’s Hamlet does, but in terms of execution, the whole effort is teeters between confused and half-hearted. So, on one hand, when Guildenstern is being played by a woman, she wears a beard and pants to signify maleness in a conventional manner. Yet Laertes, also played a woman actor, is unaided by any accessory that would help sell the illusion of this tiny, slight woman being a warrior nobleman. in the text, Laertes’s character seems very typically male — he’s the protective big brother; the angry young man who wants a fight, no matter how senseless and futile that option may be. Holmes and While’s version doesn’t reinterpret this characterisation so when the role was played by this obviously femme actor, it just came across as absurd and unconvincing. Maybe if she’d played it with the more pronounced swagger of someone trying to be more alpha than they actually are, it would have worked better.

Even more discordant and disappointing was Ophelia. Not because Saraf is a bad actor, but because it felt a little lazy. When we see Saraf as Ophelia in one of the first scenes in the play, he’s standing at the back, in a grey dress that stands out against the warm tones of both the stage and most of Saraf’s co-actors’ wardrobe. So what exactly is the point of putting a man in a dress? It is just a stunt? Is him playing Ophelia supposed to push us to reconsider femininity or think about how big a role physicality plays in the way we respond to someone?

The idea of casting a man as Ophelia is wasted in this Hamlet and Saraf is partially responsible for this. After all, Terry, with nothing more than her incredible delivery, manages to cast a little hook into the phrase “unmanly grief” and reimagine Hamlet as an androgynous character, identified not by his gender but by grief. Saraf’s Ophelia, on the other hand, has little to offer once you’ve got over the surprise of seeing a man in a dress.

Watching the scenes with Ophelia, I kept imagining the role being played by someone in drag (like Gigi Goode, or Raven, or maybe even Mama Ru herself?). With the make-up, hair, padding, contouring and costumes, there’s so much theatre to drag and all of it explores femininity and the social conventions around that concept. The more I watched Saraf as Ophelia, the more perfect an Ophelia in drag felt as an idea. Even in the simple scenes where she’s just quietly establishing herself as the good little girl, there’s an entire performance of femininity that could be done with drag make-up. Imagine the kinds of faces that Ophelia could have. Does she try to look like an anime girl? Does she have gigantic eyelashes that she bats every now and then? Does she sell the illusion of being a ‘real’ woman flawlessly? Each detail is a choice that tells you something — about Ophelia, about being womanly; about the way we, the audience, think about women and the roles the play. Later, in the scene with the crazed Ophelia, the actor could be with their make-up partially or entirely removed, and it would reflect the unravelling of the mind.

Drag would have also have been an interesting intervention when you think about the history of the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. Heroines were originally played by boys and young men. They embodied femininity and probably helped construct or at the very least cement codes of womanly behaviour. Shakespeare didn’t write female roles as parodies of women, which means the actors were expected to convince their audiences.

In drag, there’s a different kind of convincing that’s being done. Both performer and audience know femininity is an illusion that’s being shared, like when an Elizabethan boy dressed up as a heroine. But a drag queen isn’t hiding themselves in the performance; they’re revealing an aspect and questioning the narrow definitions and conventions within which femininity has to perform normally. To quote Hamlet, “The purpose of playing… is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature.”

[image error]From RuPaul’s Drag Race UK

In the persona of a drag queen is an unlikely equilibrium between complete artifice and realness. The persona is fabricated — pieced together by make-up and wigs and padding and sequins etc — and yet, it’s also a very genuine part of the performer; one that exists only on stage, when the spotlight shines on the queen. That’s the sort of duality that would have added another exciting dimension to this Hamlet, particularly because of all the façades and performances within the the script.

As it stood, Saraf just got out of the grey dress and work a black shift. Technically, it’s a rather drastic change in costume, but it didn’t feel either dramatic or thought-provoking. Nothing in his performance made think about Ophelia any differently. Most importantly, Ophelia was at all points, a man playacting in a dress.

Still, it was delightful to be reminded of just how accessible the Shakespearean plays can be when good actors perform them. Despite how different the English is from the version of the language we’re familiar with today, this Hamlet didn’t feel inaccessible even for a moment. As a listener, you didn’t get stuck on the unfamiliar grammar or odd vocabulary; you followed the emotion and the poetry. And the laughs.

One of the revelations of this Hamlet was just how funny the play can be. Yes there’s murder, abuse, depression, ghosts etc. etc., but it’s also full of absurd possibilities of humour ranging from silly to dark. This production of Hamlet doesn’t lose sight of what makes the play a tragedy, but it is as committed to finding the laughs tucked in the scenes and lurking in the repartée.

I also loved the live musicians and how the play ended with a dance that the whole cast performed. Watching it on my laptop, I couldn’t entirely follow each of the gestures to understand if there was a narrative to the choreography, but there’s something quite lovely about ending a play that is informed by loneliness, with a dance that emphasises a sense of cohesiveness because everyone performing it is in sync and attuned to one another.

The play is indeed the thing.