Photos by Gianmarco Bresadola
by Michele Markarian
“Hamnet” (Dead Centre) – Written and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd. Presented by ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage at The Emerson Paramount, 559 Washington Street, Boston through October 7.
“Look, there you are,” I said to my husband, pointing at a projection onstage, as he entered our row at the theater. This isn’t a play about audience reaction – you are only dimly aware of the audience projected when the lights go down – but the duality and point of view of two worlds, two perspectives, in this extraordinary production of grief, fatherhood, and the shadow of those we love and miss. It’s an imagining of the relationship that did – or didn’t – exist between Shakespeare and his son, Hamnet. Of his three children, only Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died in childhood.
“I’m only eleven. But I’ve been eleven for years,” says the boy with the ball and the backpack (Ollie West) to us, the audience. His mother has warned him not to talk to strangers, but “If I don’t talk to strangers, I’ll never meet my Dad”. His Dad, he tells us, is a great man. He, on the other hand, is one letter away from greatness – Hamnet, instead of “Hamlet”. Determined to become a great man himself, worthy of a meeting with his famous, but absent father – “You have to be a great man to meet a great man” – Hamnet pores over the text in an effort to be the famed Hamlet he isn’t. In addition to wanting to be great, Hamnet tosses a ball against a wall, repeatedly, over a million times already, hoping that at some point the ball will break through the wall in an improbable feat known as Quantum Tunneling. Hamnet is in one world, his father, another.
“There’s a room called To Be and a room called Not to Be, and once you’re in Not to Be, you can’t go back”, says William Shakespeare (Bush Moukarzel, projected onto the screen behind Hamnet). It’s an amazing technological feat, as screen Hamnet and stage Hamnet both interact with screen Shakespeare, who is not physically onstage until the end of the piece. If Hamnet’s goal is to know his father, Shakespeare’s is to shed Hamnet, his haunting shadow and sorrow. The space between them is the source of the play’s tension and emotional resonance.
Between the grief and loss, though, are a lot of laughs. Ollie West is a natural, and boy, is he a comfortable performer. He invites a man from the audience to read the part of Hamlet’s father with him, and the obvious delight he takes in play-acting with a stranger is a joy to watch (never mind the visual of an audience member covered in a sheet reading Shakespeare). He does a line dance with his projected dad, and the grin on his face is that of a kid having fun. He also performs a deadpan “A Boy Named Sue”, accompanying himself with a tiny synthesizer. Ollie, aged fourteen in real life, has aged out of the part, which will be taken over by an eleven-year old boy named Aran Murphy sometime this week. I might have to go see this again.
As any working parent today can imagine, Shakespeare himself is not having fun, his guilt and grief profound. The action moves back and forth between Shakespeare’s time and ours, as a reminder that abdication of filial duty is not necessarily a thing of the past. “It was a role I wasn’t suited for”, says Shakespeare to his son on fatherhood. Yet for his negligence, he is able to produce an everlasting body of work, something Hamnet is aware of. Indeed, Hamnet cast a bigger shadow over his father in death than he did in life. The material is rich, and gives one a new appreciation for theater and all that it can be. For more information and tickets, go to: https://artsemerson.org/Online/
