More matter, with less video art

Colin Murphy tells a tale of two Shakespeares at the Dublin Theatre Festival

 Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is a weak play: overlong by contemporary standards; confusingly structured; touching only lightly upon the great emotions and conflicts that animate Shakespeare's tragedies. But Edward Hall's company, at the Abbey, animates it where it is static, gives full reign to the beauty and magic in the text and brings Shakespeare's verse to vivacious life.
Hamlet is one of the tightest of classical tragedies, its plot intimately known to generations of school leavers, a play driven by the enlightenment intellect and consuming passions of its eponymous hero. In Conall Morrison's production, downstairs at the Peacock, it is stripped of its potency, overladen with distracting imagery, and Morrison's own eccentric visions for the play are given primacy over Shakespeare's words.
Many will find Morrison's production the more entertaining. It is suffused in violence and illustrated with wall-to-wall video and techno toys; no word is spoken where it could be shouted; and its hero is voraciously, struttingly manic throughout.
The production aspires to be audacious, but is largely incoherent, a riff on Hamlet for a bored and dissonant age. At times, though, it riffs well. Morrison approaches the play with attention deficit disorder; his eagerness to max it out results in briefly exciting staging, and occasional images from his pyrotechnical imagination chime brilliantly with the text. Those who are bored with Hamlet may thank Morrison for his irreverence. Others will be bored by his hyperactivity.
What Morrison's objective is with this production of Hamlet is unclear. It verges on abstraction and deconstruction – this was done better, with more wit, and more completely, in Gavin Quinn's production of Macbeth last year. Morrison exploits each of the play's opportunities for theatricality (the ghost scenes, the players, the grave scene) to introduce electronic devices, video footage and performance art – but these are used inconsistently, fit awkwardly with the text and slow down the play. Crucially, they undermine the play's integrity. Using montages of video art for ambient purposes throughout the play means that the ghost's appearance on the television screens or back walls appears bland. A rabid play-within-a-play set in a blood-drenched operating theatre is so incoherent and blandly grotesque as to render it inconsequential. Claudius's reaction in leaving becomes generic, rather than an admission of guilt.
For all Morrison's arrogance with the production, he appears to have little confidence in his cast. They appear disconnected and static. The focus is all on Hamlet, whose chief instruction seems to be to be as bloody-minded as possible. Patrick O'Kane's performance is vigorous and aggressive, but the pyrotechnics around him and his relentless emphasis on anger at the expense of reflection undermine the character's potency. Around him, the rest of the cast are largely functionaries, though Michael Harding brings a novel wit and ferocity to Polonius; and alone succeeds in really making the verse his own and forging a credible character out of it.
And yet it picks up. As the play itself gathers speed in the second half, Morrison imposes less upon it. O'Kane finds variety in his pitch, and whole lines and speeches start to flow. Characters rushing around the stage throw lines at each other as if suddenly possessed of a need to communicate; verse that was earlier delivered with heavy staccato finds life in urgency. There are moments of striking theatricality: the ghost, in the closet scene, penetrating first Hamlet and then his mother (the only incisive use of video projection in the production); Laertes picking up the ashes spilt from his sister's urn; a final scene that is violent but efficient, rather than indulgent. The impression remains, though, that Morrison had ideas for Hamlet, rather than an idea of Hamlet. He could have done with more matter, with less video – performance – art.
Simply because it is less well known, and slower to unfold, The Winter's Tale is harder work for the audience. But that work is wonderfully rewarded. Hall's company eschews pyrotechnics. They seek to stage Shakespeare “with great clarity, speed and full of as much imagination in the staging as possible”, says Hall. The order there is important: Conall Morrison imposes his imagination upon Shakespearian clarity; while he seeks speed through the adrenalin rush of shouting the script.
Ed Hall first seeks clarity – his ensemble are steeped in Shakespeare; they have a rare and thrilling facility for his verse, and can play it at speed without risking coherence – and explores the imagination in the text without sacrificing its meaning.
The Winter's Tale is a curious tale indeed. In a moment of rashness, the King of Sicily suspects his pregnant wife of adultery with his best friend, who is king of neighbouring Bohemia. She is imprisoned, he flees. She subsequently dies shortly after childbirth, and the child, a daughter, is smuggled away – to Bohemia. Too late, the King realises his mistake, and resolves to mourn for ever. Cut to Bohemia, 16 years later, where the  daughter has grown up adopted by a shepherd, and the prince of Bohemia has fallen in love with her. The play lurches in style from Goodfellas to West Side Story to The Blues Brothers; it is momentarily difficult to follow, but the clarity and dexterity of Hall's production keeps it compelling. The second half in particular ripples with theatrical imagination, and the company crafts moments of beauty on the wide Abbey stage, and images that lurk in the memory afterwards.