78 newyork| february17–march1, 2020
head) and her eager, “Put me in, Coach,”
physicality makes her Hamlet a particu-
larly young one: This sweet prince is only
just past the teenage-tantrum stage, still
prey to swift moods and triumphant sulks.
When Hamlet nails his creepy uncle with
his sneaky play-within-a-play gambit,
Negga struts around like a bantam rooster.
When Gertrude (Fiona Bell) chastises her
son, Negga sticks her hands deep in her
pockets and scowls, scuffing the ground
like a Norman Rockwell newsboy caught
with a dirty face. She inverts the play’s
tragic vector, so her final moments are
light, even ecstatic—once she tells us that
the “readiness is all,” she rises up into Ham-
let’s ugly fate with relief and joy.
There’s too much consciousness of the
text’s grandeur in her performance, which
slows her lines down, well under the “trip-
pingly on the tongue” pace the play itself
recommends. And we don’t get much of
Hamlet’s legalistic brain, in which the
young scholar keeps building cases against
himself and then destroying them. Nor
does her vigor build relationships with
other actors onstage, who seem to be in
another play entirely. As it is, though, her
work is memorable— accessible, clear,
exciting, vivid. The character’s constant
preoccupation is action and the lack of it,
and as Hamlet comes into his own, Negga
shimmers with the thrill of finally doing
what has long been talked about. Her
enormous eyes, searchlights thatseem to
pivot around corners, are suspicious for
four and a half acts. But by the end, she’s
discovered action, and she beams the good
news out to us like a lighthousefinding
ships at sea. ■Farber’s logic are different—oneisabout
motion and brightness, the other aboutst yle
and gloom. The two do agree ona certain
monumentality, so every famous line(a.k.a.
the vast majority) is delivered emphatically
for maximum poetic impact. ButFarber’s
lapidary production is the wrongcontainer
for Negga’s antic Dane, despitethestar’s
enviable set of theatrical gifts.
Farber does make several strongchoices
that could have been truly greathadthey
been carried through. She has theusurper
King Claudius (a nicely blustery OwenRoe)
give his introductory speechas ifhe’s
Mussolini on a balcony, for instance,and
her vision here is precise, cinematic,and
instructive. For that scene, Farberhasrecal-
culated the pressures and threatsoflifein
Elsinore: You note Claudius’s panicoverhis
nephew Hamlet’s popularity muchdiffer-
ently after you’ve heard the crowdsroaring
from the front of the palace. The showturns
swiftly away from such thoughts,though,
concerned less with meaning thanwith
emotion and blunt impact.
Farber changes the rules for severalof
Shakespeare’s soliloquies by insertingsilent
characters, so that people who once
declaimed their thoughts alone sometimes
have in-scene audiences to make the
moment more realistic. In this production,
for instance, Ophelia (Aoife Duffin)stays
onstage for Hamlet’s first long speech(“O,
that this too too solid flesh wouldmelt”),
draping herself over his chair andkissing
him from time to time—a supportivemove
for a girlfriend whose lover is talkingabout
suicide, but a puzzle later on whenOphelia
seems baffled by Hamlet’s wildbehavior.
Didn’t she hear all that stuff aboutflesh
melting? And Claudius usuallymuseson
his inability to pray in Act Three byhimself,
but Farber inserts a random priest,which
turns the scene into a formal actofconfes-
sion. Here, Farber’s invention hamstrings
the irony. A Peeping Hamlet believeshe’s
found his kneeling stepfatherat actual
prayer, and he shies away fromkillinga
man in the process of speaking withGod.
(He doesn’t want Claudius to go toHeaven
on a technicality.) But we can hearClaudius
saying that “my thoughts remainbelow.” If
there’s a priest there, Claudius isconfess-
ing; he’s engaging with the church;he’s
doing something holy. Yet if he’salone,as
Shakespeare wrote him, then wecansee
simultaneously his perfidy and Hamlet’s
error. Whoops.
The production takes place in a hyper-
saturated zone, a Peter Greenaway palette
of velvety reds and blacks, a placefor rav-
ishment, not for thinking. Susan Hilferty’s
set under John Torres’s stark lightingis
frequently gorgeous—scene after scene
looks as though it’s auditioning for Hamlet:
The Coffee-Table Book, as shot by Annie
Leibovitz. Hilferty’s set consists of three
walls of tall black doors around a black
floor. It’s always smoky—a censer fills the
place with an oily cloud at the top of the
show—and never daytime, even if someone
says they’re waiting for night to fall.
But design, even handsome design, can
be a heavy weight. Hamlet’s many modes—
comedy, political intrigue, revenge thriller,
psychological investigation—are being col-
lapsed into a single atmosphere in the
foggy horror-movie gloom. Hilferty’s done
clever work in surrounding the action with
a dozen coffinlike doorways, particularly
since everyone in Elsinore is always spying
on everybody else. Farber, though, under-
uses the doors. When Hamlet cries, “Let
the door be locked!,” nobody moves to shut
even one of them.
This world does look great, and it sets off
Negga’s elfin beauty perfectly. But Farber’s
passion for the well-curated image keeps
turning overobvious and even self-
negating. Whenever someone’s about to
die, one of the gravediggers appears in the
back and starts singing eerily, just in case
you didn’t get that death isn’t much fun.
And Ophelia enters for her mad scene
absolutely soaked. Why? It’s very hard to
get that wet before you go off to drown.
So Negga carries the show—or, rather,
she tows it behind her. The brooding mise-
en-scène is a black hole, but she never stops
pouring energy into it: She shines, pouts,
smiles, grabs people by the shirtfront,
prowls, crab-walks, dances, and flings her-
self onto the floor. The combination of her
tininess (at one point she hides behind an
armchair by just slightly inclining herBOOKS / MOLLY YOUNG
ProdigalClassicAfteralmost 90years,RomanceinMarseillearrives,triumphant.did you know they’re doing “spoiler alert” warnings in books
now? There one is, printed in the preamble to Claude McKay’s
Romance in Marseille: “New readers are advised that this introduction
makes details of the plot explicit.” It’s interesting to imagine what prompt-
ed this forewarning. Had readers been rage-tweeting about plot points of
novels being “spoiled” by scholarly intros? Or was the publisher, Penguin
Classics, merely protecting itself from hypothetical complaints? I’m em-
barrassed by the implication in either case—we’re readers, not babies!
But I don’t blame Penguin for following the golden rule of public rela-
tions: When in doubt, play it safe.
Mostly because Romance in Marseille plays it safe in no other ways.