| Hamlet in the (Margam) Park |
At NYTW |
| National Youth Theatre of Wales- Hamlet , Margam Park , October 1, 2001 |
| This review was written in response to a comment posted on the Theatre in Wales forum by Stanley Leary +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Today I logged onto the Theatre Wales site because I wanted to write something about NYTW’s ‘Hamlet’ in Margam Park - I had meant to do this earlier but have been overwhelmed with work. So I was pleased to see a message about the performance. I read it with some shock however because to me this, the last of ELAN’s three part investigation of ‘Hamlet’, WAS ‘meaningful, relevant and moving’. Of course if Mr Leary saw the performance as meaningless, irrelevant and without emotional impact then nothing in the world can change his opinion. But I would like to register a contrary view. I don’t think that deconstructing 'a classic text' is ‘arrogant and naïve’ and I don’t think one can legislate about what can and cannot be done with a text - no matter how venerable. The comparison with Disney is offensive and I wish to write a measured response. I felt that this was a fascinating take on ‘Hamlet’, a play which has been explored in many fields as a key text of modern times. I think that there are many ways of approaching a play and that rooting performance in that play’s imagery is as valid as any other. You do, of course, discover different things through the different paths that you choose to follow. Part of me wishes to say that this is the last in a series of ongoing conversations with the text: the first in Denmark in a twentieth-century underground fort (exploring the play’s interior through its obsession with memory, sex, guilt etc.), the second in an outdoor performance in Italy played on its exterior, the historical moment out of which it emerged (the loosening grasps of the universal Catholic church and the absolute monarch), while this, the third, placed the two together to produce a dismembered but recognisable ‘Hamlet’, a play caught between a variety of differing worlds. The site specific nature of the performance thus started with its location at the Celtic periphery of an England which provided a third space in the early seventeenth century, one set away from Northern and Southern Europe. But such a response cannot be adequate as each of these performances - no matter how significant when taken together - must also stand alone. But then I think that they did work on their own and that the imagery presented in the Margam Park performance provided a valuable way into the heart of the play, that it was not just background colour with no intrinsic meaning being exploited for meaningless visual effect. Anyone can see a conventional Hamlet - there are numerous (usually romanticised) films and frequent live performances, - most of which play on individual characterisation. In some of the more experimental performances where characterisation does not provide the focus, words can disappear altogether. These are differing interpretations. In the NYTW production the words came over powerfully alongside the images, expressing the preoccupations that underlie the text: the Renaissance fascination with appearance and reality, with the dispossessed and the over educated; with the hypocrisy of, variously, the old in their control of the young, and men in control of women (especially in their attention to female sexual desire), all in all, with the fear of the unknown whether sexual, political or military. Housing a number of Ophelias in a room filled with mirrors and prisms proved a cogent comment on the play’s concerns; it was not merely an image drawn at random. The individual site of Margam Park, its variety of differently constructed spaces and its variety of different histories, gave it a particular effective role as a site in which the multiple levels of the play could be explored - through, yes, its images. Finally, I think that the decision to rearrange the elements of the play so as to conclude with the audience being led out through the band of players was an active comment on the play itself and its own concern with play acting, with the inherited stories and masks that filter and shape our experience of life - ‘Hamlet’ is of course amongst these. This is how I understood the production. Some of the images were inspired - Gertrude’s report of Ophelia’s death, presented as a disembodied voice which floated out over a dark lake under the stars as a silent boat carrying still figures including a dead Ophelia whose arms trailed over the prow into the water: echoes of other stories featuring dead kings, betraying queens and lost innocence, or on an influential Victorian poem that draws equally on the Arthuran myth and Ophelia: the Lady of Shallot. These were thoughtful multilayered images that speak of a wide range of cultural influences. They are not merely ‘pilfered’ willy-nilly from the text. It is obvious that I think highly of Ms Guidi’s work and I want to avoid any accusation of partizan effusiveness. I do not feel however that there is any way that I could compare the NYTW version of Hamlet with one in which a building - any building - is used merely as a backdrop to a straightforward performance of the play. And I do not think that I was the only one who responded by being moved. |
Reviewed by: Jeni Williams |
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