Hamlet: A Terrifying Coward

Some Hamlets are just pure cowards. And what’s worse—they know it. It is with sinking heart that they deliver the lines, “O cursed spite/ that ever I was born to set it right,” when they hear of their fate, because they are well aware that they are too scared to do it. But it’s not just the reality of actually taking a life to avenge their father’s death that frightens them, they are knock-kneed at the thought of the confrontation that is necessary and inevitable before the final decision to enact revenge can be made. In the play, Shakespeare has Hamlet delay by feigning lunacy; he has him avoid simply asking Claudius outright to answer to the ghost’s charge of "murder most foul" by having him put on a play to test Claudius (and his father's ghost) instead. It is the boldest choices that Christian Camargo, who plays Hamlet in the latest Theatre for a New Audience production, makes in the role—sitting down in a chair with its back turned to Claudius and Gertrude, or adopting the fetal position when the ghost delivers the details of his murder—that create a Prince of Denmark literally unable to confront anything. He has no choice but to find some power by handling his women with a terrifyingly rough touch.
In direct contrast to his inability to call Claudius on the truth without the use of bratty huffing and puffing or innuendo, Camargo (of TV's Dexter fame) uses an excessive (I would say abusive) amount of physical strength to grab Ophelia from behind, muzzle her mouth with his hand and then almost throw her off her feet as if she is some rag doll with no capacity for physical, let along emotional, pain. Then he straddles Ophelia (played here by the diminutive Asian actress, Jennifer Ikeda), his more than 6-foot” bulk making her tiny, birdlike frame seem even more vulnerable, in order to tell her “Get thee to a nunnery.”
In comparison, Alyssa Bersnahan makes a blissfully unaware, giddily glamorous, and maddeningly empowered Gertrude. Unlike Ophelia, here is a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality. She wears it on her sleeves—a fact that her many silver-hued gowns and stilettos only serve to highlight. (This is a modern production of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark in black collar shirt, jeans and boots and Ophelia in a 1940s-style dress until she goes made and runs around in her knickers). Gertrude's physical presence incites great lust in Claudius who cannot keep his hands off her (and one would hope so considering the lengths he has gone to marry her). Yet the same pent up powerlessness sees Hamlet take Gertrude by the throat and smear her red lipstick, psycho killer-style, across her mouth, almost as if to cross her out.
This Hamlet’s madness is not strong enough to create confusion as to whether he is actually losing his marbles. Camargo clearly shows the audience that he is merely acting loopy. Ophelia may lament, “What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” but why that same noble mind, now done with its cover of craziness, not use its reason to calmly express anger and disappointment at Gertrude’s swift marriage to Claudius, and suspicion over the circumstances of the king’s death without resorting to what begins to resemble an almost-rape remains a question.
Ophelia has historically had a hard time in this play. If she is allowed to actually speak all of the comparably few lines that Shakespeare assigned her, it is still merely to tell us something about Hamlet. Director David Esbjornson has Ophelia tell us that her Liege is murderously furious with his mother—and taking it out on her first.
The absence of Fortinabras in this production is Esbjornson's way of focusing on the domestic situation in Elsinore. So the bigger and more difficult question is: Is Esbjornson perpetuating this tendency for men to use women as their scapegoats, or is he laying it bare for us to recognize how it works? You will have to decide for yourself.
Hamlet is on at The Duke on 42nd Street