Combine the odium of endless comparison and the sheer weight of 400 years of analysis and reverence and you have the supreme directorial challenge. Indeed, Hamlet sits at the pinnacle of Western drama. It is this veritable mountain (not to mention the 4,500 lines of text) that sits at the feet of Damien Ryan. “It’s a great joy when you’re working on one of the lesser known Shakespeares, like All’s Well That Ends Well, because you know that basically absolutely no one knows what to expect,” he begins. “It’s almost like working on a new play. Whereas with Hamlet you feel that 50 per cent of the audience have a very clear idea on what it should be and another 30 per cent recognise many of the terms and words that have become clichés, and only a very few won’t know what’s gonna happen next.”
"Sometimes things need to be bent into a different shape by the sheer virtue of the fact that we’re living in a world that’s four hundred years later.”
As an experienced actor/director who has worked on many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet and Henry V, Ryan also knows that for all the hoo-ha, what he’s doing is simply working with a script. “In the end all you can do once you’re in the room with a bunch of actors is develop your own perspective on the play and just look at the words. Pretty soon after that you feel like those cobwebs and fears start to wipe themselves away and you’re dealing with human action.”
All of which raises the question of latitude. How much room for cuts and changes do you have with a document like Hamlet? While admitting that he will change only “about five or six words” in the entire play, Ryan concedes that this year’s Bell version will lop around two hours from the full running time. “There’s a certain balance you have to find between reverence and irreverence, and making sure that you’re not treating the play like a sacred thing. It needs to be treated like a living organism that actors can feel is fresh and real for them. Sometimes things need to be bent into a different shape by the sheer virtue of the fact that we’re living in a world that’s four hundred years later.”
This production will tread the boards in centres like Mildura, Gosford and Bunbury. “There’s many moments on these tours when you really feel the romance of what it is to be a stage actor in the old days. And who knows, you might have an impact on someone. I mean, you half wonder that maybe William Shakespeare, stuck in Stratford as a kid knowing nothing about theatre, at one point went to see a show that rolled into town and it changed his life.”
