
Theatre Review: Hamlet @ The Wellington Street Theatre, until March 18
There’s something rotten in the Wellington Street Theatre—and it’s Bottle Tree Productions’ presentation of Hamlet.
The second offering in Bottle Tree’s 2007 season is director Charles Robertson’s interpretation of William Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The production features a host of local talent and Kingston theatre mainstays, but this couldn’t rescue the trainwreck I witnessed on Monday evening.
The role of Hamlet was assumed by Zorba Dravillas, who was mostly passable as the troubled Prince of Denmark. While Dravillas was entirely wooden in the first half, without anything resembling passion or credibility, he found a spark in the second half and became a hair more convincing.
Queen Gertrude was played with some success by Theatre Kingston veteran Barbara Bell. While at home onstage, Bell was unable to conjure any true emotion through her character and instead seemed like a caricature with a slight Minnesotan accent. H. Benjamin Ellis’ portrayal of Polonius had more energy than the rest of the cast, but his constantly changing accent and tone made the character seem unbalanced and not entirely rehearsed. The poor casting of Rosencrantz (Mitchell Nasheim) and Guildenstern (Greg Ridge) rendered them painfully foolish, disabling then providing any comic relief.
Finally, King Claudius, portrayedby Steve Powell, was truly the dullest, most distant, unassuming and generally poor character in the show. Shakespeare’s Claudius is a conniving, greedy, twisted man, but
Powell’s Claudius is a timid, nervous and awkward ruler. Powell’s dialogue smacked more of running lines than true performance; he had all the passion of a cardboard cut-out and all the believability of
Lindsay Lohan’s sobriety. While Hamlet is certainly not a set-intensive play, it would have benefited from a semblance of proper design. The extremely minimalist approach employed by Bottle Tree failed to establish setting, leaving only those familiar with the source material aware of where each scene was taking place. The distinct lack of curtains and larger props created a dimensionless stage, with seemingly no boundaries and endless exits. Another element of the poor set design was an exposed railing at the back of the stage.
Characters often clambered over the railing, but its actual function in scenes beyond an awkward obstacle was rarely established. Hamlet is often mounted using a thrust stage, but this wasn’t done effectively here. Seating wasn’t extended around the stage—which would have provided multiple angles for audience enjoyment— but solely situated at the back of the theatre, creating a severe disconnect between the action onstage and the audience.
Many of the actors blatantly turned their backs to the audience. Not only was this annoying, but it intensified their failure to connect with the spectators. During action sequences or scenes of gripping
intimacy that should have engaged the audience, they were shut out instead.
Hamlet is definitely an enormous undertaking for any theatre company, and it’s clear that each cast member put many hours into memorizing lines and stage movements. It’s unfortunate that the same level of effort wasn’t evident in the rest of the production.
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