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| Ollie West as "Hamnet" (photo: Gianmarco Bresadola) |
“I'm not allowed to talk to strangers”, intones the titular hero before he starts an almost non-stop narrative of his brief and obscure life, one which must have been hard, you'd surmise, for a boy whose name was Hamnet, constantly having to live misperceived as a typo. This production by Ireland's Dead Centre Theatre, Co-Written by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd (as well as William Shakespeare), is Directed by Moukarzel and Kidd (without Shakespeare), and is its U.S. premiere (its world premiere was in 2017 in Berlin). It is the first ArtsEmerson offering of the season, on Paramount Theater's Robert J. Orchard Stage. At a mere sixty minutes, it covers quite a lot of presumption-shattering ground. It's the story of Will Shakespeare's and Anne Hathaway's only son Hamnet, played by Ollie West (nominated for Best Actor by the Irish Times Theatre Awards this year), who died at eleven years after his father fled to London. Presumed to have been named after the Stratford-on-Avon baker Hamnet Sadler (a witness to Will's will), just as his twin sibling Judith was named after the baker's wife Judith, Hamnet considers what it means and what it costs to be great, or at least to be related to greatness. “I'm not a great man yet; you have to be a great man to meet a great man” adds the quite remarkable young West. As the bard wrote in Hamlet, the purpose of drama is “to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature”. This production takes this literally at first, as the audience is faced upon entering with a televised onstage screen that will constantly change, and alter our perceptions of what is real and what is not, with brilliant uses of video not to be revealed here.
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| Ollie West as "Hamnet" (photo: Gianmarco Bresadola) |
Little is known of the real life of Hamnet other than that he died in 1596, and three years later the play “Hamlet” was written. Shakespeare never dramatized the loss directly, but probably alludes to it (in King John): “grief fills the room of my absent child”. This play addresses that loss with ample visual bits of comedy and numerous Shakespearean allusions and quotations. For a boy “one letter away from greatness”, what should perhaps remain unspoken portends the inwardness of Hamlet. As the authors note in the program, the boy remains trapped on the margins of great things, a celebrated father, literary fame, knowledge, life, and death. They further attest that Shakespeare had something of an obsession with parents compelled to tell their children how to live, and that “the dead haunt the living and the living haunt the dead”.
It's a cleverly profound piece that speaks of the
father's writings to his only son, and conveys his theory that in
his playwriting he was still writing to him. It manages to be
timeless, as the presence of smart phones and allusion to the song “A
Boy Named Sue” reveal. West is a wonder no matter his age; the
part of Hamnet will be taken on by Aran Murphy in the last few
performances here in Boston. The amazing Stage Design was by Andrew
Clancy, with appropriate Costume Design by Grace O'Hara, dazzling
Lighting Design by Stephen Dodd, eerily compelling Sound Design by
Kevin Gleeson, and vitally important Video by Jose Miguel Jimenez. As
Stephen Greenblatt wrote in The Death of Hamnet and the Making of
Hamlet in the New York Review of Books: “who is more immortal,
the one who lived mostly on stage, or the one who wrote the pages?”,
and ultimately it tackles the question of being or not, and what
makes a great man. Toward the end of the play, Hamnet proclaims: “in
this harsh world, I did nothing”.
Yet, with his youthful directness, he answers the most
disturbing existential question of all time: “I choose to be”.
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