Watching the denouement of Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, I was reminded of David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ensconced within the travelling theatrical company of Mr Vincent Crummles, Nicholas and his hapless companion Smike are cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet, Smike as the apothecary and Nicholas (of course) as Romeo.

Playing with the Victorian tradition of fabricating cheerful conclusions to Shakespeare’s tragedies, Mr Crummles’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet ends with both Romeo and Juliet springing back to life, their individual suicides blessedly proving unsuccessful. As the warring Capulets and Montagues are reconciled, the young couple take their first steps towards ‘happily ever after’.

While this production of Hamlet, directed by Iain Sinclair, does not resurrect Shakespeare’s dead, it does offer a glimpse into what might be deemed Hamlet-heaven. The stage is not littered with bodies, there is no Fortinbras come to claim Denmark. There is no sense of blood having been spilt, of poison drunk. Laertes and Polonius walk from the stage arm-in-arm. So too Gertrude and Hamlet’s father. Hamlet and Ophelia embrace before they too wander together into what we can only imagine is some happier if less temporal future. Horatio’s ‘flights of angels’ have been quite literally realised.

The conclusion Sinclair has concocted for the play might leave audience members with a warm and fuzzy afterglow. There may be relief that, after all his angst and suffering, Hamlet has at last found some peace: all’s well that ends well, as it were. But the conclusion on offer here also fundamentally changes the meaning of Shakespeare’s play and recasts Hamlet’s essential tragedy as something closer to romance, a shift that oddly echoes Hermione’s reawakening in The Winter’s Tale.

Sinclair’s imposed ending is one of a jumble of directorial quirks that fail to cohere into an overarching vision of the play. To produce Hamlet in a space as intimate as fortyfivedownstairs affords the drama an immediacy and accessibility larger venues often hamper. However, Sinclair squanders this advantage by playing key scenes either in darkness, entirely off-stage, or partially obscured. As Ophelia is buried somewhere behind the seating banks, the audience is left to watch the gravedigger eating sandwiches. As Hamlet and Laertes duel somewhere in the darkness, we get only the ripostes and exclamations of the king and his court. As ‘The Mousetrap’ – the play within the play – unfolds, some sections of the audience cannot see the faces of either Hamlet or Claudius, a mystifying decision given that it is on the faces of Hamlet and Claudius, rather than within the action of ‘The Mousetrap’, that the actual drama of the scene lies.

The production abounds with such anomalies. Hamlet’s killing of Polonius is twice foreshadowed on stage, yet the actual murder of the old man is enacted out of view of the audience. Great fun is had scrolling through Ophelia’s mobile phone in search of texts from Hamlet, yet no other modern day artefacts appear: news of Fortinbras’s advance is still communicated via the relevant ambassadors, and Hamlet’s missives from England still come handwritten on paper. Hamlet’s dishevelment is rendered by nothing more than the removal of his overcoat.

Darren Gilshenan as Polonius and Aisha Aidara as Ophelia (photograph by Ben Andrews, The Maybe Pile)

There is also the question of why Sinclair chooses to retain references to Fortinbras’s encroaching forces (references many contemporary productions excise) – the early scenes on the battlements playing out as though Fortinbras’s army is just beyond the gates – if Fortinbras is not going to figure in the play’s conclusion? And what, finally, are we meant to infer from the inclusion (at several key junctures) of the Christmas hymn ‘Oh, Holy Night’ and its allusions to the birth of Christ?

What anchors this production is the acting, which affords the play an enviable approachability and keeps the audience engaged through the three-hour running time. Performances are universally solid, if lacking at times in nuance (the tragical sometimes veers into the tragical-comical or even the tragical-hysterical).

Sadly, in Australia, we have become resigned to making allowances for actors who struggle with Shakespeare’s metre. Only Natasha Herbert (an elegant and frustrated Gertrude) and Laurence Boxhall (a suitably laddish Laertes, forced too soon to bear the burden of revenge) seem wholly at ease with the rhythms of the language. Darren Gilshenan’s Polonius almost steals the show, the energy in the theatre lifting every time he appears on stage. What his performance also tellingly captures is the inherent tension between Polonius’s duty as father and his fealty to a murdering king. Gareth Reeves and Dulcie Smart bring dignity and gravitas to the roles of Player King and Queen, and as Horatio, Darcy Kent is a quiet and sobering presence.  

Jacob Collins-Levy as Hamlet is wide-eyed, even boyish. Flighty and restless, he charges from one corner of the stage to the other, his words trailing behind him like coat-tails in the breeze. His soliloquies, spoken as though they were prose rather than verse (and thereby dissipating much of the drama embedded in the rhythm of the lines), are delivered more like TED talks than expressions of inner turmoil; of a man grappling with the guilt of his inaction. As he speaks, he locks eyes with the audience, seeming to plead with them. His anguish is neither experienced, nor felt: it is performed. We might construe this as a nod to modern sensibilities, where every decision in life – major and minor – becomes the subject of the next TikTok video or reality television show, were there anything else in the staging of the play to support such a reading. Rather, it seems just another of the odd artistic decisions that configure this production, one that leaves Collins-Levy somewhat adrift. Crucially, it also disrupts the requisite tension binding Hamlet and the audience: that this is a man we might entreat to get out of Denmark, and get out now, if only we could reach him.

There is no definitive way to play Shakespeare. His are not sacred texts that demand a uniform reading. His plays endure not merely because of the beauty of their language or the keen insights they offer into the nature of humanity. They also endure because of all that Shakespeare leaves unspoken, the lacunae that might be appropriated as we explore our own apprehensions, our own times.

Through sustained investigations of Shakespeare’s words, through the creative ‘play’ of rehearsals, actors and directors continue to reinterpret and re-energise Shakespeare’s dramas. Sam Mendes, for example, in his 2014 production of King Lear for the UK’s National Theatre, had Lear – sheltering from the storm and already on the verge of madness – strangle his Fool, an action that not only astutely solved the ‘problem’ of the Fool’s disappearance from the latter stages of the play, but also offered a stunning insight into the extent of Lear’s derangement and, vitally, the brutality of the king he might once have been.

Yet, embellishments to Shakespeare’s texts, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, need to be shrewdly plotted through the rest of the play, a caution that many directors fail to heed. This is even more vital a consideration when the decision is made to reshape a play’s finale. The ending of a drama – the placing of its ultimate full stop – gives definition to the whole. Any alteration to that ending resonates backwards through time, impacting our reading of the play’s ideas and images, its motivations and conflicts.

Despite admirably conveying the central story of Hamlet, this is a production that almost fatally obliterates its import. Ambiguities regarding the true nature of the relationships between Hamlet and Ophelia, Gertrude and her first husband, Polonius and his children, are wrestled with not through choices as to how Shakespeare’s text might be enacted but rather by means of some spurious addendum. Lines such as Hamlet’s ‘the rest is silence’ – spoken as Hamlet ambles towards a contented afterlife – are rendered meaningless. More egregious still, the pity and terror that Aristotle identified as the indispensable components of tragedy are, in the production’s culminating scenes, dispensed with entirely.

Hamlet (Melbourne Shakespeare Company) continues at fortyfivedownstairs until 22 September 2024. Performance attended: 6 September.