Peter Hall explained in a lecture that
Hamlet is one of mankind's great images. It turns a new face to each century, even to each decade. It is a mirror which gives back the reflections of the age that is contemplating it. And the need to define these reflections produces, on average, a new appreciation of Hamlet every twelve days.... For our decade I think the play will be about the disillusionment which produces an apathy of the will so deep that commitment to politics, to religion or to life is impossible. For a man said to do nothing, Hamlet does a great deal. For a man said to refuse experience, he experiences a great deal. He is always on the brink of action, but something inside him, this disease of disillusionment, stops the final, committed action.... [Talking of the young intellectuals of his day, Hall felt]: There is a sense of what-the-hell-anyway, over us looms the Mushroom Cloud. And politics are a game and a lie, whether in our own country or in the East/West dialogue which goes on interminably without anything very real being said. This negative response is deep and appalling.43
The cold, self-perpetuating nature of the political machine was also prevalent in Steven Pimlott's 2001 production. Whereas in 1965 historical costumes were made with modern fabrics, loosely referencing the twentieth century, Pimlott went for a completely modern interpretation:
Searchlights and swivelling surveillance cameras make spies of everyone in [a] windowless Elsinore.... In this contemporary court, the wily new king Claudius (Larry Lamb) is every inch the president. Made over by image consultants as used by Blair and Clinton, he always appears hand-in-hand with his smiling soignee First Lady, Gertrude, a gang of whooping, clapping yes-men, presswomen and suited, armed, security guards in their wake. This is a world we all recognize.44
The production started and ended with around twenty anonymous-looking sycophantic suited types, clapping Claudius and later his successor, Fortinbras. Despite the momentous events of the play the indifferent world of politics survived. Almost otherworldly and uncanny in their uniformity, they appeared as an unstoppable and timeless crowd, without any sense of loyalty, compassion, or understanding of humanity, homing in on Fortinbras with our hero's dead body still warm on stage.
The incapability of an individual and uncorrupted life in this bureaucratic world was emphasized in the setting. The designer Alison Chitty favored
... minimal furnishing, wide empty spaces, shades of bureaucratic grey, and you [got] a corresponding sense of watching the play under laboratory conditions. Pimlott is a believer in modern-dress Shakespeare, too, which on this occasion means jeans, leather jackets, name-tags, courtiers dressed like City traders ... 45
David Warner and Sam West, respective Hamlets in 1965 and 2001, wore defining items of clothing which set them apart and marked them as part of contemporary rebellious and disaffected youth. Warner's long, red student scarf has remained an iconic theatrical image. Sam West first appeared in black jeans and a black "hoodie," a "hunched and hooded figure squatting with his back to the audience, snooping on the court."46 As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tried to find out his secrets, they plied him with a joint of marijuana.
Pimlott's thoroughly modern production is set upon confounding traditional expectations and sometimes he manages to do so with a vengeance. The guards try to blast the Ghost away with machine-gun fire. A leather-jacketed Hamlet finishes off Polonius with a pistol rather than his knife. On the Prince's orders, Horatio videos the murderous Play scene, so that his close-ups of a twitchy Claudius and Gertrude loom large before us. And Ben Meyjes's splendid Laertes, possessed by the furies, holds up the king with machine-gun fire and what suitably looks like an incipient Palace revolution.47
Moving away from politics, Matthew Warchus' quasi-cinematic production of 1997 completely cut out the Fortinbras subplot and focused on the families of the court.
Hamlet is a play absolutely saturated with the words "father," "mother," "sister," "brother," "son," "daughter," "uncle." ... I cut about 35% of the text of the play in order to focus on the domestic story--on the two families who I imagine in this production live together with their staff in an isolated house.48
Warchus conflated the three existing versions of the play, reordering events and including rarely played scenes, such as Horatio's Q1 reassurance to Gertrude that her banished son is safe. The cuts were justified by the director in an interview with journalist Lyn Gardner in The Guardian:
"I know that by cutting the play you could diminish it, but by cutting a couple of courses from a banquet you can also make the flavours sharper and richer" ... he knows that in excising the political dimension of the play, he risks turning it into a small domestic incident rather than a full-scale tragedy. "My hope is that when the story is told very vividly, very passionately, audiences will recognise it as a blueprint for what happens more widely. Shakespeare is so good at both macrocosm and microcosm. I feel that what I am doing is taking the play out of the hands of the academics and intellectuals, and bringing [it] back into the arena of relationships. More than any other play I have directed, I am doing this with my heart, not my head."49
Warchus succeeded in creating a Hamlet that was accessible and exciting, "about a wounded individual rather than the rank corruption within a tyranny."50 Its modern setting led to many inventive touches: Hamlet taking Polaroids of Claudius at a wedding party which looked like "a gaudy purple disco,"51 and later using them to show Gertrude the comparison with her dead husband; the audience unsure
if Hamlet, carrying around a revolver in a brown paper bag, was going to use it on himself or others; Ophelia handing out pills instead of flowers.
