Hamlet: a ghost, a girl and a lot of bloodshed in the great outdoors
02 Aug 2024 - - Photos by Dahlia Katz

On a lovely summer's evening, there is nothing better than settling back in the High Park Amphitheatre for some this season's Dream in High Park. Once again this year it is Shakespeare, in this instance Hamlet, so it is good for you but it is also, from past experiences, going to be entertaining and undoubtedly, as the sun sets and the night envelops, magical. This Hamlet begins strongly with Ophelia (Beck Lloyd) wandering onto the stage and sing-songing portions from her madness speeches interspersed with actual lyrics I was unable to identify. She is lovely, her voice is lovely and the audience is drawn in. Part of the fun of a Shakespearean production is untangling the interpretation, finding what angle the bard is being approached from. A focus on Ophelia—a feminist angle?—is intriguing and Lloyd proves herself up to that task. Except that isn't where we are going. James Dallas Smith, clad in tattered black robes and a horned mask, sweeps onto the upper platform, to terrify soldiers Prince Amponsah (Contempt) and Breton Lalama (The Inheritance, King Lear, Queen Goneril) as well as the little ones in the audience. The rest of us are thrilled. Here is the ghost of Hamlet's father, now the drama, the carnage, can begin.

From there the production moves swiftly through the tragedy with an emphasis on the action. This makes sense in an outdoor setting where attention spans can be limited and Shakespeare is a foreign language. There are cuts to the notoriously lengthy text—"get thee to a nunnery" is the most famous missing line— but not enough to bring it under two hours. Which, alas, is still a half hour too long. There are also additions to the text in service of director Jessica Carmichael's emphasis on grief. Most of it is seamless but the line "Grief makes one hour ten," which is cribbed from Richard II, takes on an unfortunate resonance. It is the extraordinary, and energetic, cast who keep the production racing along, encouraged and driven on by Chris Ross-Ewart's driving goth-electronic score. If a summer night is going to be spent watching the repercussions of allowing oneself to be driven mad by guilt, this is as palatable as it is going to get.

Qasim Khan (Hedda Gabler, The Inheritance, All's Well That Ends Well, Acha Bacha) gives his Hamlet a tormented anger from the very beginning. While he revels in the comic wordplay and has a definite heat with Lloyd's Ophelia, his madness seems to be a symptom of being stuck in the anger stage of grieving. One needn't be concerned that Khan starts too intensely, he is able to escalate his emotional turmoil without it feeling forced or melodramatic. The monologues Hamlet is known for fare less well, with Khan adopting a choppy rhythm of dealing with the iambic pentameter, accents falling repetitively where a comedian would lean into a word. This may have to do with the problems that the sound system was experiencing, with microphones cutting in and out and compression being applied excessively. Khan had to fight to make his emotions register through the sonic flatness. The ingenious twist that Khan gives to the interior monologues that make up so much of Hamlet's word count, is to break the fourth wall and pose the questions to the audience. Sometimes, in the Amphitheatre's dubious tradition of audience participation, directly to specific faces in the crowd.

The steeply angled aisles are also used extensively, most effectively when Khan strides and ambles through the audience down to the fresh grave dug right in front of the stage, right before our eyes. The banter with the gravedigger, Amelia Sargisson (Red Velvet, King Lear), is all the more comical and macabre when Yorick's skull is pulled from the literal earth. And of course, the horror of Ophelia's death is compounded by our being perched on the precipice of her final resting place which remains open and visible as the rest of the stage is bathed in death. Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (The Inheritance, Richard II, Fifteen Dogs, Every Little Nookie, Trout Stanley, Towards Youth, Erased: Billy & Bayard, Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom, Black Boys) gives Hoaratio a comic edge with bits of slapstick and a outsized fear of the ghost. Smith gets to ditch the horror drag to shine as the overenthusiastic leader of the players. Dan Mousseau (Wildwoman, Prodigal) is a Laertes consumed and undone by the need for revenge. All the more so as his interactions with his sister Ophelia and his well-meaning but bumbling father Polonius, Sam Kalilieh, are charming and have all the warmth that Hamlet's family lacks.

Hamlet pleads with his father's ghost, "Illusion speak to me," conveying the relationship that must have existed by way of grief and phantoms. Gertude, Raquel Duffy (Rose, Animal Farm, La Bete, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?), is all business in power suits and is vaguely puzzled by the madness of her son. Her complicity with the deliciously devious Claudius, Diego Matamoros (A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, Post-Democracy, Little Menace, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Royale), is ambiguous, but she is enthralled with the man. Small wonder, Matamoros has a firm command of Shakespearean prose and of all the cast he turns the words into direct communication of the ideas, while never losing the poetic flow. Rosencrantz, Sargisson, and Guildenstern, Christo Graham, follow Jackman-Torkoff's lead and turn the doomed duo into near vaudevillians, much to the audience's delight. It is a delicate balance to make a tragedy with as many layers as Hamlet play as both high art and a mainstream family entertainment. But Shakespeare must have accomplished it—Hamlet, the four hour version, was a hit in 1601—and this production comes admirably close.