The Zombie Hamlet

The question has often been asked: "What is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark?" The answer may be found on the stage of Broadway's Lyceum Theater in Ellis Rabb's APA revival. Rabb is the definitive zombie Hamlet, a puppet rather than a mettlesome prince--passionless, prideless and bloodless. So supine is this Hamlet that he lies on the floor of the stage literally for minutes on end, making one wonder if he is in the royal castle at Elsinore or in an opium den.

Everything about the production is peculiarly wrong. The costuming, for example. Here are courtiers with crushed-velvet and tapestried robes draped over business suits, rather like Supreme Court Justices on a Broadway sabbatical. Hamlet, on the other hand, affects a black leather jacket. He appears to be missing his motorcycle rather than his plundered crown. The ghost of Hamlet's father seems to have raided a bird sanctuary for his outfit; he looks like a huge quivering snowy owl.

Apart from physical incongruities, the sense and tempo of the play have been mangled both by Rabb's cuts and his use of the corrupt First Quarto. The famous scenes pop to the surface of the play like corks rather than exploding in emotional depth, and Hamlet's upbraiding of Queen Gertrude sounds like a whiny wrangle instead of an anguished son's sexually charged confrontation with his mother.

The soliloquies are delivered as if Hamlet were in desperate need of geriatric drugs. Rabb is too monotonous for eloquence and too weary for anger. The rest of the cast is almost uniformly inept. Horatio is played like a lost Boy Scout, Gertrude as a matronly simp and Ophelia as an epileptic. Only Richard Easton's Claudius has the dignity of a solid stage presence, and Philip Minor's First Gravedigger has wry antic authority. In view of his acting and directing, perhaps Ellis Rabb should really be listed as the First Gravedigger.

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