Hamlet can't survive Fortinbras
Neither in this century nor in the next
In the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, as part of the European Month of Culture program, the international theater festival "Hamlet 2000" was held. It hosted the first foreign tours of both Moscow Hamlets, staged last year by Peter Stein in the enterprise of the Confederation of Theater Unions and Robert Sturua in the Satyricon Theater. By hastening to celebrate the arrival of the cherished date with three zeros, the festival organizers thereby reminded that the history of the main play of the world repertoire in the twentieth century is virtually completed.

The fundamental love-hate of actor and director, as the main theatrical conflict of the century, found in this play the most spacious field for its development. An actor who has not played Hamlet will always feel that there is an annoying “blank spot” in his biography. A director who has not directed Hamlet can no longer be considered absolutely great. When you ask both of them about the reasons for such an “obsession” with Hamlet, they say something vague about traditions. But the fact remains immutable: neither an actor without a director, nor a director without an actor could pull off Hamlet. Theater people repeat this commandment like folk wisdom from an old fairy tale.
At the very end of the 19th century, Charles and Mary Lamb presented all of Shakespeare's major plays in the form of entertaining fairy tales for children. About Hamlet, it says in particular that the Danish prince, who came to a bad end, “was a loving and noble prince, and was much loved for his many sublime and royal virtues. Had he lived, he would undoubtedly have been the greatest and noblest of the Danish kings.”
It is precisely this simple “fabulousness”, and not just hopelessness, mental turmoil and other tragic matters, that sometimes lies in the attractiveness of “Hamlet” for the theater. His revelations are too much about the ridiculous old theatrics. The damned and final questions of existence, over which a genuine Shakespearean hero must tirelessly struggle, become truly interesting only when they are entangled on all sides by the temptations of a funny routine. A step to the right - and the appearance of a ghost turns into a spreading wampuka, a step to the left - and the dialogue with the skull turns out to be impenetrable vulgarity, not to mention the “Mousetrap” scene, which is always ready to grow into theatrical cranberries.
By the way, each of the Moscow Hamlets illustrates the traditional director's approach to this kind of difficulty. Peter Stein chose the mask of a scrupulous but naive reader, not experienced in reflecting on the exhaustion of all approaches. He staged the performance as if the book with the play caught his eye by chance, on a tram, on the way to the first rehearsal. The director was captivated by this story, and he decided to tell it to the viewer, who, unlike him, had not yet read the book. It turned out to be an ideal spectacle for older schoolchildren. Robert Sturua, on the contrary, testifies to the whole performance: he read the play for many years in a row, every day, knows it by heart, admits his inability to say something truly new, but invites the viewer once again to smile wearily at a world in which nothing can be changed.
Obviously, in the person of Hamlet, the century of director's theater received the most insidious and most delicious legacy of all. The next century - no matter which of the theatrical professions turns out to be dominant in it - will receive an even more difficult legacy. It seems that everything has already been played. Hamlet had to be: a secular dandy; a fairy-tale prince in love with a princess; a brave hero without fear or reproach, a defender of the oppressed; bloodthirsty avenger; just a confused young man; a wise man with losses, an aging loser; tragic clown; reader-reciter; a homosexual in love with his murderous stepfather; dressed as a woman; a dissident poet; a pomaded hero-lover; builder of communism; necrophiliac; a whiny idiot... and this is only a tenth of the possible list of interpretations.
The main thing is that contemporaries were ready to consider each of these Hamlets a tragic hero. All successive generations certainly looked for fresh fuel in Shakespeare's storehouses to maintain the theater's sense of tragic conflict. In a certain sense, by resorting to the services of Hamlet, the theater sought self-justification.
And occasionally I found it - when brilliant performances appeared, like the production by Eimuntas Nyakrosius that topped the program in Plovdiv. Already at the final curtain, when the play is finished and all the words have been said, when the piled-up corpses are taken away on a cart and the light fades, a black screen appears on the proscenium. Behind the shimmering lunar silver velvet one can discern moving shadows, silently and disembodiedly poking at this thin impenetrable bridge between the two worlds. So Nyakrosius does not proclaim, but embodies the last words of the hero. The silence that, according to Shakespeare, comes further, according to Nyakrosius - not “there”, but here, before the eyes, like a black mirror. The mystery of non-existence, which forms the core of the tragedy, turns out to be lightly brought forward.
Like the heroes of any metatext, the characters in Hamlet from time to time felt cramped within the play. Continuations of “Hamlet” were invented, and the fates of the non-main characters were clarified. The playwrights were worried about what happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who were sent to certain death, how the traveling actors behaved after performing The Mousetrap, and what happened to poor Fortinbras, who finally took the Danish throne. Only one thing, it seems, did not occur to anyone: to give life to the main character. The above-mentioned remark “further - silence” is sacred and inviolable. Hamlet always remains the one to whom the assumption “if he lives” does not apply, the one who must die.

ROMAN Kommersant-Dolzhansky

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 117 dated 07/07/1999, p. 10

Authors:

Roman Dolzhansky