Peter Sarsgaard as Hamlet in the Classic Stage Company production of HAMLET
Peter Sarsgaard’s Hamlet is a flippant, cocaine-snorting party boy with a shaved head and sleek contemporary clothes. His silky shirt and impeccable sport jacket say, “Point me to the dance floor.” He makes impertinent gestures, delivers many of his lines in a high-pitched trill, and frequently interrupts himself with girlish titters. He says “conscience does make cow-aa-aa-ards of us all” and balls his fists up under his chin when he’s angry. His Dark Prince of Elsinore is the most sarcastic gay waiter you’ve ever met.
It’s a strange approach for Sarsgaard, a dependably stealthy and frequently creepy actor who on celluloid is usually found delivering his lines in a deadly monotone. Even when playing gay characters, he rarely comes across as camp. Yet if there’s a Ghost watching over this production, it’s Paul Lynde’s.
The director, Austin Pendleton, himself an experienced performer who has played both Hamlet and Claudius, prides himself on being an actor’s director. Meanwhile, Sarsgaard praises Pendleton’s listening ability. In combination these two factors suggest that Sarsgaard felt free to try something off-beat, perhaps even off-off-beat. The theater is small (199 seats), the off-Broadway location funky and sheltered. Why not do a Hamlet that contains more than one queen?
Credit, I suppose, must be given for audacity, and under Pendleton’s direction at Greenwich Village’s Classic Stage Company (through May 10) a considerably trimmed, 190-minute Hamlet at least feels fresh and brisk. This Hamlet has some spring in its step. But it frequently skips right off the path Shakespeare laid. Pendleton dispenses entirely with King Hamlet—no “murder most foul” here to set the mood for revenge—creating the possibility that we’re meant to think the Ghost might be a group delusion.
The question of Hamlet’s madness, though, seems less compelling in this production than the question of Sarsgaard’s silliness, a stratagem that proves unworkable for several reasons. One is that this normally coiled viper of an actor is not particularly convincing as a flibbertigibbet. His manner is mannered. And his Hamlet is an off-puttingly contemporary figure, one at odds with the much more traditional Claudius (Harris Yulin), stentorian and pompous, a portrayal that would not have been out of place in a 1950s production.
There is nothing new in portraying Hamlet as effeminate. If anything, playing Hamlet as sexually ambiguous was the prevailing choice in the nineteenth century. The great Shakespearean Edwin Booth wrote in 1882, “I have always endeavored to make prominent the femininity of the character and therein lies the secret of my success—I think. I doubt if ever a robust and masculine treatment of the character will be accepted so generally as the more womanly and refined interpretation.”
It seemed inconceivable to our Victorian forebears that a real man would hesitate to act, but to the vacillating, self-doubting twenty-first-century man, an equivocating nature hardly seems difficult to grasp. Yet Sarsgaard isn’t just in touch with his feminine side, he’s a cabaret act. In reconceiving the Bard’s language as a series of snippy asides and vexatious rejoinders, Sarsgaard does injury to it. Hamlet is not a thriller, or at least not a good one—we don’t watch it for the clunky machinations of its plot. In a first-rate production, though, we are enthralled by the fragile beauty of the words and the sorrowful descent of each character into the pit of his own flaws. Sarsgaard is playing a cello with a butter knife here, and such music as he makes clangs against the ear.
As Hamlet puts when directing the performers of The Mousetrap, “It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters.” It’s a struggle to feel the tragic heft in the words while Sarsgaard chuckles and capers and gesticulates, now with fingers splayed across his midsection, now with an elbow at his hip and his palm raised heavenward. When he kisses Ophelia (an ethereal Lisa Joyce), he immediately flounces away in disgust. He rushes through some lines and pushes others away from him with hand gestures; he is most himself, it seems, when companionably snorting cocaine with Rosencrantz (Scott Parkinson) and Guildenstern (Daniel Morgan Shelley). You get the feeling the main reason he’s so snotty about everything is not that he lost his father to treachery and murder, but that he’d prefer to be free of all obligations so he and his cocaine buddies might dash off to Fire Island to judge a Liza Minnelli-impersonator contest.
Because of Sarsgaard and Pendleton’s choices, Claudius emerges as a much more sympathetic figure. That seems to have been intentional: Pendleton has said that he doesn’t think anyone in the play, Claudius included, deserves to die. Yet should it really be a point of contention which of these two men’s fate is more just? To guide things further off the rails, Pendleton has Claudius succumb to a guilty conscience instead of to Hamlet’s sword. After Gertrude (knowingly) drinks the poison, the king follows suit. There are curious choices, and then there are inexplicable ones. God’s bodkins, this is not supposed to be the Tragedy of Claudius!