Rev iews
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 93 FEBRUA RY 12, 2020
TEDDY WOLFF
Theater
father, Polonius (Nick Dunning),
into acting as the bait to confirm
Hamlet’s suspected insanity, her
sorrow is palpable. That contin-
ues to reverberate through her
disturbing mad scene, witnessed
by her brother Laertes (Gavin
Drea) and on through Gertrude’s
haunted account of her drowning.
Farber and her cast ensure that
the stakes are always clear, as
are the conflicts cleaving many
of the characters in two. This is
true especially of Bell’s Gertrude,
who initially comes off as a frosty
power player, willfully blind to
her new husband’s corruption and
indifferent to her son’s suffering.
Her slow, agonized awakening
packs real pathos.
Roe is a formidable Claudius,
a scowling bulldog of a man, ter-
rified into a moment of remorse
when Hamlet has the traveling
players confront him with a dra-
matized version of his misdeeds
(a sometimes snoozy scene that’s
both funny and sinister here) but
reverting swiftly to ruthlessness.
In her Strindberg adapta-
tion set in post-apartheid South
Africa, Mies Julie, Farber dem-
onstrated skill at cranking the
kinetic energy until it felt like
your viscera were being tied in
knots. In Hamlet, the escalation
is quieter but just as deadly. It’s a
tale unfolding in shadow, beauti-
fully spoken by a cast versed in
classical drama but never lured
into declamatory stiffness.
The casting of a female actor
as Hamlet in itself is not all
that radical, going as far back as
Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 in what
no doubt otherwise was a tradi-
tional production. But traditional
Shakespeare done well can be
riveting, and with Negga’s boldly
inhabited protagonist at its core,
even revelatory.three-and-a-half-hour duration,
Negga brings febrile urgency
to Hamlet’s existential agony,
folding even the most famous
speeches into a fluid interroga-
tion of himself as he puzzles over
his choices to oppose the treach-
ery making the state of Denmark
such a prison. The actress traces
his path from grief to anger, out-
rage through bitter irony, feigned
madness to new, more searing
desolation when he learns the sad
fate of Ophelia (Aoife Duffin).
The tenderness between
Hamlet and Ophelia here is more
exquisitely wrought than I’ve
ever seen it. Their mutual intoxi-
cation in early scenes makes
them seem like college sweet-
hearts, and Duffin is moving as
she conveys Ophelia’s mounting
anxiety over Hamlet’s torment.
When she’s coerced by herRuth Negga plays the brooding protagonist in Yaël Farber’s period-nonspecific production.Part of what makes Ruth Negga
a distinctive screen presence in
films like 2016’s Loving (for which
she received a best actress Oscar
nomination) is the emotional
transparency she brings to char-
acterizations notable for their
composure. There’s no such still-
ness in her bristling American
stage debut, a thrilling plunge
into the title role in South African
director Yaël Farber’s reinvestiga-
tion of Hamlet, which skips the
expected gender dissection to
focus on the anguish of a protago-
nist torn between vengeance and
the intense contemplation that
his intelligence demands. The
take-home is not of a female actor
playing Hamlet but simply an
extraordinary actor.
Without betraying the essence
of Shakespeare’s prince of pro-
crastination, Negga animates his
inaction with impassioned feel-
ing. The Ethiopian-Irish actress
leads an impressive ensemble
that helps make this staging
— first seen in 2018 at the Gate
Theatre in Dublin — a blistering
portrait of ill-gotten power.
In this dark age of unscru-
pulous leaders surrounded by
spineless enablers, Farber’s inter-
pretation taps into a rich vein of
contemporary despair without
clobbering us over the head with
present-day parallels. Designer
Susan Hilferty’s modern cos-
tumes evoke an unsettling sense
of our own times while her set is
a Kafkaesque chamber of heavy
black doors upon doors. The ten-
sion is heightened further still by
Tom Lane’s ambient soundscape
and cinematic underscoring.The first impression of Negga’s
Hamlet is of a figure of androgy-
nous vulnerability, his diminutive
size notable compared to the men
around him. The character’s wary
isolation makes him a threat to
his uncle, Claudius (Owen Roe),
who usurped the throne that was
rightfully Hamlet’s and mar-
ried his dead brother’s queen,
Gertrude (Fiona Bell).
Before long, the Ghost (Steve
Hartland) appears to Hamlet,
revealing how he was poisoned by
Claudius. That plants the seed of
vengeful justice but also cements
the production’s fascination with
death — an element that’s most
chilling in the edited final scene,
as the deceased reemerge out of
smoke and Hamlet meets his own
demise with a smile and the clos-
ing line: “The rest is silence.”
Over the production’s nearlyVENUE St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn
(through March 8)
CAST Ruth Negga, Fiona Bell, Gavin Drea,
Aoife Duffin, Nick Dunning, Peter Gaynor
DIRECTOR Yaë l Farb e r
PLAYWRIGHT William ShakespeareHamlet
Ruth Negga makes a
riveting U.S. stage debut
as the Danish prince in
a mesmerizing take on
Shakespeare’s timeless
tragedy By David Rooney