Globe To Globe: Hamlet (Meno Fortas)

Ah well, you can't win them all.  The Globe's magnificent worldwide Shakespeare season is coming to an end with a real stinker.  I do not think I have ever seen a version of Shakespeare as bad as this 'legendary' Lithuanian production, which has apparently been touring the world for 15 years.

For the record, I stayed this afternoon for 25 minutes before walking out -- long enough to realise I was watching a theatrical fossil.  Productions that stay in the repertoire for decades are an East European speciality; when I lived in Moscow, the theatres were full of them.  They're a leftover from Soviet days, when it was such an enormous struggle to get anything past the censors that it was always easier to keep reviving existing works than to try anything new.  I stayed long enough to see a middle-aged Hamlet stamping his feet and throwing the furniture around, to see an equally middle-aged Ophelia smoking a pipe (why?) and Hamlet's ghost presenting his son with a block of ice (why?). There are lots more silly attention-seeking gimmicks in this production, but I really could not be bothered to stay for them.  Back in the 1960s, this style of theatre might have seemed radical and innovative, but not any more.  Too old and long in the tooth, this pretentious show has lost any vestige of freshness.  The actors' eyes are completely dead and at no point do they even attempt to open a channel to the audience.

What a contrast with the show I saw at the Globe earlier in the week-- an Afghan Comedy of Errors which was entertaining, imaginative, funny, and thoroughly unpretentious.  Like the African companies who for me proved the highlight of the Globe to Globe season, these actors knew instinctively how to break down the barrier between themselves and the audience.  Rehearsed in India because of threats to the women in the cast, this was a splendid show which demonstrated just how effective Shakespeare's plays can be when they are handled simply in the spirit of four centuries ago.

Comments

[Amador Martínez]

You should have seen it outside the festival, not cut in half (4 hours instead of 2) and in it´s full integrity. The were some restraints, therefore the play was not presented properly as it is with all the production elements. I have seen it before and I can say it is "LEGENDARY".