troisoiseaux: (reading 5)
I recently hit a bit of a book slump, so I ended up reading a couple of plays instead: Osamu Dazai's A New Hamlet (1941) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938). (Although, technically, I think A New Hamlet is a novel written in the form of a script...? But if it waddles and quacks, at what point is it no longer a duck?)

A New Hamlet was... interesting? It is, as the title suggests, an adaptation of Hamlet, although "remix" might be a more apt description. The first couple of scenes are more or less a direct "modern" translation of Hamlet's Act I, Scene 2 and 3— I pulled up the original online, for a line-by-line comparison— although, actually, it's twice translated: from its original Shakespearean English to mid-20th century Japanese, and then from Japanese to English circa the 2010s. Owen Cooney's translation is an interesting blend of sounding natural as contemporary English, having a certain cadence(?) where it's more obvious that it was translated from a different language, and - mostly in Ophelia's case - intentionally anachronistic, even Shakespearean, phrasing.

After that, the plot is different. )

Our Town is technically a re-read; I'd studied it in 9th grade English, but to be honest, it hadn't left a particularly strong impression on me at the time.* What made it interesting, this time, was that the edition I borrowed had a bunch of "bonus content" about the play's history, inspirations (surprisingly, classical Greek and Chinese theater?), and Wilder's writing process, including changes that were made between drafts— e.g., in an early draft, young George Gibbs had political ambitions, but this was cut for not being in line with Wilder's goal of "an allegorical representation of all life." There was also apparently some behind-the-scenes drama between Wilder and Our Town's original director, Jed Harris; a list of changes Wilder demanded to Harris' direction boiled down to "stop changing the lines" and "everyone's acting should be like 60% less weepily sentimental."

Footnote )
troisoiseaux: (colette)
Reading Hamlet
by Anna Akhmatova (tr. Andrey Kneller) [x]

I.

The graveyard, wasteland, then the shore,

Where the river shines cool and blue.

You told me: "Get thee to a nunnery or

Find a fool to marry you..."
That's the sort of thing princes say, I know,

But I'll never forget this one, —
Like an ermine mantle let your words shine and flow

For many years, and on, and on.

II.

As if by mistake, beguiled,

I used the familiar "You..."
A flashing shadow of a smile
Lit up your face anew.
When one blunders so absurdly,
Gazes will alight...
Still I love you, like some forty

Tender sisters might.

***

Hamlet Tries Prozac
by Tawanda Mulalu [x]

Hamlet tries it and suddenly the firmament's floating.
He takes Ophelia out on a date, says he's sorry for being a dick,
and they make faces at each other over a steak that's too well-done
but he doesn't berate the waiter about it. He just chews the steak
and Ophelia dives into the ribs, stickied fingers playing over
the bones with a newfound sense of comfort. Later, when they take
a bath together, she'll look at his ribs and poke at them, pretend
that in between them flowers might spring out, that imagining
this might make the next bit a bit easier. He's gentle,
which she appreciates, but it doesn't make up for his pale
skinniness. He's sleeping now and she's looking at his ribs, then
presses a finger in between one of her own, finds no difference.
troisoiseaux: (eugene de blaas)
James Ijames' Fat Ham is a modern, queer, Black, Southern, meta, and outrageously funny adaptation of Hamlet; I saw it this weekend at DC's Studio Theatre. Plot-wise, the first half tracks closely onto Hamlet— the ghost of a murdered father demanding revenge; the mother's too-soon wedding to her husband's brother; the son's scheme to test his uncle's guilt— while the second half diverges, changing certain plot points and adding new ones. The fundamental difference is that it's a story about breaking The Cycle instead of a revenge tragedy, where The Cycle breaks everyone involved.

Instead of the throne of Denmark, the main character, Juicy, is heir to a family-owned barbecue joint and generational trauma ("Your pop went to jail, his pop went to jail, his pop went to jail ... and what's before that? Slavery!"); he's doing an online degree in human resources and quotes Shakespeare ("You quote that dead ass white man one more time," his mom snaps, at one point; "You watch too much PBS") and spends most of the show wearing a t-shirt that reads mamma's boy in rhinestones. Juicy's father, Pap,* and uncle-turned-stepfather, Rev, are played by the same actor, as swaggering men who like to make him flinch and say "soft" like they're saying the other F-word; his mom, Tedra, makes an effort but is torn between being able to stand up for Juicy and the fact she's "not built to be alone." Laertes is now Larry, a closeted Marine who longs to be soft, the very thing that Juicy's father and uncle despise him for; Ophelia is Opal, a brash young lesbian who chafes against her mom's expectations; and Polonius is Rabby, a church lady who handles the climactic reveal** that both of her kids are gay surprisingly well. The Horatio stand-in is Juicy's stoner cousin, Tio, who misses most of the plot but steals the show with his recital of— to quote another review***— a "gonzo stoned fantasy involving fellatio and gingerbread men." The entire play is set at Tedra and Rev's backyard wedding cookout; Juicy's "mousetrap" scheme involves a game of charades.

