From left: Amelia Sargisson as Rosencrantz, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff as Horatio, and Qasim Khan as Hamlet.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: Hamlet
- Written by: William Shakespeare
- Director: Jessica Carmichael
- Actors: Qasim Khan, Prince Amponsah, Raquel Duffy, Christo Graham, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Sam Khalilieh, Breton Lalama, Beck Lloyd, Diego Matamoros, Dan Mousseau, Amelia Sargisson, James Dallas Smith
- Company: Canadian Stage
- Venue: High Park
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Sept. 1, 2024
There are times during Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park production of Hamlet where you want to check your digital program. Is this the tragedy by William Shakespeare that we’re watching? Or is it Hamlet by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross?
No one actually quotes Kübler-Ross’s famous “five stages of grief” during the show, but you wouldn’t be surprised if they did. In highlighting the theme of grieving that runs through Shakespeare’s play, director Jessica Carmichael has inserted many other writings on that subject, from the Bible to contemporary poems and psychology books. As you can imagine, it often has a jarring effect, a bit like suddenly hearing a Taylor Swift melody in the middle of a Bach concerto.
It’s an unfortunate misstep in what is otherwise a compelling reframing of this overly familiar play. In the director’s notes for said digital program, Carmichael explains how she was prompted by Meghan O’Rourke’s 2009 Slate essay “Hamlet’s Not Depressed. He’s Grieving” to pursue the idea that grief is one of the engines that drives the plot.
Qasim Khan as Hamlet (foreground) with Raquel Duffy as the Queen and Diego Matamoros as Claudius (background).Dahlia Katz/Supplied
We can see that here: Qasim Khan’s Hamlet, in deep mourning for his late father, seeks closure by avenging his murder. Beck Lloyd’s Ophelia, devastated by the death of her own father, Polonius (Sam Khalilieh), loses her sanity. Her grieving brother Laertes (Dan Mousseau), meanwhile, is reduced to a blind rage, his own thirst for vengeance leading to the play’s bloody climax.
In this context, the beyond-the-grave cry of Hamlet’s father’s ghost (James Dallas Smith) – “Remember me!” – is not merely a reminder to his son that he must kill the usurping Claudius (Diego Matamoros). Echoing again and again throughout the show, it comes to represent how the grief-stricken are tortured by the pain of persistent memory.
Carmichael’s production is only the second time Canadian Stage has done Hamlet in 41 summers of presenting Shakespeare in High Park. Since these shows are meant to be entry-level, family-friendly Shakespeare, the company has always tended toward the playwright’s popular comedies.
As if in compensation, both for the tragedy and her own melancholy approach, Carmichael overemphasizes the comic elements in the first part of the play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s friends-turned-spies, come on like a couple of hyper court jesters, Amelia Sargisson’s acrobatic Rosencrantz doing cartwheels and splits, while Christo Graham’s goofy Guildenstern even has the temerity to hug the queen (Raquel Duffy).
Khalilieh, however, resists the urge to go broad with a pleasingly nuanced portrayal of the king’s advisor Polonius. Instead of the logorrheic old fool he is sometimes made out to be, Khalilieh plays him as a loving if fussy middle-aged dad.
Khan, who was the gentle Eric Glass in Canadian Stage’s The Inheritance and a likeable Tesman in Coal Mine Theatre’s Hedda Gabler this past season, brings some sharper angles to his Hamlet. He bristles with bitter wit and gives a cool, concise recital of the great “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which Carmichael has happily left intact.
Jessica Carmichael directs the production.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
At other times, however, she de-emphasizes the focus on Hamlet by turning his other soliloquies into dialogues with Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Horatio (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff). In fact, all the actors in the cast are listed as also playing Hamlet, in what may be both a democratic gesture and a suggestion that his grief is universal.
The acting in general is good, although some of the characters are short-changed. Matamoros’s Claudius is deprived of most of his soul-searching repentance scene, while Duffy’s Gertrude is given little time to make a maternal impression in her confrontation with her son. Lloyd’s strong Ophelia, however, is given added stage time, delivering a non-Shakespearean prologue and, after she becomes mentally ill, an extended monologue, also drawn mostly from other sources.
As Horatio, Jackman-Torkoff also gets added lines, pouring out a long, emotional elegy over Hamlet’s slain body. Last year at this time, he was playing a disco-era Richard II at the Stratford Festival in another bold interpretation by playwright Brad Fraser and director Jillian Keiley.
But where Fraser smoothly borrowed from other Shakespeare works to reshape that minor play, Carmichael’s grab-bag approach feels incongruous. Hearing familiar lines from a Walt Whitman poem or Lou Reed song in Hamlet doesn’t enhance an already supremely eloquent tragedy, it distracts from it.
In other respects, though, Carmichael’s treatment has some of the revelatory qualities of her 2021 Stratford revival of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters – also an outdoor staging owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the High Park Amphitheatre, designer Joshua Quinlan embodies the grief theme in a set that’s draped as if in widow’s weeds and whose earth tones suggest a grave. His costumes are mostly sombre modern dresses but with some striking flourishes. As the ghost, Smith appears in shamanic regalia, wearing a skull mask crowned with branches that look like something from the horror movie Midsommar. Chris Ross-Ewart provides a funereal score, with wordless choral passages, that drifts in and out to haunting effect.
This is not a Hamlet I’d pick to introduce someone to the play, but for those of us who’ve seen it countless times, it offers a fresh perspective on an infinitely rich tale.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)