Review: An intimate and moving Hamlet in High Park

Get thee not to a nunnery — one of many lines that’s been cut — but to the High Park Amphitheatre for Canadian Stage’s intimate, fresh and moving production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Rating: ✭✭✭✭), on until Labour Day weekend.

I never thought I’d use the word “intimate” about something at the 1,000+-seat outdoor venue. But what director Jessica Carmichael has done in her single act adaptation is focus on the cascading, overwhelming effects of grief on an isolated community.

This is a place where neither politics nor religion play much part — hence the cutting of that nunnery line (and a key scene involving Diego Matamoros’s Claudius). Carmichael has also boldly added poetry, prose and lyrics from other sources — everything from Audre Lorde to Lou Reed — to underline her themes.

And while Qasim Khan as the titular Danish prince seeking to avenge his father’s murder is most definitely at the centre of the show, Carmichael has made it more of an ensemble piece, with Ophelia (Beck Lloyd), Laertes (Dan Mousseau) and Horatio (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) sharing in the emo vibes.

Some purists may quibble with the added text and the excising/rearranging of certain lines, but these changes almost always help fill out this world of people coping with various losses. I especially like how Ophelia’s role has been boosted to give her more dimensions and to plant the seeds of her future actions. (What a clever idea it was to give her the “unweeded garden” lines in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, a scene staged like a conversation.)

There aren’t many longueurs in this production. Often the added text acts as a segue or bridge to another scene. And Carmichael uses pretty much every area of the amphitheatre to dramatize the world of the play; when the King’s ghost (James Dallas Smith) appears, it’s at the highest point of Joshua Quinlan’s effective, sober stage design. When characters run up the stone stairs of the amphitheatre, it expands the world of the play. There’s even room for some playful bits of audience interaction, such as when Khan asks a patron in the first row if he, Hamlet, is a coward.

There are some wonderful surprises in this production. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Amelia Sargisson and Christo Graham) make a wonderfully nimble, comic double act — all fun and cartwheels until their childhood friend understands how they’ve been sent to spy on him. Mousseau’s Laertes emerges as a contrasting and more active version of the prince. Sam Khalilieh is such an entertaining, engaged Polonius that it’s a shame his familiar advice scene to his son is truncated. And watching Smith’s Ghost struggle to free himself of a mask is an effective way to evoke his cursed fate. (Chris Ross-Ewart’s sound design for his later spooky utterances also works well.)

Khan makes Hamlet’s struggles palpable, immediate and deeply felt. Trimming his soliloquies, however, or having him share lines with other characters, results at times in a lack of philosophical depth.

While this production moves at a clip, I found myself longing for a bit more profundity. I think Hamlet’s “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow” line has been altered and moved higher up in the script, but it needs the context of the final act to give it more weight.

Still, whether this is your first or your 20th Hamlet, there’s plenty to ponder and admire. The rest surely won’t be silence for this intriguing adaptation.

Hamlet runs until September 1 at the High Park Amphitheatre, 1873 Bloor West. See info here. And here’s my recent interview with Khan, in which he talked about his banner year, Carmichael’s approach to the play and the surprising links between his story and Hamlet’s.

Masterclass-y comedy

A couple of subway stops east of High Park in Roncy Village, the promising company A.C.T. Productions recently presented The Masterclass (Rating: ✭✭✭), an immersive, interactive comedy that touches a bit on the Bard’s work.

The premise is that we have signed up for a free preview of renowned actor, producer, director and author Nathan Bridgets’s acting master class, which draws on techniques from his bestselling manual An Actor Does NOT Prepare. After being guided to a studio where we doff our shoes, we spot the master himself, headphones on and lost in actorly thought in a corner of the room.

After a series of quick introductions, during which Nathan (writer/producer Kyle Claeys) disabuses us of certain acting theories, he then implores us to “get naked” — emotionally and dramatically, that is. Physical and vocal warm-up exercises follow, after which we get into the meat of the class, which includes scene play, textual analysis and one of the funniest examinations of Shakespearean metre you can imagine.

Nathan occasionally interrupts his lesson to convene with his assistant/sister Stephanie (producer/stage manager M Fera). It turns out he’s dealing with the financial and career fallout of a notorious production of Equus in which he got a little too intimate with his live, onstage horse. And a lot is riding on the participants of this workshop signing up for a six-week course.

Claeys energetically commits himself to the show, ably improvising and never breaking character. The exercises are varied and clever, with just enough truth in them to make them seriously funny. My one caveat? The artists could push things further. How did Nathan get his start? What else does he do to support his art? As it is, the show feels a little unfinished.

Still, Claeys is a comic and improv talent to watch. The Masterclass would have been a big hit had it played earlier in the month at the Fringe.