November 17, 2022 • 34 mins
Hamlet is everywhere right now. But this isn't the same play you read in high school English. We meet the minds behind a singing Hamlet, The Northman's Amleth, and Pulitzer prizewinner Fat Ham's Juicy – and ponder what makes this Shakespearean tragedy speak directly to our time.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin beat, nibat schluck dujaviets. She took Australia, Sheili destiny,
(00:37):
Hey m hey, Barry. You know what that is we're
hearing um. It sounds like someone very serious speaking in
an Eastern European language of some sort exactly. And we're
also hearing the sound of a busman's holiday. A busman's holiday.
Beg your pardon. You know, when you go on vacation
and end up doing the same thing you do at work.
Sounds like stories coming. So I run a Shakespeare theater
(01:01):
right the Old Globe in San Diego. Now. My wife
is in the travel business, and last summer her company
took a group on a riverboat trip down the day
Ube River. We made that our family's summer vacation. That
sounds amazing. It was gorgeous, Vienna, Budapest, all these little
Austrian villages, and the scenery on the Danube is like breathtaking.
(01:23):
One day we dock in Bradoslava, which is the capital
of Slovakia. My wife had to work, my kids didn't
feel like getting off the boat, so I went wandering around.
One of the highlights of this really charming city is
a huge medieval castle that's perched on a hill overlooking
the whole place. I hiked up and the views are stunning.
(01:45):
You see what looks like half of Europe nice, and
the castle itself is amazing. I went walking around through
gardens and big old gates and huge wooden doors. I
go down this long corridor and I turn a corner
into some random courtyard, and all of a sudden, I'm
facing a little stage with lighting and rows and rows
(02:08):
of seats and sound equipment and like an army of
people milling around. And I realize that somebody's made a
theater here, and there's a company of actors rehearsing a play,
and so I watch for a while. Umbria sput niche
fiats a namich. Let's see, there's a guy who's the star.
(02:31):
He's smoking a cigarette, which everybody in Bratislava is doing,
and he's wearing this long black coat. He's intense looking,
his eyes are darting around like his soul is on fire.
And he walks center stage and he launches into this
long speech and I'm listening and the penny drops. He's Hamlet.
(02:52):
I've left my own Shakespeare theater to get some R
and R and I go halfway around the world, and
I wander around some old tourist site, and I end
up at a rehearsal of Hamlet, a busman's holiday. Yes,
it's like a magnet berry. Once Shakespeare is in your soul,
you are is drawn to him. You find him everywhere.
It's like there's no getting away. There needs no ghost
(03:14):
come from beyond the grave to tell us this truly
TuS vedomia zenasorobis bubbiltsov lutska. I'm Barry Edelstein, and I
run the Old Globe in San Diego, one of the
(03:35):
countries leading Shakespeare's theaters. And this is where there's a
will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and pushkin industries. Our
show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of unexpected places and
asks what he's doing there and what his presence means
about him and about us. My companion on this search
for old William is a friend and colleague with their
(03:56):
own deep interest in Shakespeare. The writer and director am Weinstein.
That sounds like it was a great vacation. Barry the
cameo from The Melancholy Dame. Notwithstanding he made a cameo
in my vacation. But he's been a star everywhere else.
It's been the year of Hamlet. M The Metropolitan Opera
in New York premiered a new Hamlet opera, da Here's
(04:40):
that Home. The twenty twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Drama
went to a play called Fat ham which takes the
Hamlet story and puts it at a backyard barbecue in
the South. I think my uncle had my father killed,
and my father wants me to kill my uncle. Jo,
what do you do? Wind up a kill nobody? Yeah,
(05:02):
I think it's probably mad Heart exactly. And a film
called The Northman brought the story that Shakespeare based Hamlet
it on to multiplexes and streaming services everywhere. I am,
I'm not a bad wolf son. I'm going out of
London war Rafen and I WHOA. That is intense, you think? Oh?
