"That is another of my attempts--the fourth--to come to
grips with Shakespeare's masterpiece. This time, it's
Hamlet the actor. The entire action is, in a way,
concentrated in a dressing room, which serves as a place
where Hamlet reflects on what is happening on the stage in
the background, these goings-on being only somewhat visible
--or, rather, audible--to be audience. It's a Hamlet of
meditation rather than action--the latter being replaced by
the former. For Hamlet, the Actor, 'to be or not to be'
means to endure until the end. To sustain the pressure of
his role. To play it through, also in the sense of the
artist's potential."
--Andrzej Wajda
The house lights in the august Theater C at the State University of New York at Purchase were on, but every seat was empty. Audience members were led down the aisles, and around the playing area, to a set of bleachers accommodating just one hundred spectators backstage. Those spectators saw a small dressing table on the left and beyond that, through a mirror-lined center stage, footlights and the vast empty hall.
As the action begins in Polish director Andrzej Wajda's novel staging of Hamlet, which had premiered at the Stary Theater in Krakow just a week before its brief July run at the Pepsi-co Summerfare Festival in Purchase, Hamlet is getting dressed and ready to go onstage. Already Wajda is offering us yet another twist on Shakespeare's revenge tragedy. Are we watching Hamlet the play? Are we watching an actor play a role about playing Hamlet the character or Hamlet the play, or both? Or are we watching all of the above? We are struck by another of Wajda's interventions: Hamlet, the young prince of Denmark, is played by an actress, the extraordinary Teresa Budziscz-Krzyzanowska.
Depths of illusion
The reversal of the usual casting configuration immediately creates new depths of illusion, as some scenes are played to the empty seats in the theater, while others face the spectators backstage. Still others are divided between the two groups of seats. Similarly, Hamlet divides his/her time between sitting at the dressing table and participating fully in the action.
What could easily, in lesser hands, have collapsed into an academic vision of Pirandello meeting Shakespeare, especially through the obstacle of listening to a taped English translation through headphones, becomes here a deepening of the play's troubling introspection. Budziscz Krzyzanowska--at one moment the confident young student fresh back from Wittenberg, at another the vulnerable child of a dead father and a scheming mother--plays Hamlet with such nuanced tautness that one could imagine the production working as a monologue.
Casting a woman as Hamlet almost inevitably minimizes
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