The London critical response to Fiennes ranged from the Sunday Times’s “hugely accomplished” to the Daily Telegraph’s “major disappointment.” But all treated Fiennes as an actor with a solid classical background, a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The spectrum of response reflects the play itself, still the most familiar and most enigmatic product of the Western dramatic imagination. For Orson Welles, Hamlet was “an authentic tragic hero who . himself a man of genius.” Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye” called Hamlet “a sad, screwed-up type of guy.” Mel Gibson, remarkably good in the 1990 movie, called Hamlet “a human time bomb.” Even Diane Sawyer got into the act, calling Hamlet (noted in Norrie Epstein’s lively compendium “The Friendly Shakespeare”): “A rich kid from Denmark.”
Screwed up, short fused, well heeled, what any Hamlet must be is thrilling-emotionally, intellectually, existentially. Fiennes has intensity, force, a kind of grinding dynamism, but he does not really thrill. Or rather, his mode of thrilling is a contemporary one; the world’s sexiest guy is an oddly sullen presence in his black coat and grungy shirt. In fact, Fiennes gives us the first grunge Hamlet; his anguish, self-loathing and despair, even his hangdog handsomeness, eerily echo the image of Kurt Cobain. And he granges up Shakespeare’s verbal music. His voice is strong and clear, but in his determination to avoid the banalities of poetic drama, he winds up avoiding the poetry itself. In the great speeches, Fiennes enacts the central emotion–rage, despair, loathing-and hurls the lines in verbal arpeggios that become accompaniments to the emotion, rather than projecting the feeling and thought through the words themselves. He rifts out “To be or not to be” in a cascade of words that founder in their own aural feedback.
Fiennes is not helped by Jonathan Kent’s production concept. This is the drabbest, gloomiest “Hamlet” ever. Peter J. Davison’s set design turns Elsinore into a black hole: with the recorded sound of lapping waves, it suggests a run-down resort in Atlantic City. The court, standing around in James Acheson’s dimly Edwardian costumes, has all the regality and intrigue of a mechanized wax museum. This is a “Hamlet” of flashes: flashes of pathos from Tara Fitzgerald’s Ophelia, of irony from Terence Rigby’s Gravedigger, of fatal pedantry from Peter Eyre’s Polonius. But the flashes don’t detonate to the Big Hamlet Bang. The bedroom scene between Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude (France-sea Annis), has theatrical ferocity, but the incest angle that Olivier made fashionable is by now such frayed Freudianism that you long for a new approach.
Watching the gifted Fiennes wrestling with the sacred monster of Hamlet, you sympathize with his task. For nearly haft a millennium Hamlet has been our prince, the symbol of humanity caught between earth and heaven. But culture is changing, racing farther from the Shakespearean universe. Bernard Shaw said: “We are growing out of Shakespeare.” It may not be growth, but technological transformation and spiritual diminution. We need a Hamlet that reclaims him as our own. Or else it may really be good night, sweet prince.
