the law of writ and the liberty: Maxine Peake's Hamlet @ the artplex HD

Maxine Peake doesn't rewrite the playbook on Hamlet, but it's a respectable effort in a big field of recent respectable efforts. Where in other productions the Ghost is the catalyzing agent that impels Hamlet down the path that ends [spoiler alert] with Horatio and Fortinbras as the last men standing, Peake's Hamlet is clearly already well down that path from the opening dinner table awkwardnesses. (Also, btw, there is no Fortinbras as they cut all of Denmark's knotty foreign relations entanglements.)

This directorial strategy has a plus side and a minus side. The minus side is it makes for a somewhat one-note main character. And as such we, the audience, miss the transformations, the steps become more of a slide. The famous indecisiveness, as addressed in Hamlet's speeches, seems less in evidence, which in turn makes those speeches less convincing. (nb: this may be precisely the point.)

On the plus side, the more like wallpaper the main character becomes, the more secondary characters stand out. This may be the first production I've ever seen where I was actually interested in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as characters. Peake's Hamlet really has no decisions to make -- the train is never not going to the station. But what that makes evident is the collateral damage to Hamlet's "friends", actual or potential: R & G, of course, and Laertes and Ophelia, but also the Players, scattering in a panic at the termination of their performance, when they realize they've been used as pawns in a game that could turn out very badly for them. This Hamlet is one willing to throw anyone under the bus without much worrying about the consequences.

In fact as soon as the Ghost appears we are calling into question the whole enterprise: John Shrapnel plays both the Ghost and Claudius, the only difference between them is the clothes. But Hamlet is a play about appearance and sham, and masks are everywhere. The "Hyperion to a satyr" comparison Hamlet makes to Gertrude (Barbara Marten) is a visual one -- "Look here upon this picture and on this." If there is no physical difference, and the text abjures psychology, then who's to say Claudius is any worse than the brother he's usurped? And who's to say Hamlet's "revenge" has any meaning whatsoever?

Director Sarah Frankcom makes it clear to us that Rosencrantz (Jodie McNee) and Guildenstern (Peter Singh), two punk kids with accents from some other part of town, have never darkened the doors of Elsinore. Gertrude knows of them, as any mother might who makes it her business at least to know the names of her children's friends. Claudius is uncertain of their names, "Moreover that we did long to see you" becoming a bit of lip service even more patronizing than usual here. And they, unlike much smarmier versions in other productions, seem to be both genuinely concerned and leaping at the chance to hang out with a mate so often out of reach, whether off at school or mewed up behind castle walls and protocol. Unlike the Players, though, they don't quite know when to bail out, finally trapped between Claudius's "need we have to use you" and Hamlet's own somewhat sociopathic agenda.

The casting of Maxine Peake doesn't make for much in the way of a gendered understanding of the title role. Her Hamlet is androgynous, rough-voiced, trickstery, but not quite a challenge to convention. But there are interesting things happening in the margins: Rosencrantz, Marcellus and the Player King, the grave diggers, and Polonius are all explicitly gender-swapped. In the case of Rosencrantz, this means she and Hamlet have had a passing thing, which a bit ups the ante on each one's (real or perceived) betrayal of the other.

In the case of Polonius -- Polonia here -- it changes the relationship with Ophelia in the way recent gender-swapped Tempests have altered, and expanded on, the relationship between Prospero and Miranda. When Polonia (Gillian Bevan) says "I do know, when the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows," you know her mind's eye is looking down the long road of her own past and seeing her daughter's likely future.

The upshot: worth seeing, full of interesting choices, but we're still waiting for an actress to really drag this role kicking and screaming out of its conventions.

pregame

Peter Gelb moderates a panel discussion with director William Kentridge and the principle cast members of the Met's upcoming Lulu

more of the same except less of it

Just back from Met HD Il Trovatore (2015) encore . Opinion hasn't changed since the last time.*

Oh, and **

*except we're using walnut hull-based cat litter now, so the concrete effect was just about concrete, and about as interesting as it is possible for concrete to be without doing something interesting with it.

