All in all I think Othello is actually the saddest, Lear the most tragic, and Macbeth the most horrifying– but I always have the most fun with Hamlet. One day when I am rich enough to do whatever I want, I’d really like to stage a production of Hamlet where each scene is imbued with an emotional valence that flies in the face of how we usually see those scenes portrayed.
For example, 1.5′s conversation between Ghost Dad and Hamlet! It’s often a very portentous bit of theatre, all doom and gloom with Ghost Dad’s voice booming out over the audience and Hamlet’s face contorting itself into new histrionic heights of agony. I mean, that’s fine, but I find that my attention tends to wander because the heightened emotions get a bit exhausting after a while. So I wonder how it would feel if the whole thing were played as something delicate; an account of murder told like a bedtime story, wistful and tender. If Hamlet’s instinct – despite his own skepticism and fear – is just to reach out for his father’s warmth again.
I’d also like to have that Hamlet played by a woman, I think. A lot of really fascinating things happen when you do that, but what I’m most interested in here is that it would align Hamlet with Ophelia, instead of Laertes or Fortinbras. A daughter who has lost a father, not a son who must avenge his. What might that say about how female responses to grief are prescribed, in opposition to the male? What statement could that make about the source of Hamlet’s madness? And if the whole thing (…perhaps especially the appended sketch above) seems vaguely incestuous to you, that’s… not what I intended, but… but it’s only fitting, isn’t it! Oedipus, Electra. We’re just exchanging a prince of Thebes for a princess of Argos.