(05:32):
And there was more. The Stratford Festival in Canada had
a major production of Hamlet, starring the first black woman
to play the part there and a famous avant guard
director did a Hamlet in London that became a breakout
hit and was remounted at the Park Avenue Armory in
New York, and the Old Globe My Theater did a
radio version of the play that you could download to
(05:53):
listen while you're folding your laundry or going on your
morning run. My father's spirit in arms. All is not well.
Hamlets having a moment right now. But Barry, why that
is the question in this moment of Hamlet, or yet
another moment of Hamlet in a string of moments of
Hamlet in the last four centuries since the play was written.
(06:15):
Let me ask you, Barry, what do you think he's
going on with all this Hamlet am all? I have
her theories. But I've been lucky because I've been able
to talk to some really smart people who have some
really thoughtful and provocative things to say on the subject.
People like James Iimes, the winner of the twenty twenty
two Pulitzer Prize for his reimagined Hamlet, Robert Eggers, the
(06:39):
visionary filmmaker who's drawing meaning from the myths that informed
Shakespeare as he wrote the play. And Matthew Jocelyn, the
librettist of the Mets Hamlet opera. We'll get into my
conversations with them after a break. A full disclosure, I
(07:15):
did not see the opera at the Metropolitan Opera House.
I saw it at nine am in a multiplex in
San Diego, me and twenty other you know, hardy souls
who got up early. You are virtuous beyond words. That's
Matthew Jocelyn. The MET Live in HD simulcasts Metropolitan Opera
performances to cinemas all over the world, including a really
(07:37):
thrilling new opera of Hamlet. Matthew is the librettist. I
asked him to explain what that means. It's funny. When
I arrived at the Met for this present series of performances,
it took a couple of days for me to get
my security pass. So I finally went to the head
of security and said, I, you know, I need to
check in every day with all of my certificates. Why
(07:58):
don't I have my security pass? And she said, oh,
you're Matthew Johnson. You're the librettist. I just don't know
what category to put you in. I've never met a
liberty before, and I said, that's all right, most of
us are dead. So to explain what is a librettist,
we are essentially the book writer. That is where the
(08:18):
people who write the text and the words that are
going to be put to music for an opera. Matthew
and composer Brett Dean have reinvented Hamlet really with this
sweeping and hugely moving score and a collage of a
text put together by someone who clearly knows his way
(08:38):
around the play. Shakespeare has been frequently brought into the
opera house, famously, Giuseppe Verdi did a bunch of them, Rassini, Brittain,
Oddists right, Purcell, What is that about? Why make Shakespeare
into an opera? Great opera is inherently theatrical. It's looking
(09:00):
for theatrical moments and broad, large theatrical gestures that at
the same time contains some kind of broad emotional content,
a sweep with which one can tell a story and
grip the emotional fiber of the audience. And Shakespeare was
(09:20):
a master of that. He was a master of finding
a narrative that had both the dramatic content and the
emotional content and the intellectual or the thinking content. That
(09:52):
music is amazing and it really gets under your skin,
and also it's really innovative. I'm no music scholar, and
I don't really have the language to talk about how
music works and what it does. But Brett Dean has
composed modern class music and you can hear in it
the influences of the twentieth century minimalism, atonality, and like
(10:17):
the play, it's also got these passages of Romanticism. And
he kind of broke the orchestra out of the orchestra pit,
didn't he. He placed small satellite orchestras around the huge
auditorium of the met There was a small percussion section
tucked away in a high balcony, and sometimes singers sang there.
There were other little installations of instruments kind of hidden
(10:40):
away in corners of the theater. So you were surrounded
by the score, immersed in it. That is so cool.
And on top of that, Dean used this wild combination
of found objects to make sound. Plastic water bottles that
scrunched and crunched, rusty springs from an old car, and
stones banged together. Matthew told me about it. The principle was,
(11:03):
how do we get inside Hamlet's head? How do we
have the experience of something that is all invasive and
all pervasive, and from which one cannot extricate oneself, And
Hamlet cannot extricate himself from his own thoughts, and that's
exactly what the orchestra is providing us with as an experience.
