Hamlet Review: As Madness Would Have It

There’s something radiantly destabilizing about realizing that Hamlet is just words. It’s only a shared understanding, static, more or less, for centuries, of what this play means that fills in our expectations of the physical life and the emotional energy between the lines.

It’s not that Thomas Ostermeier’s German-language production (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg), which was first staged in Europe in 2008 and now arrives at last in New York as part of BAM’s New Wave Festival, is anti-establishment. It doesn’t thumb its nose at the play’s history because it simply isn’t in conversation with it. At one point, with inspiration from a mix of Charlie Chaplin and The Three Stooges, Ostermeier stages a silent early burial sequence across Jan Pappelbaum’s muddy sandbox of a set with gravediggers slipping and sliding over and under coffins as water from a handheld hose drenches them.

Most directors race or plod through this play’s scenes that don’t fit their boldest visions, but there isn’t a single line here that feels unmerited or out of place—and that’s a little bit because Ostermeier makes ample but coherent cuts and mostly because directorial decisions aren’t imposed but spring, often improbably, out of a text that we thought we knew. (As for audiences unfamiliar with Hamlet, they may be particularly challenged by hearing the words delivered in German since the supertitles are almost entirely Shakespeare’s original language.)

By irreverently opening the production with Hamlet delivering “To be or not to be” into a camcorder that he’s holding, Ostermeier stresses that the play, often staged to portray Denmark as a dystopian surveillance state, is more prominently about self-surveillance. This is a production in which madness, taken to a frightening extreme by Hamlet and then mirrored, harrowingly, by Ophelia (Jenny König), isn’t so much a deviation from the healthy self, but a release of the most honest, unrepressed impulses that already pulsate beneath the surface.

By choosing to perform madness, Hamlet physicalizes those impulses. Ostermeier, liberating himself from what everyone else thinks the play is and should be, passes his production’s exuberantly adventurous baton to his cast of six, led by the astonishing Lars Eidinger, who promenades and prowls the stage with a sort of feral whimsy. As Eidinger’s dives headfirst into piles of mud, leaps over tables, and even charges into the audience, it’s not so much that Hamlet actually goes mad, but that he finds comfort, even escape, in embracing his id.

König, playing both Gertrude and Ophelia, seems almost as central here as Eidinger in a metamorphic performance in which sunglasses often signal the difference between mother and almost-lover. (The costumes, which nimbly and sometimes mischievously clarify who’s who among the shape-shifting cast, are by Nina Wetzel.) König leans into Gertrude’s seediness in the opening scene—you can easily empathize with Hamlet’s discomfort with his mother’s publicly bravura sexuality—but she’s best in the extended confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude.

Her sunglasses off and hair down, König could be both Gertrude and Ophelia at once, a dramatic optical illusion that convincingly suggests that Hamlet’s been projecting his fury at his mother on to Ophelia. Here, it’s Gertrude whom he so desperately wants to check herself into a nunnery. But it’s not only Ophelia who refracts Gertrude’s image, as Hamlet, in the play-within-a-play, performs the role of his own mother, an over-the-top drag excavation of Gertrude’s betrayal. (König is well-matched, too, by Thomas Bading as a creepily gentle Claudius.)

Hamlet’s final scene has always been a challenge to stage. This is a play that’s dense with language but suddenly climaxes in a near-wordless fencing match that results in four major characters’ violent deaths within a matter of minutes. Both on paper and in most productions, it’s a bit ridiculous, impolite as that might be to admit about the most tragic scene of the most celebrated tragedy. But from start to finish, Ostermeier’s Hamlet is worthy of its ending, and that duel, both funny and brutal, pathetic and frightening, even as it features Eidinger’s silliest breaking of the fourth wall (at one point, he tries to switch positions with an audience member), finally feels like the proper peak of the play’s extended crescendo.

Not every moment of here makes sense, and not every choice is in good taste. (Eidinger’s use of Tourette’s-like tics as part of his evocation of “madness” is the only intervention that crosses a line.) But there’s the rub: By seeking to create a Hamlet that’s definitively not definitive, in which the aim isn’t to concretize how the play should be understood by everyone everywhere but simply to capture what its words might mean to one director and six actors at one moment, Ostermeier and his company reclaim Shakespeare, fleetingly but full-heartedly, for all of us.

Hamlet runs through November 5 at the Howard Gilman Opera House.