Theatre Hamlet

JONATHAN MILLER is one of the most imaginative directors in the theatre today. His talent is wide-ranging, from Beyond the Fringe to Shakespeare, and his work normally receives an enthusiastic response. His present production of Hamlet, which leaves this country tomorrow, has been an exception, receiving absolutely no good notices, and being met in many places with outright hostilities.

Miller has attempted something daring with Hamlet. He has tried to make sense out of it, resolving all of the inherent contradictions in the characters and streamlining the script to bring it to terms with post-Freudian rationalism. The result is entirely rational, but wondrous strange.

Miller's Hamlet begins with the second scene of Act I, at Claudius's speech, "Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death/the memory is green..." The justification for this is that the opening scene is unnecessary, since the ghost turns up again, anyway, and the scene does not add to the action. This argument has some validity, since the opening of the second scene introduces the entire court and establishes the character of Claudius, but the first scene is necessary to define the supernatural character of Hamlet's obsession. Miller is cheating by omitting it, since it tends to contradict his whole Freudian interpretation.

The problem with Miller's version is that it is too single-minded. In his program notes, he quotes three sources to explain his interpretation. The first, a selection from Frazer's Golden Bough, describes a mythic religion in which the priest-king, to gain his office, must slay the old priest-king, and then in turn be on his guard against his successor, who will slay him. The second, from Freud's Totem and Taboo, relates the phenomenon of the young men in the primal horde, who, after destroying the totem/father, whom they perceive as an obstacle to sexual fulfillment, feel guilt at the destructive act, and a resurgence of affection. From this springs the taboo against parricide, fratricide, and, eventually, murder in general. Miller's final selection is from a biography of Proust, which tells of the young Proust's trauma at the denial of his mother's kiss at age seven, which the author perceives as the turning point in Proust's psycho-sexual development.

GOD and Jonathan Miller only know what this pseudo-Jungian nonsense has to do with Hamlet. Miller has decided that Hamlet, rather than feigning madness, is really mad, and has given a psychological interpretation to the play. Unfortunately, the text will not bear it. While Miller's actor cavorts about the stage like something out of The Golden Bough, Shakespeare's text is depicting a hero acting more from pietas than paranoia. The conflict between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Miller's destroys the play.

There are no complex characters in Miller's Hamlet. From beginning to end, the Prince is simply a thoroughgoing lunatic whose madness is real, and not a weapon used to confuse his enemies. This creature, as played by Hugh Thomas, is not Prince Hamlet, not was meant to be, in the normal sense. He is one-dimensional in the extreme. Luckily, Thomas is a fine actor who carries off the part rather well, making himself believable, even though his character is out of place in the context of the play. At some points, though, he loses credibility, especially in "To be or not to be...."

The most one-dimensional character in the play is Claudius, played by Jonathan James-Moore. He is a boring fellow, reciting his lines in perfect meter without much expression, even when he is supposed to show remorse. Miller has done more violence to him than any other, for the director has decided that Claudius is a master politician, filled with cunning and unshakable. Thus, he shows no emotion during the players' performance, since he is (Miller thinks) too crafty to fall for a simple trick like that. This may be consistent with Miller's idea, but not with Shakespeare's, for it gives Hamlet no ground for believing that Claudius has done the murder. It makes Guildenstern's lines "The king ... is in his retirement marvelous distempered..." seem absurd, for we have just seen the king perfectly unmoved. Again, in the final scene, Miller creates a contradiction when he has Claudius invite Hamlet to kill him, and willingly accept the poison cup, because his sense of politics makes him realize that he is done for as a king, anyway. This is remarkably silly, arguing that a man who has done so much to gain a crown will give it up willingly.

The one-dimensional approach is not all bad. Polonius (Mike Baker) is remarkably funny, playing all of those wonderful lines to the full. But Shakespeare did not create one-dimensional characters, Miller did. Shakespeare's people are complex, not easily explicable. There are conflicts in the play which Shakespeare never resolves. Miller has included the part of Claudius who kills his brother, but has ignored the part which cries "O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven..." He has ignored the textual justifications for Hamlet's behavior, and tried to superimpose an interpretation of his own which is totally unaccounted for in the internal evidence. In short, he has done violence to Hamlet, murder most foul.

Despite all this, Miller's Hamlet is interesting, because it is inventive. The acting is good, and the production, though it offends, never bores. Hamlet is undoubtedly the funniest thing Miller has done since Beyond the Fringe.