Director Robert Hastie’s fresh update of Hamlet arrives at BAM’s Harvey Theater with visual flair, a first-rate cast at home with the Bard’s poetry, and a decidedly modern and upbeat approach to the most-produced tragedy in the English-speaking world. The show opens in darkness, with guards who spot the ghost of Denmark’s recently deceased king (Ryan Ellsworth) appearing suddenly in the scope of the handheld flashlights held by two palace guards. The onstage jump scares are further punctuated by Richard Taylor’s horror film scoring and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s sound design. It’s wonderfully creepy, and gives way to a large ballroom in the Elsinore palace, strikingly designed by Ben Stones (who also did the witty modern costumes), that’s dominated by a large painted mural and suggests a regalness that President Trump’s future banquet hall should envy. There, the cast has assembled for the wedding reception for the late king’s widow, Gertrude (Ayesha Dharker) to her brother-in-law and now king, Claudius (Alistair Petrie).
There’s a celebratory mood, with young Laertes (Tom Glenister) sipping champagne from his shoe, that’s marred only by the dour presence of Hamlet seated at a table downstage, dressed in a black suit of mourning and openly scoffing at how quickly his mother has remarried — to his uncle, no less. Hiran Abeysekera, who starred in the recent Broadway adaptation of Life of Pi and remains boyish at 40, eschews the usual melancholy of the Bard’s young hero. Instead, he plays a manic student prince whose chief psychological challenge appears to be a case of undiagnosed ADHD. He flits about the stage, cracks jokes, fires finger guns, dons drolly clownish attire such as a Blockbuster Video sweater and a pleated ruff collar — and brings a similar breakneck pace to his downstage monologues, like a young man whose mouth cannot keep up with all the competing ideas in his head.
It’s a bold and brave performance, if not always successful at conveying the full arc of Hamlet’s revenge scheme. (It doesn’t help that Hastie has reshuffled scenes, bizarrely plopping the “To be or not to be” speech late in the show, after the graveyard scene.)
Francesca Mills, a young British actress born with a form of dwarfism, makes the star-crossed love Ophelia the heart and soul of this production. She’s an impish, charming, but dutiful daughter in early scenes, playfully flirting with Hamlet and teasing her brother, Laertes. In one clever bit, the two interrupt the speech of advice from their father Polonius (Matthew Cottle, wonderfully out of touch) to finish his sentences of admonition — “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” — a sign that they’ve heard these pearls of paternal wisdom so many times they’re committed to memory. Her later unraveling is an astonishment as she flies about the stage not in girlish glee but in increasingly obvious madness. She even dons her slain father’s bloody shirt like a child playing dress-up while all too aware that she has wandered far from the land of make-believe. You can’t take your eyes off of her. It’s a towering performance.
Mills wrenches genuine emotion from her scenes — which sadly can’t be said of the final roundelay of deaths, which don’t carry the heft that they should. It’s hard to build up much sympathy for a Hamlet who seems to be putting on an antic disposition from his first entrance — and then maintains it until almost the very end. It’s hard to track the psychological throughline of his character. The killing of Polonius, performed with a gun that he seems genuinely surprised to have appeared in his possession, seems less the culmination of a long-brewing revenge plot than an accidental and felonious flareup in his severe mental illness. (It’s very cool but suggests a level of delusion that doesn’t track with the rest of Hamlet’s actions.) The response of Dharker’s Gertrude is perhaps understandably muted as a result; we see her reject Claudius’s extended hand soon afterward, a sign that she now believes Hamlet’s assertions, but soon after she heedlessly quaffs the poisoned chalice that her husband extends to her son in the final scene. Individual moments register, but they don’t always connect.
Hastie (best known for how work on the uproarious musical Operation Mincemeat) brings new perspectives to material that is four centuries old, whether it’s casting a woman (Tessa Wong) as Hamlet’s pal Horatio, dressing the prince’s sycophantic peers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Hari Mackinnon and Tom Bolland) in preppy rugby shirts, or creating a full red curtain-lined theater within that ballroom for the Death of Gonzago play-within-a-play with a scene of king poisoning that Hamlet hopes will stir Claudius’s guilt for murdering the previous king. (Never mind that the play depicts a nephew poisoning the king, a hint of Hamlet’s own treasonous plot to overthrow the current monarch and avenge his father’s death.) There’s a playfulness here — Polonius’s killing is a real shocker — that’s matched by a rapid-fire breakneck pace that barely pauses for breath over a nearly three-hour running time. But too often he appears to be straining for novelty at the expense of narrative coherence.
Abeysekera seems intent on shaving a full hour off the play single-handedly, even barreling through his “To be or not to be” soliloquy with such haste that it’s hard to believe he’s really reckoning with serious questions of mortality at all. The words rush by, and so does the sentiment and the sense of a connection to a character whose eventual downfall lands like anticlimax. This Hamlet doesn’t need vengeance. He needs Ritalin. ★★★☆☆
HAMLET
BAM’s Harvey Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through May 17 for $46 to $216