To Thine Old Character Be True
Building on their strong production of “Macbeth” two years ago, Morgan and Tristan Vaughan and their Roundtable Theatre Company will now tackle “Hamlet‚” beginning tomorrow at Guild Hall.
Although one of Ms. Vaughan’s goals is to make the play more accessible to the audience, she will not abandon the classic. “We are taking out text that is not relevant, not adding text. The actors will still be fighting with swords, not guns,” she said during a break in a recent rehearsal. Ms. Vaughan is directing Mr. Vaughan, her husband, in the title role.
Why “Hamlet‚” and why now? “For me, it is the most relevant of Shakespeare’s plays right now, in the way ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was when I was 16 and ‘King Lear’ might be later on in life,” she said. For the broader audience, the self-involvement of Hamlet’s character reminds her a lot of today’s obsession with selfies‚ and what those self-portraits say about the people who take them.
The director likes the challenge of capturing Hamlet as he grows and changes within the performance. “It is the most intricate and intellectual study of how we actually behave,” including all of the characters around him.
The rehearsal of the scene in Gertrude’s bedroom after Hamlet has killed Polonius offered a potent glimpse of how complicated the play’s emotions are and what the language tells us about the characters. It was early in the timeline of the production. Some characters were still learning their lines, and the scenes were being performed primarily to see where onstage it made most sense to say them. This included alcoves to the side of the stage, the aisle, and even the balcony. The actors were working to find their interpretations of the characters. Soon they would perform for an audience, but now they were doing it for themselves.
Onstage were Dianne Benson, Jeff Keogh, Sawyer Avery, and Peter Connolly. Ms. Benson said her lines neutrally and quickly to Claudius, played by Mr. Keogh. Ms. Vaughan asked her how she, as Gertrude, felt.
“Exhausted. She is ready to spill it all out and confirm that [Hamlet] is mad,” Ms. Benson replied.
Ms. Vaughan encouraged her to “just say the words. It doesn’t have to be emotional, because that is where we are at this point. Get the information to him: [Hamlet] is crazy, he killed someone, he took the body. And also, get out, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern! Hamlet did murder someone right in front of you, you need to tell [Claudius] first, before anyone else.”
Mr. Connolly and Mr. Avery play Hamlet’s school friends, who are also earnest courtiers and Claudius’s inept henchmen. They appeared to have found their characters already in their simple presence onstage. While the rest of the cast worked without their scripts, they held on to theirs, even though that scene had no lines for them.
To be fair, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern were in the scene simply to show the chaos now ruling the court. Their presence in the queen’s bedroom would be completely inappropriate under normal circumstances, but they have followed Claudius there, eager to do his bidding. Gertrude’s ordering them away demonstrates her dawning realization that her new husband and his behavior are not what she thought they were.
As the scenes progressed Mr. Avery and Mr. Connolly continued to be a half-step behind the other actors, using their slowness humorously to entertain the cast and crew. Ms. Vaughan and the others teased them, but she appeared quietly pleased that their characters were beginning to gel. Mr. Vaughan showed evidence of seeing the world as Hamlet as well. After Ms. Vaughan pointed out to the cast that it was weird that Hamlet’s friends were in the queen’s bedroom, he heckled from the seats, “Oh, who hasn’t been?”
As director, Ms. Vaughan encouraged her actors to find their own truth in their roles. During a break, she said it was most important to her that none of the characters be caricatures, particularly the women, and that Ophelia’s loss of sanity not be overdone.
“Shakespeare had this great grasp of mental illness. His Ophelia in a psychotic state is done so well.” After Ophelia is rejected by Hamlet and then loses her father with her brother away, she as a woman in that society loses all control of her destiny. “There’s nobody to protect her, and her brain fries. She just can’t take it, she cracks.” Rather than draw upon hysteria, Ms. Vaughan said the reality of mental illness is that “you often don’t know someone is crazy until they say something crazy. It’s often just more erratic behavior” than the rest of us.
She drew a parallel to Hamlet’s depression in his first soliloquy: “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!”
“The pain is so great, but the next sentence is about revenge,” she said. “These two are not just these depressed people.”
In “Macbeth,” Mr. Vaughan directed Ms. Vaughan as Lady Macbeth. Now she is in the driver’s seat. Their strategy in directing each other, she said, is, “you choose your battles.”
The Vaughans, who have known each other since they were classmates in drama school, have seen each other at their best and worst. Over time, said Ms. Vaughan, “we have developed the same taste and the same language.” Most of their communication can be in shorthand. Arguments tend to be about the use of a sword or a place in the text, not about overarching themes or their interpretation.
For his part, Mr. Vaughan said in a video prepared by Guild Hall, he has full trust in his wife and is at ease with her more than with anyone else. The key to Hamlet, for him, was to learn the text through and through, to trust the writing. “It goes with me wherever I move,” he said. At the same time, it’s a role that has to be controlled. “There is so much hinging on him as the central figure, you have to control it or it all will fall apart.”
The play will be performed Fridays through Sundays through Nov. 23. Tickets, $25 or $15 for students, will be available at the door or online at guildhall. org.