Shakespeare has not been a staple at Sanford's Temple Theatre, usually home to popular musicals, personality revues and light comedies. Despite the theater's professional standards, staging "Hamlet" might seem a risky stretch for the company and its regular audience.
Happily, the risk was worth taking, for this gripping, imaginative production intrigues the eye and the mind. It won strong approval from a Sunday matinee crowd, an audience traditionally difficult to engage.
Much credit goes to seasoned director Richard St. Peter, whose judicious trimming of the text and tight, dramatic pacing construct a concentrated intensity, miraculously mounted with only 10 actors. His concept of Hamlet's Denmark as a stand-in for any current corrupt government is borne out in contemporary military uniforms, ubiquitous security cameras and digital screens flashing slogans for the populace, producing a palpably ominous atmosphere.
In this dangerous realm, Adam Luckey's Hamlet is not melancholic or indecisive but angry and revengeful, warily biding his time to retaliate for his father's murder. Luckey gives Hamlet's comedic turns, intended to throw off any suspicions of the character's true intentions, a chilling underpinning of deadly determination. He is especially adept at making Hamlet's poetic ruminations seem the spontaneous thoughts of this modern-day freedom fighter, darkly gritty utterances rather than airy pronouncements.
He is joined by an equally adept set of supporting players. Thomas Edward Dalton gives King Claudius quiet menace and sneering confidence, matched by Lynda Clark's imperious Queen Gertrude, whose later breakdown is moving in its devastation. Tim Brosnan makes an amusingly unctuous Polonius and doubles nicely as the wisecracking Gravedigger. Anne Butler's Ophelia is delicate but headstrong, her distress at Hamlet's sudden repudiation of her heartrending. And Michael Brocki skillfully delineates his four character assignments, especially the volatile Guildenstern and the effete Osric.
The players and director St. Peter deserve particular commendation for largely avoiding the extremes of volume and speed that plague so many Shakespeare productions. Here most of the actors speak naturally, with pauses and emphases that make the heightened language easily comprehensible.
A major component of the production is the computerized projection design by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White. Hamlet's father's ghost as a fleeting, moving image on multiple surfaces and Ophelia's drowning through watery three-dimensional planes are mesmerizingly wrought. Projections also provide changes of locale, although some seem at odds with the modern concept, as does the silent film of the play-within-the-play. Thomas Dalton's sound design enhances the cold, oppressive atmosphere.
Overall, this "Hamlet" communicates in a directly involving way. It's easily recommendable for first-timers as well as experienced theater goers.