(11:23):
And in the same way that Brett Dean sort of
fractured the orchestra into bits and spread it around the place,
Matthew took a kind of kaleidoscopic approach to the text
of Hamlet. You reassigned lines from one character to another,
you rearranged scenes, so you entered into almost as a
co author with Shakespeare. Is that fair to say? Yeah?
(11:46):
He was very generous with his co authorship, I have
to say, because he provided me with the essential material
and he made put up no obstacles whatsoever to my
delving into it. I asked Matthew the big question, why Hamlet?
Why now? Yeah, there's a kind of prevalence of this
(12:08):
unknowah will hero this person who seems to experience life
in such an intense way, experiences loss in such an
intense way, and love in such an intense way. The
play is essentially also about this moral battle. Do I
(12:31):
follow my father who's asking me to be untrue to myself,
who's asking me to become a man of revenge, when
I'm a man of philosophy, who's asking me to become
a man of prosaic action when I'm a man of poetry,
or do I follow my own poetic self and be
the lover that I am with Ophelia and be and
(12:55):
be the soul that I am within the world. There's
(13:17):
a very famous and very waggish English stage director who
likes to say that the first rule of working on
Shakespeare in the theater is to remember that you're alive
and he's dead. There's a certain license granted to a
contemporary theater maker when you engage with a writer who's
been six feet under for centuries. Pretty Much every production
(13:40):
of Shakespeare we see today, in whatever form, is an adaptation.
Matthew Jocelyn's libretto is the Hamlet we all know, and
at the same time it's something totally fresh. Fat ham
kind of works in the same way, like it takes
the raw material of Hamlet, but it rearranges it, It It
makes it new, It moves it to a new location,
(14:01):
a new time, even a new culture, where there's a
will We'll be back after a short break. I want
to talk to you about what My daddy is dead.
(14:22):
You know what I'm talking about. The King, my queen
is dead. Huh, it's Shakespeare kind of. My name is James, IIMs.
I am the playwright of fat Ham, among other plays.
I am associate. Yes, is that right? I am an
(14:44):
associate professor of Theater of Villanova. That's right. I have
tenure and I am a co artistic director of the
Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You are also the most
recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That's correct.
I've quite gotten used to adding that to like the
list of things that I've done. James's play is a
(15:06):
loose adaptation of Hamlet. The bones, the players still there,
the fathers died, the uncle's murdered the father, the uncle
marries the mother right, but then it becomes its own thing.
It follows a character named Juicy who's my Hamlet, and
Juicy is trying to figure out what he wants the
rest of his life to look like, and then he's
(15:26):
visited by the ghost of his father and all those
questions sort of get blown up for him. But while
fat Ham follows the basic outline of Shakespeare's play, James
doesn't set his version in Denmark. Juicy is black and queer,
living in a small town in the South, in a
family a very colorful, bright but complicated people. Nic what
(15:52):
Shakespeare if you burn up that dead oh white man wal,
I want to talk about his ass. At it's core,
it's a question of what of our family's legacy in
history do we want to hold onto? And what of
our family's legacy in history do you want to release?
And Juicy has to sort of make those decisions for himself.
(16:12):
He leads the family through a transformation. Yeah, and which
I find that, you know, in my family, I feel
that younger generations are often the ones that show me,
and you know, my mom and my mom's siblings, new
ways of thinking, new ways of experiencing the world. So
I think it's very true to how this current moment
feels in terms of how the generations are interacting with
(16:34):
each other. The striking thing about fat Ham is how
funny it is. It's a raucous, wild comedy, which Hamlet
generally is not. No, the pile of corpses on stage
at the end is not exactly a laugh riot. I
asked James about that. Early drafts of this play were
(16:55):
really quite faithful to Hamlet proper, and then you run
into the problem of the end of the play. It's
not really a problem that you run into the reality
of the end of the play, which is that everybody's
basically dead at the end of the play. And I
didn't want to write that story. And so, you know,
Hamlet was the thing that got me going in terms
of working on a play that was exploring cycles of violence,
(17:18):
inherited trauma, all of these things. All of these things
that Hamlet, the Shakespearean character, deals with, and he just
decides to engage with them in a different way than
Juicy does. But the same questions were really interesting to me.
