Success is not to be
ACT’s ‘Hamlet’: Something is chaotic in the state of Denmark
ACT’s production of “Hamlet” offers in John Douglas Thompson one of the most earnest portraits of the title character you will likely see. Protesting to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Domenique Lozano), that “the trappings and the suits of woe” can’t begin to capture the depths of his mourning for his dead father, Thompson eschews the hauteur, the spite that so often color the character’s first speech. His Danish prince speaks only to beg his mother for understanding — understanding that, if it comes, doesn’t come with the force to avert doom.
Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy, which opened Wednesday, Sept. 27, at ACT’s Geary Theater, moments such as these, when Thompson gets to exude the boyish goodness that comes so naturally to him, are the show’s finest. A secondary pleasure is Thompson’s crisp and loving
enunciation of every consonant, a testament to the power of classical training if there ever was one.
But sibilant esses do not alone a tragedy make, nor is Hamlet merely righteous. In the course of learning about and then plotting to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle Claudius (Steven Anthony Jones), Hamlet must be cruel, waggish, imperious. Thompson is never fully at home in those or Hamlet’s myriad other trappings and suits.
The production as a whole, directed by Carey Perloff, is equally at sea. Actors’ inflection is either like a runaway train or a distorted score, prerecorded to hit arbitrary tones. When Jones’ Claudius and Teagle F. Bougere’s Laertes conspire to off Hamlet, they deliver each line of dialogue as if they’re dueling over who can be most apropos of nothing. The culminating sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes is more like a game of whack-a-mole, both because of cringeworthy fight choreography, by Jonathan Rider, and because the weapons aren’t traditional swords but something akin to speared clubs. Bulky and lightweight, they look about as dangerous as Styrofoam baseball bats.
Jake Rodriguez’s sound design spans so many different aesthetics that it never seems to emerge from the world of the play. Cues don’t support the action but barge in to call attention to themselves, using cliches like heartbeat rhythms to dictate a feeling the show hasn’t earned.
Other directorial choices fare worse. Rivka Borek’s Ophelia, one of two young women in the play, has to strip to her underwear for no reason. To the beginning of Claudius’ “O, my offense is rank” soliloquy, Perloff adds a version of a line from the first quarto (which is much shorter and very different from the version of the play with which most audiences are familiar; some scholars theorize that it originated as a pirated version of Shakespeare’s text): “O that this wet that falls upon my face would wash the crime clear from my conscience.” Presumably, that appending exists solely to justify the use of an onstage shower, so that Claudius can wash his face before the speech — a painfully literal interpretation, as if we needed a diagrammed instruction manual to illustrate each word.
At least an instruction manual would be livelier.
The culminating sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes is more like a game of whack-a-mole.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak