Kevin O'Day's New "Hamlet" for Stuttgart

Hamlet
The Stuttgart Ballet
Opera House
Stuttgart, Germany
3 October 2008

by Horst Koegler
copyright 2008 by Horst Koegler

Considering the dozen of Hamlet ballets between Francesco Clerico´s Venetian Amleto of 1788 and  David Nixon´s 2008 version for Northern Ballet Theatre in Leeds, it seems that just two  have managed to survive their initial seasons: Robert Helpmann´s production of 1942 with himself and Margot Fonteyn as protagonists for the then Sadler's Wells Ballet, and Tatyana Gsovsky´s Berlin staging, with music by  Boris Blacher, in the early ´fifties, which, headed by Gert Reinholm and Gisela Deege, became the signature piece of the ´Berliner Ballett´ and its tours all over the world plus a standard repertory classic in numerous individual productions by local choreographers for their companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland up to the early eighties (but never since). Though the title-role has always been the supreme  challenge for many principal dancers  — to mention only Konstantin Sergeyev 1970 in Leningrad and Vakhtang Chaboukiani 1972 in Tbilisi  — few seem to have conquered successfully this climax of roles from the  Shakespearean cosmos — not even that experienced Shakespearean dance-interpreter John Neumeier when he created his Copland based Hamlet Connotations in 1975 with the dream cast of Erik Bruhn, Gelsey Kirkland, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Marcia Haydée for American Ballet Theatre (nor in his later attempts for the Royal Danes and the Stuttgart Ballet).

It is interesting to see that while Giselle has often been described as the Hamlet of romantic ballet, only a single ballet production of Shakespeare´s ´Tragicall Historie of Hamlet´ seems to have made ballet-history with  a woman performing the title-role, and that was Nijinska´s of 1934 (while there have been several famous actresses tackling the part, beginning with Sarah Bernhardt). If, though, Hamlet is the supreme theatrical challenge and Giselle is considered its ballet equivalent, with all the extravagances of the German ´Tanztheater´ movement, I have not yet encountered a production of  Giselle so far with a man usurping its title-role (at least not outside of the Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo realm).

Thus one was looking forward with some trepidation when the Stuttgart Ballet announced a new full-length Hamlet for the beginning of the 2008/9 season, commissioned from Kevin O´Day and his customary musical collaborator John King. O´Day, hailing from Phoenix, Arizona and Joffrey-educated, has worked with several American and continental companies before settling in Europe and, in 2002, being appointed artistic director and chief choreographer of the Mannheim ballet company, for which he has created a great number of ballets in today’s fashionable global border crossing classical-contemporary style, many of them based on computer generated scores, prepared by King, whom I would prefer not to consider as a composer in the traditional manner, but rather as a manufacturer of noises. O’Day had already choreographed more or less successfully three shorter pieces for the Stuttgart Ballet when Reid Anderson, Intendant of the company (a function beyond that of an artistic director — more sort of General Manager), commissioned a full-length work from him (and King as his provider of sounds) — actually his first attempt on this scale. Behind this idea was the hope that it might turn out as the third piece to crown the Stuttgart Shakespeare trilogy, so far resting on the two pillars of John Cranko´s Romeo and Juliet and John Neumeier´s Othello. As it turned out on October 3, it proved a ballet of the B rather than the A category, though it was  received by its first-night audience with clamorous applause.

While it is sufficiently clear that the man in everyday garb ecstatically moving about, digging and shoveling the earth and throwing his arms into the air in front of a drop-curtain that looks like an abstract of bones and skulls, is supposed to be Hamlet, mourning at the tomb of his father, the following events, persons and their actions emerge like a puzzle, its parts haphazardly assembled in patchwork manner, so that one needs an intimate knowledge of the play to identify them, as they are treated anonymously alike, without any individual character traits. Thus it takes some time before one sorts out Claudius, Laertes, Polonius and Horatio — with the single exception of Hamlet´s mother Gertrude, who in her matriarchal care is lovingly portrayed by Bridget Breiner, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who, as performed by Sébastien Galtier and Mikhail Soloviev, seem to have escaped as a touring buskers duo.  When the drop-curtain is lifted, Tatyana van Walsum´s set suggests the interior of a two-storied court, perhaps a mortuary, with the walls, mysteriously opening and closing, formed by skeletal bones — like the burial chambers of southern cemeteries. Here a lot of jerky dancing happens in solos, duos and small ensembles, and people converse, often nervously, flustering into each others ears if not brooding intensely just before themselves, but one never knows what they are communicating or plotting to do. Even poor Ophelia appears as a cipher rather than as a desirable young woman.

