“Die, you creep!” called a woman toward the back of the theater on the night I went to see Ingmar Bergman’s “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—presumably an outraged feminist, angered by Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia. The cry came during Hamlet’s dying speech, and it was loud enough to be heard onstage. (You watched it register fleetingly on the faces of the actors playing Hamlet and Horatio.) More startling than the moment itself, though, was the realization that nothing quite so shocking had happened in the theater all evening. The stage had been filled with breaches of decorum—carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts visited by Claudius upon Gertrude and the Player Queen, and by Hamlet upon Ophelia. (One could sympathize with the outraged feminist, even if one could not applaud her manners.) Claudius had mounted Gertrude from behind before the entire Danish court, and had performed the confession scene while alternately manhandling and fondling the Player Queen. Hamlet had forced himself on Ophelia after spitting in her face and had hacked Polonius to death after stabbing him in the eye through the arras.
That none of these images had the power to jolt us out of our seats as that disembodied voice did says something, I think, about where we have arrived in our dealings with this play. Owing partly to Tom Stoppard and partly to the high premium that New York, as a culture, places on the idea of innovative Shakespeare, we have reached a point where nothing one could possibly think of doing to or with “Hamlet” could reasonably hope to surprise us. As a collective audience, we have no preconceptions left—beyond the preconception that someone will do something unconventional. Thus, even if one has not actually seen a production in which the Ambassador from England carries a ghetto blaster, and Fortinbras, got up like a Cuban revolutionary, has Horatio hauled offstage and murdered, one feels that one has.
“I can’t die without having made ‘Hamlet,’” Bergman recently told a reporter from the Times. In a sense, though, Bergman had already given us his version of “Hamlet”—in “Fanny and Alexander,” the movie about the little boy who keeps seeing his father’s ghost. “Don’t act Hamlet, my son,” the Widow Ekdahl says to the ten-year-old who is sulking over her second marriage. “I am not Gertrude and the Bishop is not Claudius. This is not Elsinore Castle, even if it does look gloomy.” But the Bishop turns out to be a lot worse than Claudius, from a child’s point of view, and Mrs. Ekdahl has to have Fanny and Alexander spirited away before they, and she, can return to the bosom of their father’s warm theatrical family. “Fanny and Alexander” is like a child’s rewriting of the Hamlet story in which Gertrude deserts Claudius, taking Hamlet and Ophelia with her.
In “Fanny and Alexander,” in order to make us care more viscerally about the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius relationship, Bergman shows us, as it were, life at Elsinore before the old king dies. “Look here upon this picture, and on this,” he says to the audience. But the values have been reversed: a satyr to Hyperion. It is the bawdy, permissive Ekdahl household, full of farting and fornication, that we’re meant to approve of and set against the austere palace of the Bishop. In Bergman’s “Hamlet,” there was no such reversal. Up until the last moment, when Fortinbras did indeed seem to burst on the scene in the person of Che Guevara, nothing in the production seemed to tamper with the values of the play. On the contrary, the images of violence and carnality seemed calculated to heighten or reaffirm the conventional moral reading. The “scene of sexual violation between King Claudius and Queen Gertrude that takes place before the entire court” (I quote from the press release issued by BAM) was not, like the fun-loving bed-hopping in “Fanny and Alexander,” meant to amuse us. Despite what the press release implied, it wasn’t even to be taken literally. It was simply a stark, theatrical image of the Danish court’s willingness to sanction Gertrude and Claudius’s behavior.
Throughout the production, characters roamed about the stage or lingered in the background—much like the ghost of Oscar Ekdahl in “Fanny and Alexander.” During the brutal murder of Polonius, Ophelia was right there onstage, not—as the press release maintained—as an actual witness but as a spiritual presence. The ghost was forever popping up where he shouldn’t be, and in a brilliant touch, he took hold of Claudius and held him still, forcing Hamlet to administer the death blow. But, though much in the production was haunting or thought-provoking, nothing seemed wildly unconventional: not the musical-hall turn that Ulf Johanson did as the gravedigger, not Pernilla Ostergren’s gutsy, earthy Ophelia, not the suggestion of homosexual love between Hamlet (Peter Stormare) and Horatio (Jan Waldekranz), not the progressively more contemporary costumes, not the liberties taken with the text, not a Hamlet who at first is not in control but gains dignity and stature. (I resist this reading, but it is familiar.)
The audience for Bergman’s “Hamlet” seems to have been heir to a series of fortunate ironies. To begin with, BAM had thought to import this foreign-language production—a good idea not in itself but in view of how well we know this particular play. Then, having come up with a felicitous idea, BAM—being BAM—had tried to hype the event with intimations of avant-gardism. In the end, owing to Bergman’s particular genius (the last five minutes notwithstanding), what the production amounted to was a chance to see Shakespeare straightforwardly performed by a first-rate company of European classical actors. Perhaps we have reached a point in our jadedness about “Hamlet” where the only thing that might seem innovative is inspired traditionalism.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 27, 1988