There's a clarity and energy here that silences the usual anxieties about updating a classic from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II. [Alex] Jennings hugs [Derbhla] Crotty, then pushes her away, stubs his cigarette out on the floor and tells her to get to a nunnery. There's a whole new spin to her saying he's blasted with "ecstasy."52
In 1980 director John Barton picked up on the many references in the play to role-playing and theatricality, making it the central metaphor for his production in collaboration with his cast and designer. Michael Pennington, who played Hamlet, explained how
the distinction between self-dramatization and real feeling, theatricality and life, runs right through the play, and was beginning to influence my reception of the text; and soon the theatrical world itself--hampers, cloaks and property swords--began to appear in rehearsal.53
Reviewing this production, the critic Irving Wardle pointed out that
Hamlet, everyone agrees, is Shakespeare's most obsessively theatrical work. This production puts that idea to the test of the basic scenic elements, ransacking the text for disguisings and routines, and always allowing the spectator a full view of the concrete instruments that create the sense of illusion. Where is Elsinore? It is a stage. Who is Hamlet? A man who may not be able to take action but who can always put on a show. What happens happens bang centre stage: otherwise characters retreat to the benches and philosophise across wide open space as if they had no part in the events.54
Another reviewer noted that
The style of the production is, in a sense, dictated by Ralph Koltai's design: a thrusting wooden platform over which five rehearsal lights hover and behind which are arrayed such necessary props as a thunder-sheet, a table for the swords, a huge dragged suit of armour, for people to hide behind.55
6. Hamlet is the most self-consciously theatrical of the tragedies: Hamlet himself is fascinated by actors and the idea of playing a part (does he act his madness?) and his deep concern with "acting" in relation to thinking and feeling introduces a play on the two senses of "to act." The presence of the players and the play-within-the-play is crucial to all this, but the highly rhetorical linguistic style of The Murder of Gonzago (otherwise known as The Mousetrap), together with the dumb show, require a different theatrical style from that of the main play. Masks were used in Buzz Good-body's intimate 1975 production in the studio theater The Other Place.
Heaven or Hell: Hamlet and the Ghost
"Who's there?" Hamlet famously begins. The question, centred on the ambiguous figure of the Ghost, haunts the entire play.
(Stephen Greenblatt)56
As the catalyst for the play's action, the staging of the Ghost is key in indicating what type of production and what type of Hamlet the audience are about to see. However, one of the difficulties with staging Hamlet in the modern era is creating a Ghost that will have the terrifying and awe-inspiring impact that it had on audiences of previous centuries.
Many directors have eschewed any attempt to make the Ghost frightening, especially when the production has a modern setting. In Matthew Warchus' 1997 modern-dress production,
As Hamlet, Alex Jennings appears centre stage, holding his father's ashes in an urn, while on the screen behind we see black and white footage of the father playing in the snow with his son. Over the speakers, we hear the words of the usurping king, Claudius: "Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death the memory be green ..." In this strong personal production, which axes the public-political side, Hamlet's memory of his father, the motive for revenge, never loses its freshness.... Into [the] wedding celebrations, amid champagne, fireworks, balloons and bridesmaids, walks the ghost of Hamlet's father (Edward Petheridge) ... [entering] in a smoking jacket, [he] speaks with quick authority, then drifts away.57
Steven Pimlott's 2001 production had an extremely animated and fast-moving Ghost. He clutched at the distraught Hamlet and held him in his arms when imparting his story of betrayal. When Hamlet went too far in berating his mother the Ghost strode purposefully into the room, rather than just appearing, and almost grabbed Hamlet, as if to say "That's enough!"