Column on Hamlet at STL Rep

Mr. Culture is on a roll lately. We had the fine Great Rivers Choral group here at First Presbyterian last weekend with an elegant new program. On Wednesday, we were able to see the St Louis Repertory Theater’s production of Hamlet.

First, it made me feel so old, as I realized I had first read it 47 years ago, roughly around the time of Shakespeare himself. I’ve seen video since of Kevin Kline and Mel Gibson in the role. Yet, we approach a great work in a different vein of mining meaning than we do when younger.

Jim Poulos looks a bit like Benedict Cumberbatch, who just played Hamlet to capacity crowds in England in 2015. Be prepared, this is a fuller presentation of the long play, but Poulos burns through the dialogue at some speed. So it may good for the audience to get more familiar with the play before entering the theater. (It also helps to alert us to the language itself, even as we miss a good deal of it due to the age of the language itself).

Second, the play itself continues to speak volumes. Even if one is not familiar with the play, bits of dialogue are familiar as quotes often heard years ago. This production is a more profound meditation on grief than I had recalled. I thought of the play more as a meditation on revenge and the difficulty of Hamlet to engage in such a fateful act. Here Ophelia is clearly driven mad by grief. Hamlet perhaps feigns the degree of madness in his melancholy after the death of his own father.

Claudius- “ our dear brother’s death the memory be green, and that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe…”  Some reading this recall the reaction of the country to the terrible spate of assassinations in the 1960s. Most of those reading this recall vividly our national mourning after 9/11. Grief gets freshened (green) as we witness losses, personally and publically.

When Hamlet seems to pour out his thoughts and feelings, he captures a sense of the book of Ecclesiastes that life seems meaningless, absurd in the face of loss: “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,… O God! God! / How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

"How is it that the clouds still hang on you." says King Claudius to Hamlet. After a few weeks, both mother and uncle wish that Hamlet would be back to normal, not locked in the sadness of appearance and affect of grief. We are so afraid of grief that we insist on calling funerals celebrations of life.

I’ve been reading a lot of Martin Luther as we move toward the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation on Halloween. Luther kept mortality front and center in his theology. “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.” Uncertainty about life after death drove Luther to put his trust in divine promise. We cannot reason our way toward relationship to the divine post-mortem.

To Hamlet that uncertainty propels us into living this life, with its enticements but its hardships and sorrows as well. “The dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn (river, as in river of time) No traveller returns, puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of?”

Art connects us to our common humanity, through the centuries. We cheat ourselves in ignoring it to coalesce and challenge our perspective on this brief and precious life.