No matter how many times you’ve seen Hamlet, this one is exciting if occasionally too broad, particularly in its superimposed comedy, whether the Player Queen is jumping into the arms of her on-stage spouse during The Murder of Gonzago (the play that’s the thing wherein Hamlet catches the conscience of the king) or Thorne’s Hamlet is collapsing crazily on the floor before his doctored play is performed or setting out for exile in England with a fey jeté. There is sometimes more flippancy than mordancy in the character’s scathing wit. The Shakespearean comedy of the gravediggers’ scene, on the other hand, is deftly dealt with by the who’s-on-first clowns of Fred Sullivan Jr. and Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium student Rama Marshall. And it’s given a timely edge by Sullivan’s interpolated wartime ditty about boys not knowing what they’re fighting for.
In this very immediate Hamlet, even Thorne’s melancholy is fresh — as when he explains to newly arrived Wittenberg chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern his loss of mirth, choosing every word of the “What a piece of work is a man” speech as if struggling to explain the depression into which conflict between the desire to revenge his father’s murder and a mysterious lack of resolution has driven him. And there is a manic element to this Hamlet’s depression, causing him to leap atop chairs, brandish a gun, and straddle Gertrude on a hassock in her “closet” as if driven — but unsure whether it’s to throttle or mount the disloyal, disillusioning mother. Of his Father’s Ghost — a militarily clad Sullivan, angry yet piercing, without any echoey special effect — he is simply in awe, a child’s yearning for the departed parent mixed into his terror of the Ghost and horror at its finger-pointing revelations.
But this is not a Hamlet that’s all about its ambivalent protagonist struggling toward manhood and resolve. The supporting characters make well-charted journeys of their own, beginning with Joe Wilson Jr.’s taut Hamlet sidekick, Horatio. Wilson is familiar for more pyrotechnic acting antics, whether in Ain’t Misbehavin’ or Topdog/Underdog. Here he combines a slicked-back period elegance with incredulity at the corruption unfolding around him and steadying support of Hamlet, to whom, in the absence of the last-minute Fortinbras, he gives an eloquent, quietly moving send-off. Timothy Crowe is a steely and Machiavellian Claudius, whose brief pangs of guilt are nothing to his silky, lying resolve to rid himself of his troublesome stepson. As a platinum-blonde if aging Gertrude, done up in Japanese pajamas or riding tweeds with a forest full of foxes arrayed around her neck, Cynthia Strickland is placating and distressed, a Chekhovian gentry-bred weakness strangling an innate decency. By the time she delivers the mellifluous news of Ophelia’s drowning — from a perch distant from Claudius, who’s scheming Hamlet’s murder over drinks with Laertes — she’s awash in sadness and shock.
