Hamlet as Everyman / “Hamlet” by Oskaras Koršunovas

There are always performances everyone is talking about so much that you actually do feel in the end that if you haven’t seen it, you have no business of calling yourself a theatre critic. “Hamlet” by Oskaras Koršunovas is one of those. It’s always tricky to react to such a performance when you at last see it, as the expectations have been whipped up so ridiculously high that only a real master-piece would come through it as a success. “Hamlet” didn’t. I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is no point in doing classical plays unless you have some new interpretation to offer. And that does not mean just form. But “Hamlet” by Koršunovas does in big part just that: we see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in dresses, Fortinbras with a red clown-nose, Gertrude in leather and so on. Even the core idea to show actors on stage as actors, constantly putting on and removing their makeup, staring in their mirrors, feels already old-fashioned (of course the premiere was last year) – it seems that economical crisis has led artists to look deep in the meaning of themselves not just in Estonia. Compared to Tiit Ojasoo’s “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” for example, Koršunovas doesn’t really analyze the questions raised with the set design and acting style – it’s there as a side-thought, mainly as a symbol out of Shakespeare’s text (“in a mirror one may see his own failings”, “for it cost him no effort to change the angle of his mirror” etc.) but nothing more. And that’s a pity. Only in letting the same actor portrait both Claudius and the Ghost, Claudius’ “brother”, does the director bring the symbol of mirrors to the level of interpreting the play and even that is dangerously close to the over-exposed Jekyll and Hyde opposition. So it is that in the end the real interpretation of the performance is in casting Hamlet not as a romantic hero but as an ordinary looking guy. We’re all used to hansom Hamlets, so it takes some time to adjust to this one played by Darius Meskauskas. But this choice saves the performance, moving old fictional play much closer to everyday, to Everyman.