Staging 'Hamlet' With a Vengeance
Israeli Director Sees A Harsh Lesson for His Own Nation in Broody Prince's Tale

By Ted Merwin
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 4, 2007; Page N02

In the mind of Israeli director Omri Nitzan, whose internationally acclaimed production of "Hamlet" travels from Tel Aviv to Signature Theatre this week, it is his own nation's government that has been filled with the putrid stench of immorality.

A place where, politically speaking, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

It was after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that Nitzan began to feel desperately out of sync with his own society. "Everyone was celebrating this messianic euphoria of settlement and conquest," he says, "in which we were sinning against ourselves."

The teenaged Nitzan also identified with Hamlet -- his tormented adolescence, his helplessness and angst in the face of what he sees as a militaristic culture built on violence.

So, decades later, could Nitzan do anything but deliver an interpretation of "Hamlet" that is controversial, in which the young Danish prince confronts an evil regime built by his elders on the sins of murder and corruption? And in which only by discovering the truth about his father's death can he deal with the misguided policies that have taken his country down the road to ruin? As the 56-year-old director puts it, "The political and the psychological go hand in hand."

Then again, Tel Aviv's Cameri Theater -- where Nitzan's "Hamlet" has been running for more than two years -- is famed for its left-wing productions of both classics and new works in ways that speak to contemporary political and social issues in Israel. In recent years, the company has produced Shmuel Gonen's "Gorodish," about what the play argues are excesses of the military; Hanoch Levin's "Retzach" ("Murder"), about the calamitous effects of a cycle of vengeance; and Amnon Levy and Rami Danon's "Sheindele," about gender relations among ultra-Orthodox Jews.

But Nitzan's modern-dress version of "Hamlet," translated into modern Hebrew by the late Ted Carmi, has gotten enormous exposure. It was staged 218 times in 2005. It has also traveled to international Shakespeare festivals from Gdansk to Stuttgart and begins its run here Tuesday as part of the Shakespeare in Washington festival.

Critics have been extraordinarily effusive in their praise. Naomi Dudai of the Jerusalem Post hailed the production and praised Itay Tiran's empathetic, rousing turn as Hamlet, calling his performance "as impressive as the most inspired performances I have ever seen, here or abroad."

Political interpretations of "Hamlet" are nothing new. In South Africa in the 1940s, "Hamlet" was first presented to celebrate the end of British colonial rule; in the 1970s, the play was restaged there to question the moral authority of the apartheid system. Similarly, actors boycotting the mass media under martial law in Poland embraced "Hamlet" as a play about moral independence.

As the Polish critic Jan Kott wrote in his seminal work, "Shakespeare, Our Contemporary," Hamlet and other Shakespearean heroes could be viewed as emblematic of the political and existential experience of the postwar age, in which humanity still struggled to free itself from the grip of totalitarianism.

Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of the Signature Theatre, says his company originally sought the rights to present a revival of "West Side Story," the musical based on "Romeo and Juliet." When the rights were unavailable due to the musical's 50th anniversary tour, they turned to this production of "Hamlet."

Schaeffer compares seeing "Hamlet" in Hebrew to the Japanese-language version of Stephen Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures" that the Kennedy Center presented five years ago. "How often do you get to see Shakespeare performed in a foreign language?" Schaeffer asks. Rather than distancing the familiar work from the audience, Schaeffer says, a foreign-language production of a familiar work can turn it into a "whole new cultural and visual experience" that brings out new meanings and associations.

Nitzan, who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company under Jonathan Miller before taking the helm first at the Habima Theatre (Israel's national theater) and then the Cameri, pointed out a parallel between Israel's political situation and a scene toward the end of "Hamlet." The protagonist learns that the Norwegian prince Fortinbras is planning to march across Denmark to capture a small region of Poland. Hamlet indignantly observes that tens of thousands of men will die to occupy a plot of land that is not even large enough to serve as their burial ground. To thrust the audience into the center of the action, Nitzan situates them in swivel chairs, built especially for the tour in a Gdansk shipyard. The chairs, which rotate 360 degrees, are aligned along the sides of a long catwalk, where most of the action of the play is performed. The chairs are so important, the director says, that he considers them to be an integral part of the set.

The actors circulate rapidly among the audience, with sophisticated computer technology used to project the English translation onto the walls behind the moving actors. The actors and audience are in such close proximity, Nitzan notes, that the audience members can "hear the performers' breathing, see the words in their mouths and the tears in their eyes."

Tiran, 27, sees the play, at root, about the process of "becoming human bit by bit," including Hamlet giving up his own clownish immaturity and learning to see behind the masks that other people wear. The spectators' spinning chairs, he says, symbolize to him the whirring frenzy of a teenager's troubled state of mind. He acts out his disdain of the older generation by wearing headphones while they try to speak to him, and by showing off his command of hip-hop movements.

"He starts out very naive and idealistic, looking for justice," Tiran says. "But over time, he realizes that justice isn't the only issue; he discovers the most basic ingredients of life -- love, family, friendship and death." Yet his rage and disorientation delay him from reaching a complete understanding of himself.

Only toward the end of the play, after what Tiran called a "Zenlike moment of clarity," can Hamlet reconcile with both himself and society, having realized that "the readiness is all."