HELLO, SWEET PRINCE

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Breakers come crashing in over the loudspeakers as the audience fills the theater. The surge of the ocean can be lulling, but these waves are too big for that. Both the audience and the still unseen actors are left with the same question: Will Hamlet sweep us out to sea?

We ask nothing less of a drama that traffics in suicide, fratricide, regicide, specters, madness, incest. Horatio in the first act tries to discourage Hamlet from pursuing his father's ghost: "What if it tempt you toward the flood?" But full into the flood Hamlet eagerly plunges-and we in the audience with him. It is one of the play's many paradoxes that the character we rely upon to guide us on so long and stormy a journey is himself so feckless and equivocal. Although "most royal" and a "noble heart," Hamlet unwittingly destroys almost everyone dear to him-even while asking us to regard his eventual death not as the farcical passing of a bumbler but as the tragic extinguishing of a hero.

It is both an impossible and an irresistible role, which has attracted virtually every important -- or ambitious-English-speaking actor, from John Barrymore and Laurence Olivier to Mel Gibson and Keanu Reeves. The latest is Ralph Fiennes, who stars in a production that has traveled from London's Almeida Theatre Company to Broadway. Fiennes, 32, is known primarily as a movie actor (he played the unforgettable chief villain -- in a world overrun by villainy -- of Schindler's List, and the fair-haired, clay-footed young scholar, Charles Van Doren, of Quiz Show), but his roots are in theater, and he handles Shakespeare's great role with a commanding blend of intelligence and ardor.

He is supported by a solid, gimmick-free production. The cast and its director, Jonathan Kent, have chosen to play things straight. There are no clashing incongruities of costume or accent, no radical deletions or insertions. Sets are appropriately dark and stark. The pace is brisk, sometimes to the point where speeches seem dashed off -- less expounded than expelled. But the rapidity mostly works. Hamlet's "To be or not to be ." soliloquy comes in at a hurtling but affecting clip; Fiennes seems less concerned with weighing alternatives than with feverishly fending off suicide. He makes an athletic-looking prince, and he manages to appear beautifully, brainlessly exultant in the final scene, with fencing foil in hand-savoring a duel that he considers mere sport but that will bring his world crashing down. Throughout, he is marvelously complemented by Francesca Annis in the role of his mother. She gives us a queen who is convincing at each downward turn in her trajectory: as a figure of brittle jubilation when celebrating her "o'erhasty marriage" to her late husband's brother; as a sinner afflicted with a harelike trembling when confronted with Polonius' death and the "black and grained spots" of her soul; and as a creature of hopeless, heartbreaking maternal solicitude when she realizes, simultaneously, that she has been poisoned and that her son is doomed.

The production's prime flaw is a failure at the top. Most of the figures in authority lack a compelling majesty and weight. For Hamlet's role wholly to succeed, his self-doubt must seem justified; he needs to be a worthier soul than anyone else on stage and yet something of an underling, with an intellectual's cowed nervousness in the presence of men of decisive action. His part demands august personages before whom he can shrink. But Hamlet's ghostly father, as played by Terence Rigby, wouldn't scare a puppy, let alone a prince. James Laurenson's Claudius has some fine moments, but they are rendered on too small a scale; he finally seems more a petty thief than the brazen usurper of a throne.

Yet when was there ever a performance of Hamlet one couldn't quibble with? Ultimately the play defeats its every interpreter-just as life itself does. This is a noble production in concept and execution, and it is hard to imagine how anyone could sit through it without getting the goose-bumpy feeling that here we may have the greatest drama anybody ever wrote. This play's the thing -- a work whose cadences are so peerless that phrase after phrase has infiltrated the language at large. Moliere once created a character who was thrilled to learn he had been speaking prose his whole life; someone ignorant of Shakespeare might stumble into a theater and be dumbfounded to discover that for years he had been speaking Hamlet.

For the audiences who fall under the spell of Fiennes and this new production, every other marquee on Broadway goes dark. Only one light remains, and the glow it sheds is harsh, scant and imperishable. ^1