Any director of "Hamlet" must decide what kind of ghost will haunt the melancholy prince. Will it be a sheet-draped actor rattling chains, an apparition of special effects or a disembodied voice suggesting Freudian freakiness?
In the Wooster Group's radical, and often scenically mesmerizing, video-spliced deconstruction of "Hamlet," which opened Wednesday at REDCAT under the direction of company leader Elizabeth LeCompte, the spectral presence at the heart of the show isn't Hamlet's murdered father. It's a legendary performer who conquered the role on Broadway in 1964. A film of Richard Burton's "Hamlet," originally staged by John Gielgud, serves as a kind of flickering canvas for the group's lovingly winking re-creation.
The venerable New York-based performance collective, one of the most enduring and fertile entities of the American avant-garde, has finally gotten around to the Bard. The group's signature multimedia method is to pair canonical texts by playwrights such as Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein and Racine with entertainment curiosities such as blackface vaudeville, soft-core porn and amateur badminton to create compositions that are one part critical commentary, two parts dazzling postmodern craft. But that isn't exactly the strategy here.
This "Hamlet" is as straightforward as the company's technologically thrilling production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape," the last word (for me, anyway) on that strange and seemingly unproduceable play. Of course, straightforward for this experimental crew still means roller coaster curves, and so Shakespeare lovers expecting the players to let the famous speeches flow trippingly from their tongues while holding the mirror up to nature should think again. This is a 21st century karaoke version of a celebrated 20th century "Hamlet," filtered through the Wooster Group's inimitable (don't try this at home!) sensibility.
The program says "the Burton production was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown for only two days in 2,000 movie houses across the U.S." The hope of bringing a high-brow Broadway bonanza to thousands of viewers in different parts of the country was "trumpeted as a new form called 'Theatrofilm,' made possible through 'the miracle of Electronovision.' "