They're interesting to me as a person. They were interesting
to me in terms of how I wanted to approach
the story of Hamlet, which is not you know, that
(17:39):
question isn't always central to when people are working on Hamlet.
James digs deep into Hamlet in his play. He finds
something remarkably personal there. The to be or not to
be speeches quoted so much because I think it is
central to how people think about Hamlet, this ambivalence of
like whether or not to move forward or to stop,
(18:02):
and I think that the play holds a much more
interesting question of whether or not one wants to stop
or continue, but rather how one wants to continue. And
I wanted to see what happens if Juicy was sort
of not sure about my Hamlet wasn't so sure about
how he felt about that, what he wanted to do
(18:23):
about that, how he wanted to move forward. So the
question shifted from to be or not to be? Do
I be this way or do I be that way?
Like the B stays, the being is consistent, you know.
The how was slightly more interesting to me. I love
hearing about the personal connections artists make the Hamlet. The
(18:46):
play had a huge impact on me when I first
read it. When I was in the tenth grade, I
took an English class, and suddenly Hamlet was my entire identity.
It's an odd thing about this play, am It grabs
people and it never lets them go. I know an
actor who's played the part twice and he's won Tony
Awards and an Oscar and he always has a copy
(19:07):
of Hamlet on him wherever he goes. People just they
go all in with it. It's a play you wrestle
with over a lifetime, not a play you just do it.
As foretold that I would slay my father's killer in
a burning lake till that they comes. I will torment
(19:29):
the man who made my life. Hell. Hi, I'm Robert Eggers.
I'm the director and co writer of The Northman. Robert
Eggers is one of the most original filmmakers working in
the American cinema. He makes historical epics and they're like
touched by violence and horror. He's known for his scrupulous
(19:52):
research and his meticulous recreations of the periods where the
films are set. The Witch is an amazing film, and
The Lighthouse is one of my favorite movies of the
past few years. It's this crazy Herman Melville meets Hitchcock
meets Bergman thing, and it's as impossible to describe as
it is to forget. I just love talking with the
(20:14):
person who made it, this idiosyncratic visionary artist. I asked
him to tell me more about The Northman and what
it has to do with Shakespeare. Well, funnily enough, when
I describe it, I often say that simply put The
Northman as Viking Hamlet. So it is based on a
Scandinavian folk tale of am Lev. So young boy his
(20:40):
father is murdered by his uncle and he needs to
avenge his father's death as an adult. Basically, it's basically
the plot of Hamlet. Yes, basically yeah. And revenge is
something It's not something that I feel every day. That's
something that doesn't excite me. But a good revenge story works.
(21:01):
So of course, what makes Hamlet potentially so resonant is
that you have today the protagonist who's unsure about the revenge,
and in my film, Amlet is quite sure revenge the
whole time. And while this act of vengeance is satisfying
(21:25):
for our protagonists, like you know, to me, it seems
like a waste of an entire life obsessed with the vengeance.
So in a sense, your film does the thing that
Shakespeare's play does, just in a different kind of way.
It's still problematizes revenge as an idea, it just does
it differently. I think that's fair. It's so interesting that
(21:47):
this film that isn't even Shakespeare ends up somehow illuminating Shakespeare.
I think it happens m because Robert manages to grasp
something profound about Hamlet's character, and wonderfully, it's the same
thing that Matthew Jocelyn and James i'ms talked about Hamlet's
essentially unknowable. There's a bottomless sense of mystery to him.