With the action moving in the first act in sudden bursts of energy and abrupt halts one feels tempted to classify it as a dramaturgy of hiccups, nor does the music contribute to the ballet’s continuity — anyway one perceives it rather as a sort of noise environment (though it is performed, in addition to the computer generated sounds by the brass-dominated house orchestra, strategically led by James Tuggle). There is no escalating drive. Instead, the individual scenes resemble an assemblage of  patched together events – but perhaps this is just meant to reflect the protagonist’s qualms in arriving at a decision.

In the second act the action tightens. It starts with a luscious party for the celebration of Claudius´s and Gertrude´s marriage, which gives O´Day the occasion to arrange a lavish divertissement, with the company sweeping through it with panache, and here the music contributes some Hollywoodish big band explosions, with a guest couple of dancers to perform the mousetrap charade (brilliantly delivered by Hyo-Jung Kun and Alexis Oliveira as a show-stopping spectacular). If the rest of the act again involves the performers in difficult to entangle confusions, their vigorous performance suggests that they might have been injected with some high energy dope. 

Things speed up for the final fight between Hamlet, Laertes and Polonius, so that it develops in that high voltage manner, as if the three of them had been specially trained by the instructors of the famous Chinese films. This shows O´Day at the height of his powers, and as it occurs just minutes before the end it is small wonder that the audience reacts uproariously, forgetting the many occasions during the almost two and a half hours when it had wondered what all the fuss was about.

And this is just the crux of the performance, that while one admires the brilliancy and virtuosity of the dancers, one never gets really involved with the story and what it wants to tell us. And so one watches Jiri Jelinek´s lecherous Claudius, Evan McKie´s down to earth Laertes, and Alexander Jones´s sympathetic Horatio with relish, without being interested in what they were supposed to represent, as one amusingly followed the antics of Arman Zazyan as the grave-digger while he performed as a percussionist drumming on the skull he is playing with.  But one regrets that Shakespeare’s infinitely rich tapestry of human vices and virtues has been neutralized so that they look like animated cartoons rather than human beings of flesh and blood.

And that holds true also of Hamlet and Ophelia, who certainly belong to Stuttgart’s elite principals. Jason Reilly, a Canadian whom Anderson had brought with him directly from Toronto, has developed into a very fine dancer, a man for all seasons, princely nobleman as well as tempestuous daredevil, with a cosmonaut’s desire to conquer the space, a fiery Othello and an infectious Petrucchio, but as Hamlet not at all the ´cunctator´, unable to make up his mind. Instead the looks like a born Revenger who comes home and clears up the mess he finds the state in after his father’s death: a man of deed rather than of scruple and qualms — a cousin of Richard III rather than the dreamy youth from  misty Elsinore. And Ophelia? Well, as Stuttgart’s favourite Lulu, Alicia Amatriain obviously had been brainwashed, but under her guise as an insecure girl of innocence and vulnerable frailty there seems to lurk a  voluptuous demon, just waiting to burst through the confines of her straightjacket. Actually with Reilly and Amatriain  as Hamlet and Ophelia one wished that an author like Tom Stoppard of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead  had written a new ballet libretto for them à la Hamlet and Ophelia are alive and kicking.

Photos:
Jason Reilly in "Hamlet" (Photo: Ulrich Beuttenmueller)
Alicia Amatriain and Jason Reilly in "Hamlet" (Photo: The Stuttgart Ballet)
Jason Reilly and Alexander Jones in "Hamlet" (Photo: The Stuttgart Ballet)
Bridget Breiner and Jiri Jelinek in "Hamlet" (Photo: The Stuttgart Ballet)
Alicia Amatriain and Evan McKie in "Hamlet" (Photo: The Stuttgart Ballet)