I was actually scrolling my blog to see if I’d talked about it before but I can’t find it, which is shocking because it was truly one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.
I forget what year it was, but the play took place in the historic James J Hill House here in St Paul. Hill was a railway tycoon during the gilded age, with all the disparity of wealth and privilege that implies. He was so successful and obscenely wealthy he became known as The Empire Builder and the grandness of his home reflected that. The walls in the dining room are literally gold. It’s breathtaking. It’s obscene. It’s perfect for the kind of corruption and rot that takes place in Hamlet under a gilded veneer.
The play started in the viewing gallery, with actors walking through the literal gilded halls of the mansion, the leather wallpaper stamped with gold filigree glittering in the gaslamp—the perfect setting for the wedding scene. As the opening progressed the lights were dimmed until only Hamlet was visible illuminated from the upper gallery by harsh modern lights above, just this chillingly beautiful cold light after all the warmth of the gaslamp and gold.
As the play progressed we were led further through the house, witnessing Hamlet talk to the ghost of his father on the grand staircase—the stairs further used to show hierarchy among the characters with Hamlet spiraling ever lower until we were invited to descend into the bowels of the house through the servants quarters, an area just as vast as the rest of the house but infinitely colder and utterly devoid of the opulent grandeur above.
The space is also nearly entirely marble, which leeches the warmth from the air, so even huddled together the audience grew colder and colder the longer we were down there.
It also meant the echo was amazing, and listening to Ophelia sing forlornly as she descends into madness was absolutely bone chilling. Watching her climb into a claw foot tub that had been placed in the center of the long hallway was also hair raising. She just kept singing, strewing flowers around the empty floor as we stood around her in a circle, helpless to stop her as she purposefully slipped under the water, holding her hands above the lip of the tub even as her head slipped under the water and the last echoes of her singing faded.
It made the Queen’s account of how Ophelia died just so… the lie of it. Like we were still standing there, she was still in the tub (head now above the water) and we’d witnessed the truth of it, and there was Gertrude telling any one of us in the circle who would listen how the poor maid “fell.” Anything to absolve themselves of the sin of her suicide.
We were turned around for a bit after that, led to the end of the hallway near the boiler room where the gravediggers leaned on gilded age coal shovels, and Hamlet got to do his bit with Yorick, the echo of the marble hallway dampened by having brought us back toward the stairwell, his voice soft and intimate. Showing his quiet resolve and return to sanity.
Only to pull us back moments later to center as he ran to where Ophelia’s funeral was taking place, and when I tell you, Hamlet’s howl of grief echoed. It reverberated. It was terrifying. It was amazing. People took instinctive steps away from him. It was just raw emotion bouncing off the walls of this cold, dark basement, entire worlds away from where we’d started.
The play ended back in the ballroom, the dead lying strewn amongst the wealth that couldn’t save them with only Horatio illuminated in gold by the lights. When Fortinbrass arrived he looked around the space like it was nothing, like the way we’d looked around the empty void of the basement. The wealth meant nothing to him. It was just another graveyard.
It was brilliant. I keep hoping they’ll host it again. It was such a good way to literally walk us through the story and use the environment to set the atmosphere. It was all I could do not to put billing flier in my mouth and eat it.
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