Performance review

concluded with the evocation of 'the very witching time of night', while the red clock struck 00:00 announcing the interval.While such a shift undoubtedly showcased the soliloquy, it seemed daring to place Hamlet's most hesitant musings at a moment when he seemed most resolute about his revenge.This choice seemed emblematic of Goold's entire project, putting in tension two conflicting logics.The Titanic setting provided a unity of space and time that the original play does not have.Obviously, everything happened on the ship, spanning one long night (actually cut down to about two and a half hours, though the clock suggested a longer duration of the action, closer to that of the unedited text, from 21:06 to 01:09 and beyond).The slanting stage was a fitting metaphor for the instability of both the characters and the 'rotten' state of decaying Denmark, yet it also required some suspension of disbelief to explain the arrival of the players or to imagine why and how Laertes could learn of his father's death and return to the (already) sinking ship.Certainly, the most astonishing scene in this maritime context was the gravediggers' scene with bones (whose provenance shall remain a mystery) being thrown into the ocean.The conceptual logic also brought a major shift in the treatment of Ophelia.In the first act, Ophelia was portrayed as a cheeky young woman who finished her father's sentences during the latter's sermon to Laertes.Her devastation and madness after her father's death, fused into a unique scene, was thus all the more poignant, as was the tale of her death adapted by Goold to the seafaring setting by borrowing Clarence's dream about drowning (from Richard III).As for the funeral itself, her drowned body was fished out of the water only to be roughly manhandled before being thrown back into the sea in a coffin, leaving dead Ophelia a victim of the patriarchal system a second time, paradoxically deprived of any agency even beyond death.In this catastrophic context, revenge itself took on quite a different derisory meaning, suggesting instead a psychological collapse for all protagonists, in line with the emotionally unstable Hamlet.The play's concluding tableau offered a sense of irenic closure: as the sinking ship reached the bottom of the ocean, with only Hamlet remaining on deck, the prince opened his arms wide, in a fleeting imitation of both the iconic Titanic pose and a Christ-like figure, letting the audience imagine that Hamlet eventually found inner peace while embracing death

Historical Art and Culture Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History