With tech rehearsals about to begin, the endgame commences. The costumes are getting finalized, the performances (you hope) are getting settled and starting to blossom, the set's nearly finished, the lights are hung. Any major changes, or even small ones, risk upsetting all the good that has come up to now. But sometimes big things remain undone…
By the final rehearsal run of the play (sans costumes or lights), the action was feeling tight, we had cut the running time down to a lean 2 hours 40 minutes, and the actors were all in high spirits. Everything was there. But something was nagging me, something important: WAS THE STORY BEING TOLD?
When Hamlet cries for his father, are we getting it? When the ghost of the king appears, are we getting it? When two months pass and Hamlet is in his "antic disposition," do we get it? If someone isn't already familiar with the play, will they follow it and understand the important information along the way? If those first several scenes aren't clear, does the whole play lose the power of its arc? I didn't want our production to be a collection of great acting moments without a clear story.
But this was the endgame. Resources had become scarce, TIME being the most valuable and rarest. (We had already made some last-minute simplifications to the set and lights in the interest of time.) To change the staging would take hours to rehearse, hours that could be used refining what's already working.
The final run was on Friday. Generally speaking, all the cues needed to be written by the end of Saturday, with adjustments during cue-to-cue and first dress on Sunday. After that, any major changes would be nearly impossible. I figured I had one more shot at this.
So on Friday night, with the question of "story" nagging at me, I did what any normal person would do: I watched a movie. Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. I really was just trying to relax before bed, but sometimes watching a movie or listening to a symphony -- anything not related to the project at hand -- can allow me to let my conscious guard down and my subconscious to run free.
I was struck by how clear the story of the film was. This story of a king and his complicated claim to the throne of France, and how he caught conspirators and left his childhood friends behind and won at Agincourt and courted his queen. One unversed in English history would understand it, though a connoisseur would also appreciate the skill with which each moment was told not only textually, but visually. It was stunning to look at: the battles, the contrast between the French and English courts, the long table of the final scene, the little flourishes of gesture and wit. Branagh even included flashbacks to held explain things when necessary.
While watching the movie, a new idea for the first few scenes of HAMLET started to materialize:
- A woman (Horatio) speaks the prologue: "Let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about…"
- We then see a photograph being taken: King, Queen, and Son. The loyal subjects applaud.
- Then we see a ghost. (The ghost of the man we just saw photographed.)
- Then another photograph. Same woman but different man. The loyal subjects applaud as before, but the son has receded to the background.
NOTE: One of Hamlet's underlying complaints in his first scene is how normal everyone is acting, even though their king just died and his brother married the queen. But it's NOT normal. The center of the kingdom has been ripped away and rapidly replaced. I felt like an opening tableau of a photograph would whet the audience's appetite to connect the pieces. I wanted them to see the ghost and know instantly that something is wrong. I wanted them to understand more clearly how Hamlet fits into this story and what he has to be upset about, so that when the play turns towards revenge it means something.
Another idea formed, which became a transition sequence bridging Shakespeare's Acts One and Two: Ophelia singing in the garden while Hamlet looks out the window. How much time has passed? We don't know, but we instinctively sense that something has changed, and so listen more closely for clues in the next scene between Polonius, Reynaldo, and Ophelia. We learn that Laertes has been in France a while, and that Hamlet is now mad, perhaps connecting this new information to Hamlet's warning to the watch that he will put on an "antic disposition."
I called my Hamlet (David) late that night to tell him the idea. The next day (Saturday's dry tech) I talked it through with my set and lighting designers. Then the cues were written and the scenes were staged on Sunday, just under the wire.
Both of these moments (the opening tableaus and the transition into Act Two) are not in Shakespeare's play. They are my inventions. But they came out of a desire to tell the story most clearly and to make the relationships more potent to the audience. Do I wish I'd had the foresight to do this weeks ago? Perhaps. Though it may have been helpful to wait until the need became clear to me, and thus be forced to stage things simply because of time. (Something too showy and overthought might have drawn attention to itself -- "Oh, the director is trying to be clever.") Most of all, I am grateful that I was not too stubborn to admit that something was missing and needed to be done. Time be damned.