(22:08):
You can read the play and study it and see
production after production, but still you never quite feel like
you fully know Hamlet. I think in some ways, am Let,
my Amlet, is knowable, but there's something that's so brutal
and fatalist and horrible about it that it's hard to
sort of wrap your mind around. But I do think
(22:32):
you know Hamlet because I've played Hamlet. He's a different
person in every single scene, you know, and in many
ways that's why he seems the most human of any
character written. Maybe you played Hamlet ware the Edwin Booth
Theater in Dover, New Hampshire. So m At this point
(22:54):
in our conversation, Robert Eggers reaches behind him and from
a shelf he grabs a skull, his own personal Hamlet
like skull. Oh my goodness, never never leave home with
no this question of Hamlet being knowable or not, it's
(23:15):
so provocative. Do you think it's somehow connected to him
having a moment right now? I asked James. I'ms about that.
I think there are some Shakespeare roles that you can't
really get to the bottom. You can't really get to
the bottom of the Scottish King, you can't really get
to the bottom of Juliet. And I think Hamlet is
also in that category. Cleopatra is in that category Falstaff,
(23:37):
but I think Hamlet in particular, there's just so much
to mine. He says to people, you can't figure me out,
you can't pluck out the heart of my mystery, right,
And of course the action of the play is everybody
trying to figure out what's going on with this guy.
And he's dressed in black, and he's moping around, and
he's stalking around, and nobody can figure him out. So
there is this sense that he is this walking mystery
(24:00):
whose depths are unplumbable and unknowable. Hamlet just sort of
is isolated and trying to figure and move through this
world by himself. Isolated and moving through the world by himself,
that's Hamlet's problem. He's all alone. He sees a world
(24:20):
upside down, out of order, not functioning, and he understands
that fixing it is entirely up to him. More than
all the other amazing things about the play and the character,
this is the reason I think he's around so much
right now, this thing of being alive at a time
when the world is turning upside down, when everything we
(24:43):
think we know is changing. It's so heavy and it's
a burden we can all relate to, especially after the
few years we've just lived through. This is the perfect
time for Hamlet to show up to light the way forward.
You've directed this play a couple of times. I've been
really lucky. Yeah, your most recent was really about that,
(25:04):
about Hamlet in this upside down world, right in the
middle of the pandemic, right on the radio, when the
old globe was closed because of the virus. Oh, that
this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve
itself into a due well, that the Everlasting had not
fixed his kin and against self slaughter. What was the
(25:27):
genesis of the production? What was your inspiration? Well, in
the summer of twenty sixteen, my father of Blessed Memory
died and he was in his mid eighties, and you know,
we loved each other dearly, and I remember sitting in
a hospice room with him in New Jersey in the
final days of his life, and to my astonishment, what
(25:51):
came into my head were lines from Hamlet nature's common
theme is death of fathers. Your father lost a father,
that father lost his just these strange echoes of Shakespeare
rattling around in my head while I was sitting a
loan at two o'clock in the morning in a dark room,
with my father breathing heavily in a hospice bed and
(26:17):
literally the final hours of his life. And when my
father passed away, I thought something was speaking to me
here that I've got to explore, and I really should
go look at Hamlet. I am my father's spirit doomed
for a certain term to walk the night. So now
(26:40):
I want to talk about your twenty twenty one production
of Hamlet, right in the height of the pandemic. You
did a very technically innovative take on the play, and
I'd love to hear about what at that time inspired
you to tell this story again. So, the pandemic hit
in March of twenty twenty and shut down the theater
(27:01):
very quickly. So, like many American theaters, we pivoted to
digital programming. We did some educational material, we did some
community based material that we streamed on YouTube or Facebook,
or that we recorded and then distributed, and at some
point we said, well, what about the radio. So at
the very beginning of twenty twenty one, I thought, let's
(27:23):
get everybody back together from the twenty seventeen Hamlet and
put some Shakespeare in the world. Maybe this kind of
nimbus of Shakespeare might be a way to connect everybody
who was out there alone, hunkered down. So that's what
we did. What did it feel like to re encounter
this play after the pandemic? Did you see it differently?
