The title is structured like a prize fight, a bout between two heavyweights in the manner of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon. In one corner, the most famous actor in the world, Sarah Bernhardt; in the other corner, Shakespeare’s troubled Prince Hamlet, never before played professionally by a woman. No points for guessing who comes out on top.
US playwright Theresa Rebeck sets her work in 1899, when Bernhardt (Kate Mulvany) is a star of massive international renown but experiencing a major crisis of confidence. She has played her share of ingenues, including Ophelia and La Dame aux Camélias, but knows her time portraying alluring young beauties is coming to an end. The theatres are too small, the lights unforgiving. What she needs is a shake-up of her reputation, a role that will shock and delight audiences searching for something new.
The play opens with Bernhardt deep into rehearsals as Hamlet, kitted out in breeches and a ridiculous wig. She’s struggling with Shakespeare’s poetic register, as well as the role’s inherent indecisiveness. She wonders why he can’t just act more, instead of all this endless talking and thinking he seems to do – which makes us wonder why she wanted to play the part in the first place.
She gets plenty of advice from the men in her life: fellow actor Constant Coquelin (Marco Chiappi), who has played the Dane four times previously; playwright Edmond Rostand (Charles Wu), who is also her lover; and artist Alphonse Mucha (Tim Walter), whose own reputation rests on the art nouveau posters he makes of Bernhardt’s most famous roles. None of it helps her performance much, until she hits on a novel idea: she’ll commission Rostand to write her a new version of the play, where Hamlet is a man of action.
It’s a demonstrably terrible idea, as her son Maurice (William McKenna) warns – especially when Rostand has to halt work on the play he is writing for her, the one that will eventually go on to make his name, Cyrano de Bergerac. As Bernhardt’s need to conquer the role of Hamlet comes into direct conflict with her artistic intuition, not to mention her interpersonal relationships, she has to decide whether to back down or push through.
Rebeck knows precisely what she wants Bernhardt to do, which is both the strength and the weakness of the play. Oscillation, doubt and pathological interiority are Hamlet’s thing, not Bernhardt’s, and the playwright couches the actor’s transformation of the role in purely heroic terms. This gives the work a certain rhetorical force – and makes Bernhardt a convincing symbol of feminist will – but it also simplifies, and almost nullifies, the central tension.
Anne-Louise Sarks, in her directorial debut as MTC’s artistic director, keeps tight control over the production’s pacing and mood. Endearing flirtations with buffoonery dominate the early scenes, but Sarks manages to subtly shift the dynamics towards a more nuanced naturalism. Marg Horwell’s exemplary set and costume design reflects this stylistic modulation, moving from hoary flats to hyper-realist sets – the second act realisation of Bernhardt’s dressing room is a maximalist wonder – and finally to the stripped aesthetic of Grotowski’s poor theatre. Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting is suitably varied and evocative in response.
Performances are terrific across the board. Mulvany is astonishingly good as the grand dame of the theatre, capable of being callous and haughty one moment, poignantly exposed and vulnerable the next. She has a gift for high rhetoric and low comedy and toggles effortlessly between the two modes, often within a single line of dialogue. She relishes the epic grandeur of the part, but she never lets us forget the human trembling under the surface.
There are plenty of fine supporting performances, notably Chiappi’s wonderfully droll actor, Walter’s exasperated artist and Wu’s moving and passionate lover. Izabella Yena makes a strong impression in a single scene as Rostand’s wronged wife, Rosamond. And McKenna is superb as Bernhardt’s son, slightly foppish but super smart. After dazzling turns in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Admissions, he is proving an actor of enormous talent and scope.
Bernhardt/Hamlet is sparkling entertainment, especially for those with a working knowledge of the material. It may suffer from too many ideas – the deep dive late in the piece into Cyrano de Bergerac serves mainly to confuse the play’s themes – but it’s preferable to too few. Rebeck’s ahistorical approach produces some wonderful confluences, notably with the characters of Rostand and Mucha, but we also have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief.
Bernhardt was a famous gestural actor, with a style completely anathema to Stanislavski’s “system” (what in the US would become known as “the method”). In 1899, she was already on the ropes, a kind of relic and symbol of obsolescence. It is to Rebeck and Mulvany’s credit that she feels so vital, refusing to hold her punches.
Bernhardt/Hamlet is on at the MTC’s Sumner Theatre until 15 April
