Three Years With Ghosts: Tackling Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

All photos by Viktoria Iakovleva

For about three years, the Russian theater "Palme" that I act in was working on the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Even without having read the play, one could guess that few of Shakespeare's characters live to see the end of the final act. So, basically, for three years, three times per week, all of the actors were coming into the theater to go mad, commit suicide, and talk to ghosts. A fascinating experience in and of itself, that was made even more fascinating by our attempt to drag these ghosts into the 21st century. Here's how some of that went.

The key challenges for our troupe were bringing life to the characters that had been created over four hundred years ago, finding universality in the long gone, and making the story that has been told over and over again lively enough to be told one more time. We decided to drop the pompousness of the characters and to root them deeply in a world of indulgence and passion characteristic of Denmark’s royalty of the time.

The first entrance of the king and queen was via a bed sheet that they had just been making love on, dragged across the stage by the king's knights, all in some state of inebriation. Without simplifying the text, we were nonetheless able to infuse it with very raw human emotions, which made the characters accessible to the audience. We made the challenges that Hamlet faced - the murder of his father and his mother's near-sighted attraction to the murderer - entirely understandable and relatable, which allowed the audience to connect with him and the play's events. We tried to make the characters seem as human as possible, allowing them to interact emotionally and physically, stunning the audience out of the expectation of a pompous, monotonous play. This made the play relevant to the 21st century and thereby made its events impactful.

I played the part of Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, and was presented with a peculiar challenge that I had not encountered with my previous characters: the audience did not care about her and was thus unaffected by her death, which the character is mostly known for. The play presents Ophelia as a simple girl with nothing to offer other than unconditional love for Hamlet. She is not shown to possess any wit or purpose, and is depicted as undesired and forgotten by her lover Hamlet, her father Polonius, and her brother Laertes. Without depicting Ophelia as worth missing, her death is only perceived as a tragedy in so much as an accidental death of a foolish child might be, which only triggers sympathy and pity.

The audience does not feel deep sorrow, however, since her death is not perceived as an important loss. The text only shows Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship as him telling her to leave him and go to a monastery, and her interactions with her family as fleeting and condescending. To represent Ophelia as valuable to Hamlet, we injected playfulness and romance into his telling her to leave, flipping those and other lines on their head so that they were said by him sarcastically, highlighting his love for her. This highlighting made her death a tragic event for Hamlet and explained his descent into desperation and subsequent death.

As well, I attempted to make Ophelia clever and charming, filling her with substance and portraying her as loved by Hamlet and her family. Her wit and well-placed sarcasm allowed the audience to connect to her, as she was presented as a much deeper version of Shakespeare’s character. Due to her wit and Hamlet’s and her family’s love for her, her undeserved death became a much deeper blow for the audience that saw the death of a beloved and well-shaped character.

This entire experience was indescribably difficult emotionally. For me, personally, it became routine to go mad, lose everything I cared about, and commit suicide on a regular basis for a prolonged period of time. The hardships were outweighed, however, by the valuable experience of making such aged and played-to-death characters relevant for a contemporary audience. To learn more about our theater, go to www.palmestudio.org