Shakespeare’s classic ‘Hamlet’ gets shorter, darker presentation in Sacramento

Shakespeare’s classic “Hamlet” is the Sacramento Theater Company’s current offering. Presumably many members of the audience have already well-developed ideas about the play from high school, college courses or films. Because of all that has come before and all the preconceptions, it’s hard to review an icon like Hamlet; it must be much harder to stage a powerful, innovative production of Hamlet after 420 years of the play’s fame.

Shakespeare’s famous tragedy is the source of so much of our language and memory and culture. As one sits in the theater or reads the play, there are constant echoes. One example could be Hamlet’s warning to his friends “I am but mad north by northwest,” a key self-explanation giving a quizzical meaning to Hitchcock’s great film.

The directors, Casey McClellan and Greg Ford, undoubtedly have many stage and film versions of Hamlet in their heads, which they have to compete with, judge against. The two, in their directors notes, suggest they have engaged the contemporary audience by “setting the play in a modern day, fictitious Denmark.” The only apparent gestures in that direction are the use of flashlights and hoodies worn by several cast members. But there is no allusion to Denmark’s renowned socialism, or reputation as one of the happiest places on earth (presumably, other than Disneyland), nor any suggestion of how a modern Denmark has a king ordering or acquiescing in various murders, using poison and swords.

Still, the current directors have admirably excised from the original Hamlet any references to military conflict between Denmark and Norway and its leader Fortinbras; these strategies thankfully shorten the play to an accommodating two hours, plus a fifteen-minute intermission. That’s much shorter than its five-act structure in traditional versions, often lasting three to four hours; at 4,000 lines, it is Shakespeare’s longest and most-performed play. There’s are many more lines that some will notice are gone; it’s not easy to lop an hour off an evening’s performance of a classic play.

Here’s a tragedy that begins in darkness for the audience and the people of Denmark, as two night guards, wary even of each other, turn on their flashlights in an ominous scene. The performance ends as a multiple massacre, with four bodies on stage — and four others who have died along the way.

The “Crown virus” that confronts Denmark is far more mortal than a coronavirus, leaving the stage eventually littered with bodies. Yet this Hamlet is often amusing, with moments of lightness and even comic relief, when the company of three players from an itinerant band arrive at Elsinore, playing music and offering friendship to Hamlet, then later offering the “play within a play” as an entertainment for the court.

In the initial scene, the dead King Hamlet’s ghost appears with a tragic mask as if a refugee from “Phantom of the Opera.” Though the character says very little in voiceover through the amplified sound system, like the other actors, his physical form occasionally elongates like a cobra charmed to grow even higher, accompanied by occult background music. It is enigmatic, frightening and frequently disembodied. He eventually delivers a tale of political assassination and fratricide employing poison in an ear long before the Soviets developed deadly isotopes. At one point, this specter of the former king appears at the rear of the audience. So does Hamlet himself, when he initiates the renowned “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The king’s appearance is a problem for Hamlet as he must decide whether the ghost is “real” or a fake apparition, and what to do about these allegations.

But the most problematic part of the play is the character and performance of Hamlet himself. Ian Hopps as Hamlet does a superb job of turning 17th Century iambic pentameter into comprehensible and believable modern utterance using a variety of gestures, facial expressions and modulations in intensity. Hopps is nearly always present, even in an early royal scene when he lurks, in black, almost eclipsed, at the side of the stage. He gives feeling and intelligence to the play’s great monologues, as well as three slightly different readings to his repeated, tortured advice to Ophelia: “Get thee to a nunnery.”

Hamlet not only has the vast preponderance of lines; he has all the best ones, and Hopps gives them intelligence and ferocity. Whatever is ailing Hamlet — Grief? Late adolescence? Depression? Indecision? Cowardice? — he is the most interesting, most intelligent, most witty character around. Is he mad or just pretending to be? Perhaps, after all, this character’s indecision and creativity is what this play is all about.

Of course without Hamlet’s hesitation and troubled confronting of his fate, the play would be half the length it is, even in the abbreviated form, and would lack all his greatest speeches.

Is Hamlet mad, or is the madness feigned? But it’s a response to a Denmark that is dark and mysterious and has “something rotten” in it; Hamlet himself calls it a prison. The hero is regularly removing his dagger to threaten suicide — though he never attempts it, but Hopps often has difficulty sheathing his weapon — or occasionally mayhem.

Hamlet’s romantic connection, Ophelia (Karen Vance), is dramatically affected by this atmosphere as, after her father Polonius’ death, she appears in court with eye shadow smeared over her face and wearing a strange black skirt. She tears gauzy strands from her skirt and drapes them about the other court members, naming each strand after a symbolic herb — such as rosemary — as if in a strip-tease self-revelation. Her father, Polonius (Gary Alan Wright) is the ever-verbal, ever just a bit overly officious and sententious advisor to the king, but completely convincing and hardly foolish. Until, that is, he is stabbed by Hamlet through a curtain, and his fairly distinctive body lies prominent and unmoving on a stage corner waiting for Hamlet to eventually roll it unceremoniously over and drag it awkwardly into the wings — perhaps one of the play’s few “comic” deaths. For a while no one can quite determine where Polonius is.

Without the Norway subplot and appearance of the new “leader” of Denmark, Fortinbras, this play is even more starkly tragic, depicting a kingdom left in anarchy and death after the deaths of all extant members of the royal family. As one of the greatest plays ever written and with a bravura performance by Hopps, it’s certainly worth seeing.

If you go

“Hamlet”

Where: The Sacramento Theatre Company, 1419 H St.

When: Through March 22, with shows Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 pm.

Price: From $20 to $38

Tickets: 916-443-6722, or tickets.sactheatre.org