In a tangent I promise is relevant, the first production of Hamlet I saw live staged his first soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2) in a way that's stuck in my head for years: instead of Claudius et al. exiting the stage, everyone froze and the lights changed to indicate that this was Happening Inside His Head, and Hamlet fell to his knees and just screamed in grief and rage before going into the whole bit about too, too solid flesh, pacing through the frozen tableau as he spoke. This show basically did the same thing— using purple lighting and the live-theater version of a freeze-frame to, like, flip a switch from the Action to Soliloquy Mode— in a way that broke not just the fourth wall but the second or third one, too. Other characters unfreeze to converse with Juicy when he's still in Soliloquy Mode (or, in the case of Pap, to rage silently in the background); twice, when the Action resumes, the parent he interrupted a conversation with demands, "what you tell them?". The best use of Soliloquy Mode occurs halfway through Juicy's karaoke performance of Radiohead's "Creep", when he goes from half-hearted, please don't make me do this mumbling to heartfelt belting that brought the house down.

Juicy's monologues, delivered in Soliloquy Mode, are mostly Ijames originals, but Fat Ham includes two Hamlet speeches wholesale: one ("I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play...") delivered straight (at least until ending with "...wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king— preacher. He's a preacher in this play") and one ("what a piece of work is man") in a wildly different context, expressing Juicy's admiration of Larry after a tender moment between them, with a slight but significant twist on the last line ("man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by my smiling I seem to say so").

Read more... )
troisoiseaux: (colette)
Saw Hamlet at the Park Avenue Armory, which was incredible— this was an import of the production, directed by Robert Icke, that starred Andrew Scott in London a few years back, with about half of the cast intact: not Scott, unfortunately, although I could see shades of his style in Alex Lawther's performance (at least during the second half, once things start to get murder-y) and it added Jennifer Ehle (1995 Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett) as Gertrude. The Armory has been running this concurrently with Robert Icke's Oresteia.

This was probably the most elaborate staging of any play that I've ever seen; the Armory isn't actually a theater, and this production made fantastic use of the (massive!) space it had to work with. The stage was... slightly hard to describe? It was like there was the stage, and a glass-paneled hallway stretching across/behind it, and behind that was a "room" where, e.g., Claudius and Gertrude's wedding reception went on while Hamlet soliloquized. This production also incorporated a lot of multimedia elements: there was a big screen above the stage, where the ghost first appeared as a glitch on Elsinore's security footage, where taped "news segments" covered Claudius' coronation and Fortibras' military excursions into Poland, and which occasionally played a live feed from the stage: e.g., during the "mousetrap" scene/play-within-a-play, Hamlet et al. sat in the front row of the audience rather than on stage, and were filmed/live-streamed onto the screen.

Here's the thing: I really, really, really love Hamlet. One of the things I love about it is that - maybe more than other Shakespeare plays? - there's a lot of... flexibility, I guess, in how to stage it?? The STC's most recent production played Hamlet as a political thriller; this one was, like, a psychological horror-drama. An actor's inflection on this line, the way he holds himself when talking to that other character— different choices by the actors or director can bring such different emotions or implications to the same scene, even if not a single word of the text is changed or omitted.

Alex Lawther's Hamlet is waifish and slouching, all quick wit and small, languid motions, and somehow he feels more dangerous than other Hamlets I have seen. I've seen more than one review throw around the word "incel," and that checks out: something about Lawther's performance drew attention to the particularly incel-y flavor of Hamlet's venom towards Gertrude and Ophelia - wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners; his obsession with Gertrude's incestuous sheets - and, in this production, Guildenstern, who was played by a woman and as (in a truly *chef's kiss* example of how creative staging/acting can interpret the text) Hamlet's ex.

Thoughts about other staging choices )

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