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HAMLET: PERFORMANCE NOTES

I directed this performance of Hamlet in 2010 with a group of high school seniors. The actress playing Hamlet in our production had wonderful presence, diction, commitment, and emotional delivery, but she tended to “saw the air too much” with her hands (an acting tic that Hamlet decries in his advice to the players). I appreciated her instincts toward physicalization, especially since most beginning actors move too little, but we had to choose specific moments where her arm movements enhanced the text rather than distracted from it. As with many scenes, by simply breaking the speech down moment by moment, we were able to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”

Living tableaux can provide visual reinforcement for key plot elements and allow the audience to see what happened in an omitted scene. This technique is often very helpful at the beginning of the play, and can be employed during the narrator’s introduction to acquaint the audience with key characters and plot elements. Audiences are not nearly as familiar with the story as the actors are. One should not assume the crowd knows the plot. Tell the tale, but also show the story in living color!

Many of the speeches in this play are full of rich imagery, such as the Ghost’s in Act I, Scene V. I asked the actress playing the Ghost to focus on the words themselves, how they sounded, and what they evoked. When an actor breaks a speech down to its individual words, she can “color” each expression and paint a beautifully textured scene for the listener. A player must appreciate the sound and feeling of the words as they leave her mouth: “father’s,” “spirit,” “doom’d,” “term,” “walk,” “night,” “day,” “confined,” “fast,” “fires,” “foul,” “crimes,” “nature,” “burnt,” “purged,” and “love.” Each of these words alone is expressive, and when spoken as part of a line of Shakespeare, they are poetic.

How does one speak “poetically”? The first rule is not to rush the phrases. Many novice actors hurry their lines, which perplexes the audience. Writing down beats and breathing points in the script helps curb this problem. Performers should mark a slash in their text at appropriate breathing points. They can also underline words or syllables that are accentuated, and then experiment with changing the emphasis to hear how this changes a line’s meaning.

Actors can also practice “coloring” their words. Think of the word as not just a word, but also an emotion evoker. See if the word can become a poem in itself, with a richness that echoes its sentiment or enhances the image it arouses. Marking beats and coloring words will encourage actors to slow down their speech.

Many of the decisions actors make can spring directly from the text, and I encourage performers to mine the text for clues to help them in their choices. However, the writing itself does not inform all acting choices. In fact, certain acting choices inform the narrative, i.e., they enable actors and audience to view the story in a different light, based on a performance choice an actor makes. That is why it is so helpful to experiment with different interpretations of a scene before making a final choice on how to perform it.

HAMLET: ACT III, SCENE I

Act III, Scene I is a powerful and emotional scene. It is also tricky to act, because the characters’ emotions, especially Hamlet’s, change rapidly and unpredictably. Hamlet may be acting insane on purpose, a point that the actor and the group can explore in rehearsal. He is certainly rash and emotional. He also says some very cruel words to Ophelia, whom he once loved, according to Hamlet himself. From a staging perspective, I am interested in having the actors’ physical movements reflect their emotions. Hamlet could get physical with Ophelia by holding her shoulders and pushing her, which would certainly give her something to get upset about. On the other hand, his words are more hurtful than any shove. For example, Hamlet and Ophelia approach each other until they are almost touching, and then Hamlet turns away on the line, “I love you not.”

As Hamlet is exiting, he turns back to Ophelia and walks toward her for the line, “God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.” This back-and-forth staging works on two levels: It reinforces the attraction/repulsion dynamic between Hamlet and Ophelia. Also, if Hamlet is indeed pretending to be mad, it paints a convincing portrait of someone who is behaving erratically. Finally on Hamlet’s line, “It hath made me mad,” Ophelia turns her back on him, as if it is too painful for her to see him this way.

Beginning actors frequently do not know what to do with their bodies while they are on stage. They either move too much or too little. Just as we can vocally color words through inflection, tone, pauses, and pitch, so can we add body movements that add to a word’s meaning. On his line, “marry a fool,” Hamlet performs a little stutter-step and a hand pose to signify a fool’s jest. When Ophelia describes Hamlet’s “noble and most sovereign reason, like sweet bells jangled,” she lifts her arm up and rings an imaginary bell. Often a simple physical gesture can help an actor put her stamp on a character and make Shakespeare’s words her own.