Indecision 2008.('Hamlet')(Theater review)

At the finale of "Hamlet," most of the main characters lie either poisoned or stabbed to death, scattered around the palace hall like so many toppled chairs. Horatio is left to tell the tale to the conquering Fortinbras, who enters upstage and surveys the carnage. By dying, after three hours of dithering, Hamlet has finally asserted his manhood, purged the corrupt court, and revenged his father's murder. In the current Public Theatre production (at the Delacorte, under the direction of Oskar Eustis), however, Hamlet isn't borne offstage, as the script suggests, in a hero's stately exit. Instead, when, in the play's last line, Fortinbras calls for a cannonade to honor Hamlet--"Go, bid the soldiers shoot"--his lieutenant whips out a pistol and kills Horatio. This is a first! Fortinbras then stamps out the eternal flame that pays tribute to the murdered king's memory. What is going on? Is this the end of history? Of storytelling? Are we on "Candid Camera"? The play, which begins with a conundrum--"Who's there?"--now ends with one. The state of Denmark is delivered, it would seem, into tyranny, not justice. This arbitrary moment of bewildering violence is, unfortunately, the evening's one and only scenic shock; instead of an existentialist Hamlet, a Freudian Hamlet, a Christian Hamlet--all legitimate interpretations--Eustis leaves us with the one kind of Hamlet that the Prince himself would have inveighed against: a melodramatic one.

The story of Hamlet predates Shakespeare's version; a bloodier, more action-packed "Hamlet" existed, probably written by Thomas Kyd. The sophistication of Shakespeare's play lies in the way it teases and exploits the earlier play, along with the ranting tropes of Elizabethan melodrama in general. Then, as now, melodrama imposed simplicity on complexity; every action inspired a satisfying reaction. Shakespeare's Hamlet does the reverse: in his life, the rules of cause and effect do not seem to apply; a university student summoned back to the court, he is paralyzed by thought. Hamlet's capacity for ambiguity and for ratiocination were a novelty to Elizabethan audiences. By making his hero refuse to act, Shakespeare hit on both a brilliant psychological predicament and a structural innovation in a genre that had pandered to the public's appetite for blood and bombast. He ingeniously forestalled the thrill of retribution, substituting psychological suspense for physical excitement. This was a major narrative discovery: action withheld could be as tense and dramatic as action itself.

As it is, when Hamlet does "drink hot blood" and get down to the business of murder, he turns out to be clownishly inept. He murders the wrong man; this, in turn, leads to the suicide of his girlfriend; and when he finally kills the right man, pouring the poison down Claudius's throat, he does so in confused circumstances. Shakespeare fulfills the genre's requirement for violence, but in a new way; irony becomes the antidote to histrionics, enforcing an intellectual detachment that echoes Hamlet's lecture to the travelling players. "O, it offends me to the soul to see a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise," he says.

In a sense, the Public's outdoor productions should be judged as a kind of street theatre. The wide stage and the absence of subtle lighting and sound favor the presentational. ("The Pirates of Penzance," "The Threepenny Opera," Savion Glover's "Dancing Under the Stars," "Henry V" are previous garish, gregarious Delacorte successes.) But for plays that, like "Hamlet," have a complex internal life, the open-air space is a challenge, dissipating energy and focus. Here the problem is one of both penetration and presentation. Eustis, who is the Public's artistic director, can make the ...