Shakespeare Bulletin

No play by Shakespeare is quite as centered on one character as Hamlet is on its title character. His 1,338 lines (in Q2) exceed the next biggest role in the canon (Richard III, at 1,116 in F) by over 200 lines. It only stands to reason, then, that since at least as early as Garrick, Hamlet has been a defining role in the careers of stage actors who aspire to the status of the day's leading actor. And since at least the nineteenth century, criticism has followed suit, with Hamlet-centered meditations on the play that continue today—embodied in their most extreme form in Harold Bloom's rhapsodic encomia to Hamlet (a practice that has earned the snickering characterization "quote and dote"). But critics and theatre practitioners, as well as playwrights from Tom Stoppard to Bryony Lavery and Margaret Clarke, have also understood the distorting effect our (deeply understandable) [End Page 77] obsession with Hamlet can have on the play as a whole. Surely the play gains in depth, richness, and even political resonance, the thinking goes, when our attention extends to other characters.

It would not be surprising to find that actors in the play's "minor" roles were particularly sympathetic to non-Hamlet-centered approaches to the play. Certainly the performers of these roles in the 2006–07 Actors From the London Stage (AFTLS) touring production of the play were. As one member of the company quipped jokingly (and affectionately) in conversation, the cast had its hands full keeping the actor playing Hamlet from thinking the play was all about him. As anyone who is familiar with AFTLS knows, however, the cast has unusual power in that it consists of only five actors (four men and one woman) who share multiple roles and collectively direct the play. For a play like Hamlet in particular, that is, the potential for decentering the play is contained in the very make-up of the company. And during the week of September 18–23, 2006, AFTLS presented a Hamlet at Wellesley College that reshaped the play as an ensemble piece and showcased the actorly powers the play takes such pains to thematize and dramatize. The play took on the shape that a composite sculpture of a sculptor might in the hands of five artists working intimately together.

All the hallmarks of an AFTLS production were on display from the outset. In a universally lit auditorium, the actors took their seats onstage in a semicircle of chairs open to the audience. After introducing the many characters each was to play, the cast quickly dispersed and immediately began to set the scene by vocally creating a soundscape of ominous whispers and whistling winds. The multiple and creative doublings also began, perforce, from the first scene. Terence Wilton began the scene as Francisco, shivering, hunched and with a red beret on, but "re-entered"—which is to say, got up from the chair to which he had "exited"—without the beret and with a posture of suffering dignity, as the Ghost. In the next scene (1.2), Wilton played an amiably avuncular but lecherous Claudius, signaling his general looseness of conduct by unbuttoning the same double-breasted suit that he wore as the Ghost, and by groping Gertrude's derrière after a rather "reechy" kiss to celebrate his coronation and marriage. No less impressive in shape-shifting was Geoffrey Beevers, who began the play as a beret-donning Marcellus, but seamlessly metamorphosed into a comically befuddled Polonius who did manage, nonetheless, to interject into his litany of precepts to Laertes a fatherly warmth that was poignant in its sparkling clarity. Beevers would later put the audience into giddy stitches with his turn as an ironically cheery Gravedigger, who...