Fiennes Joins a British Acting Tradition, Albeit Dubiously

When a certain kind of British actor snatches a certain brass ring in his career, it’s “Hamlet” time. Roger Rees’ Dane came after his triumph in “Nicholas Nickleby,” and Daniel Day-Lewis’ followed on a two-pronged film success, in “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Room With a View.” Now Ralph Fiennes, the actor who was so chilling as a Nazi in “Schindler’s List” and touchingly insecure as Charles Van Doren in “Quiz Show,” is going for the gold. His “Hamlet” opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre on Tuesday night.

His entrance is good. Back to the audience, Fiennes stands facing a tall window whose shutters are flung open, revealing lots of panes and a lovely opal sky. His long hair dirty, he looks down at the floor, as if he were too depressed to contemplate the life in front of him. It’s a striking image. But once Fiennes turns around, his Hamlet goes downhill.

Jonathan Kent, who last year directed a clean and powerful “Medea” with Diana Rigg on Broadway, lets his Hamlet hang in the wind. Fiennes starts out whiny and self-obsessed and goes nowhere from there. He’s rude and surly when sane, a condition that changes very little when he puts on his “antic disposition.” You have to wonder why he bothers to pretend to be mad.

Most disappointing, Fiennes’ Hamlet takes little or no joy at all in his own amazing capacity for language and thought. The monologues are delivered to sound a private, hollow bitterness. When Hamlet says, “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,” Fiennes takes the character at his word. In that same speech, Hamlet’s majestic imagery shows that the character is not as lost to himself as he may think. Yet Fiennes delivers “What a piece of work is man” as if he were truly dead to the world--without any longing.

Fiennes’ take on Hamlet flattens much of the poetry in the verse. He rushes through monologues with the appearance of anguish but not with anguish itself. Claudius (James Laurensen) is right when he calls Hamlet’s grief “unmanly” in the play’s second scene, and you know something is wrong when you’re siding with Claudius, even early in the play.

Poor Ophelia (Tara FitzGerald) is shown not a shred of tenderness. When Hamlet exhorts her to get to a nunnery, he is physically abusive, rather rudely assaulting her with his hand at one point. He leaves her a sobbing wreck, which is how Polonious and Claudius find her.

Polonius (Peter Eyre) also suffers from an excess of cruelty; his neglect of his daughter borders on abuse. When he finds Ophelia in a pile on the floor, he makes no move toward her and ignores her progress as she picks herself up and drags herself like a sick cat all the way around the room, hugging the wall.

This scene, in turn, makes problems for Ophelia’s mad scene. It’s hard to believe she would go crazy from grief for losing this awful father of hers, or for this too-moody suitor. Choices seem to be made in this production without real thought or follow-through. Another case in point: Once mad, Ophelia shows inordinate interest in Claudius’ genitals, acting like the Beggar Woman from “Sween-ey Todd.”

For all its overheatedness, this is an arid “Hamlet,” spare with its pleasures, rather like its hero. Peter J. Davison’s set follows suit; it’s a bare wooden room with a sloping floor. From behind the huge back scrim, an iron grid can sometimes be seen, suggesting a modern glass and steel skyscraper. The dress is late Victorian or early Edwardian. The anachronisms have no more coherence than anything else.

As Gertrude, Francesca Annis wears a gorgeous array of beige gowns, designed by James Acheson. The actress, who played Ophelia to Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet in 1969, is nicely dissipated and cold-blooded, a good Queen for Laurenson’s smug King. As the dead King who was Hamlet’s father, Terence Rigby is appropriately stiff and tortured, but he brings some real life to Elsinore with his hammy Player King and his crusty Gravedigger.

Canned sound effects also mar the evening: fierce waves on the shores of Elsinore, frantic whispering preceding the entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, worst of all, a portentous clanking sound that punctuates several of the scenes.

Hamlet lightens up when he returns home from England, as if Fiennes wanted to give us just a little taste of a guy we could like just before he dies. William Hobbs stages a vivid sword fight for the briefly rejuvenated Hamlet; it’s one of most realistic I’ve ever seen. By the time the sword fight ends, however, and Horatio wishes his sweet prince good night, one might want to reply, “Yeah, good night already.”

* “Hamlet,” Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th Street, New York, (800) 432-7250.