** If you're going to insist on identifying Dmitri Hvorostovsky as "the baritone with a brain tumor" (NYT, I am looking at you) as opposed to more traditional descriptors like "the baritone with the voice like X" or "the baritone with the Hair", then the end result of the blood oath for some in the audience will be to ponder the Count di Luna's platelet levels when we're supposed to be focusing on the dust-up in the nunnery. It is not the lede of this story. You are not the NY Post. Resist the temptation, you ghouls.

"Scotland is not for the squeamish": La Donna del Lago Encore at OperaMall Millionplex

So, let me get this straight:

There's the first guy, a complete stranger whom she invites hame tae her wee croft cuz she's leal like that, and he proceeds to get all up in her personal space the whole time he's there except when her chica Albina is ostentatiously waving a wedding veil and then resorting to the Death Ray (both utterly ineffectual due to his self-evident density supernatural yet unseen Jacobean aura).*

Then there's the second guy, her main squeeze as it happens, who finds the lady not at home, but whose default mode when she's not there is apparently to raid the liquor cabinet...question mark mark mark

Then there's the third guy, who has weird, hairy friends who like to gather on hilltops at night to tub-thump and, uh, burn crosses, yeah... I can understand her being least enthusiastic about that one. With a subset that is evidently into shrooms, interpretive dance, and woad. (Not as cool as it sounds.)

Okay, go with the second guy if you have to, at least he has the benefit of being a girl, but I have to say, given these options, the obvious choice is to blow town with chica Albina and go start a B&B in the Hebrides.

*Can we just point out that if this were another Walter Scott-based gig, say Heart of Midlothian: the Opera, her girlfriends would already be making up scurrilous traditional songs about her around the fulling table by the next scene.

You all know by now the singing was brilliant, of course it was. And since that's really all this opera is about, everything else, even King Giacomo's soulful disquisition on love in the presence of heads on pikes, is just gravy.

McVicar in Concrete: an interlude

Can't remember why I missed it the first two times, but just took in the encore encore of 2011's Met Il Trovatore HDcast. I have only two things to add to whatever it was people wrote about it way back then: first, David McVicar's set had me thinking I needed to remember to buy cat litter on the way home. Second, we need a new cliche for the swearing of blood oaths. Gratuitous palm-slashing is so last ten centuries. How about face-stapling? [addendum: Okay, I see nobody's quite getting on the bus with this, but it has the benefit of demonstrating Unhinged Commitment to an Idea and yet being directly referential to the circumstances of first-world existence in the 21st century. Wasn't it the Duke of Wellington who said "Only girls fight with swords these days!"?... What if we say Di quella pira was rock n' roll, and along came the Sex Pistols in the form of... Okay I grant this idea either needs some work or a quick plastic bag over the head. I return to my corner.]

sundry items well really only two

So April is Giulio Cesare month at the Met, since -- apart from the Saturday radio broadcast / HD transmission on the 27th -- they are (according to their schedule) audiostreaming live performances on the 4th, the 9th, and the 22nd. Start times vary, so check the schedule. In between those last two we get a 2nd cast Rigoletto (Gagnidze, Oropesa, Grigolo), and all this, I'm guessing, to avoid overexposing the Ring for once.

Meanwhile, Les Arts Florissants brings Charpentier's David et Jonathas to BAM April 17 - 21. Ticket availability at this point is a bit better than it should be, so if you're in the tri-state that week and think this French baroque thing is behavior that should be encouraged, don't be leaving it all to Handel.

The Work of Art in the Age of...

Digital Reproduction, wherein the FT goes all Benjaminian on the concept of HDcasting from the opera house, and

Historical Reproduction, wherein the FT talks technical on the record industry's new-found interest in shellac. Which in Benjaminian terms is pretty funny, since the medium -- and its mechanical reproduction -- is now a component of the art itself.

Late addition: Over at the NYT, Jonas Kaufmann talks to Peter G Davis about the tyranny of Fach.