3D Hamlet: A Lost Generation

What to do with a problem like Hamlet? Staging Shakespeare’s towering psychological tragedy with its intimate soliloquies, wide-angle fight scenes, courtly gatherings and spectral apparitions isn’t easy at the best of times. Halve the cast, cut the four-hour running time by 75% and perform the whole thing in a low-ceilinged hotel conference room with a stage the size of a snooker table, and you’re really dancing with the devil.

NYC’s Fundamental Theater Project’s “casting” of Alec Baldwin (who doesn’t actually appear in person, but via pre-recorded video projection as Hamlet Snr) may have bolstered the pre-publicity, but also seems to spark an overzealous use of visual technology and all-too-obvious modernist tweaks including Ophelia’s Facebook predilection and intercut topical TV news footage.

The audience are also given 3D glasses for the mid-section play-within-a-play, filmed in 3D for no discernible reason other than to justify the show’s title and to remind you, again, that this is a new Hamlet for a new generation.

It feels somewhat shoe-horned. Thankfully, the acting—in a tight space with no props or set to speak of—is exceptionally well-drilled. Jonathan Walker’s statesmanlike King Claudius is icily suave and dulled with powerlust, his ever-faithful aide Queen Gertrude (Jennifer Van Dyck) a mother divided. And Anthony Rapp keeps his mental degradations, suspicions and procrastinations at an intelligently muted level in the title role.

But without a sabre, skull or gravedigger in sight, this was always going to feel a little threadbare and, despite some innovative textual re-jigs (a still-breathing Hamlet closes the play with his poignant “…if it be now” speech), this Hamlet sinks under the weight of its own ambition.