We all know Hamlet. Or, certainly, some part of Hamlet: snippets from the seven famous soliloquies, a brooding man holding a skull, Reviving Ophelia. It’s known. I thought I knew it, anyway, as a former theater student who, like many, has read and seen the play several times in various forms. (Does The Lion King count too?)
Honestly, though? I don’t know that I’d ever really gotten the play—its towering drama, the dizzying poetry of its language—before seeing director Sam Gold’s production at the Public Theater, starring Oscar Isaac. (It runs now through September 3.) Ominous and earthy (at times quite literally), Gold’s Hamlet has a simple, tactile charge, one that truly, in the least corny of senses, brings Shakespeare to life. The production is given extra, invaluable electricity by its star, whose crisply legible, fiercely intelligent performance confirms for me what I’ve long suspected: Oscar Isaac is the best dang actor of his generation.
Which, yes, I realize is a hacky, hyperbolic, and probably unnecessary claim to make. But he’s just so good in this play, as he’s been so good in so many things since his talents first caught our attention. He’s a classically trained actor of true range, one who can sing and dance, do comedy, action, and drama with equal ease and authority. He’s thrilling to watch, a prodigious mind sparking a nimble (and, yes, handsome) form into action. But he’s never showy; he doesn’t mug. Not in the wintry Coen brothers folk-music picaresque Inside Llewyn Davis, not in J.C. Chandor’s moody economic allegory A Most Violent Year, not in Paul Haggis’s shaggy civics mini-series Show Me a Hero, perhaps my favorite Isaac performance to date. Instead he inhabits, taking possession of a story’s world, and letting it take possession of him.
But that’s all been original stuff, roles he could make definitive by being the only actor who’s played them. But Hamlet is freaking Hamlet, as well-worn territory as there is in the Western dramatic canon. It takes a true thinking actor to not only mine something new out of Hamlet, but to actually clarify something about the melancholy Dane for a culture so steeped in his story. Watching Isaac delve into the role with his conversational yet lyrical delivery, one almost experiences the tale for the first time. Isaac finds the timeless, fraught humanity in a character who’s often played too carefully, too academically, as if he’s a term paper a young actor has to conquer to prove his mettle.
Over the play’s three-and-a-half hours, Isaac becomes more poet than player. His interpretation of Hamlet, as a decent guy who just can’t get past his grief, and is often thwarted by his own anger over that grief (he’s much like Lee in Manchester by the Sea, in that way), is sensitive and astute. He talks through each soliloquy as if these thoughts are genuinely, just then, blooming into being, not enshrined in literary tradition for centuries. Isaac’s organic nuance opens up the language, makes it almost contemporary. (Isaac seems to just speak Shakespeare naturally, like it’s a native tongue.) The graveyard scene—in which Hamlet regards poor Yorick and contemplates the fleetingness of all existence—is moving in a way I perhaps cynically didn’t think Shakespeare could be anymore. Same for the play’s final scene, which had members of my audience blubbery and sniffly with tears. At a Shakespeare play! In 2017! On a sunny Sunday afternoon in the summer!
Such is the power of Isaac’s graceful, unmissable performance, and Gold’s entire production, which uses some familiar Gold techniques—house lights, everyday modern dress, relaxed, almost improvisatory tone—to gradually breathtaking effect. This Hamlet has a steadily crescendoing artistry to it. It begins relatively bare-bones, save for the cellist who plays, rather effectively, throughout the show. But then it grows, by the final act, into something grandly theatrical—though still intimate enough in scale that none of its visceral immediacy is lost.
Ritchie Coster makes for a purring, halfway redeemable Claudius, while the great Charlayne Woodard is an imperious Gertrude whose (deftly rendered) realizations come too late. Peter Friedman is a winningly avuncular Polonius, an Upper West Side-type whose affable vanity betrays a dangerous obliviousness. Keegan-Michael Key adds levity, but also sincerity, as Hamlet’s watchful friend Horatio. And I love Gayle Rankin’s angry, hard-spined Ophelia, a refreshingly active and unfussy take on a character who can often become a tragic pixie dream girl.
The whole ensemble works in seamless concert in Gold’s weird milieu, staging a Hamlet I’ve never seen nor imagined before. A major theme of this production, as I see it, is the way parents can lay waste to the world their children are set to inherit—personally, societally—as they fumble after their own fading power. Which gives the play a truly timely, resonant shiver, as we contemplate our current political and environmental crises. The production is also about the more lighthearted aspects of parenting petulant, impetuous children (which is to say, most children, to some extent), and about the way the bonds of family are somehow both innately enduring and tenuous. Yes, all the big-stakes existential tragedy is there too. But Gold plucks the text’s subtler strings, teases out its quieter themes, creating full-bodied chords that have a rich, haunting timbre.
Gold’s production leaves us room to think, to really contemplate this revered play in unexpected ways. Casual, laid-back, yet bursting with feeling, this post-millennial, minimalist Hamlet is an invigorating approach to Shakespeare. (Much like Mark Rylance’s hyper-traditional Richard III and Twelfth Night were a few years ago. Hey, whatever works.) It’s all anchored with calm mastery by Isaac. Who, sure, may be a little old for the role, but all that added wisdom allows him to find such crucial and insightful detail—and empathy—in this forever-morose anti-hero.
Back in college, the dramaturg for our production of Hamlet wrote in the program that he hoped it was the last production of the play any of us ever saw, because it has been produced and produced into meaninglessness. I mostly still agree with him. But I think we can, and should, all make an exception for this soft-spoken wonder at the Public. After that, we’re done—but for now, savor and enjoy. Isaac and Gold make it nearly impossible not to.