(27:45):
Did it feel like it a change for you at all?
When you heard the line the time is out of
joint in the beginning of twenty twenty one, you just thought,
oh my god, is it ever? Is it ever? Just
the world blowing apart, institutions collapsing trust, evaporating, people alone
(28:06):
at home? By that point, I think we were nearing
million Americans dead from the coronavirus. The time is out
of joint indeed, you know, and following the journey of
this young man who feels like it's his devastating burden
to try and set things in order, felt incredibly personal
(28:27):
and felt very very powerful, and felt in a way
like we were no longer alone, Like Hamlet could be
our spirit guide to trying to figure out how to
put the shards of our lives back together. The time
is out of joint. Oh curse, it's spite that ever
(28:49):
I was born to set it right. These four Hamlets
that we've been interrogating in the opera house, in the cinema,
on stage, they become like our companions in this disoriented time.
It feels like Hamlet has never really been far from
our collection. Unconscious, his melancholy, his indecision, his struggle to
(29:14):
do right when he knows that he's honor bound to
do something morally wrong. Hamlet distills human experience like no
other fictional character. And sometimes, when the circumstances are right,
he steps out from our unconscious and he blazes his
way into the world with his inky cloak and his
(29:36):
customary suits of solemn black, with his mournfulness and his eloquence,
with his madness and his wit, with his deep, unknowable soul.
He speaks to us a friend, a guardian, a guide
to be or not to be? That is the question.
(30:01):
Whether it is nober in the mind to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, what to take arms
against a sea of troubles? And by opposing. And then
(30:25):
I remember one time when it was being broadcast, I thought,
I'm going to get in my car and listen to
this thing on the radio in the same way that
I listened to all things considered on the radio or
the ball game. And so I don't know, eleven o'clock
on a Sunday morning or whenever it was four o'clock
on a Sunday afternoon, I just got in my car
and just started driving around San Diego with Hamlet playing Wow.
(30:50):
I remember sort of sends chills for me to remember it.
And you know, you're like, oh, look there's the waterfront.
To be or not to be? That is the question,
you know. And oh, now I'm going to turn left
past the school where my kids attend and your year.
Oh that this two two solid flesh would melt. And
it was this kind of sense of benediction, you know,
(31:13):
of Shakespeare just visiting this city for a couple of hours,
with his healing power, with his beautiful voice, with his
sense that humans are extraordinary, you know what a piece
of work is a man? And I thought, oh, what
a good thing to just sort of blanket san Diego
(31:33):
with Shakespeare for a couple of hours felt wonderful? What
a piece of work is a man? How noble in reason?
How infinite and faculties inform and moving? How express and
admirable an action? How like an angel in apprehension? How
(31:57):
like a god? Where there's a will? Finding Shakespeare is
written and hosted by me Barry Edelstein. My co host
(32:20):
is m Weinstein. Our show was produced by Buffy Gorilla
and Nisha Vencott, with assistant producers Jennifer Sanchez and Salman
Ahat Khan. Our executive producers are Katherine Girardo from Pushkin
and Alex Lewis and John Myers from Row Home Productions.
Our editor is Audrey Dilling. Our mix engineer is Justin Burger.
Our theme is an original composition by Hannis Brown. Samuel
(32:43):
Buzid is our fact checker. Vicki Merrick is our voice coach.
Our show was recorded at Bill Corkery Productions, Leopard Studio,
and The Old Globe. Special thanks for use of audio
clips to the Public Theater for fat Ham the Metropolitan
Opera for Hamlet and focus features for The Northman. Thanks
to actor Johnny Costrey for Hamlet in Slovak, Where There's
(33:05):
a Will is a co production of Pushkin Industries and
The Old Clobe Barry Edelstein That's Me is Erna Fincy
Veturbi artistic director and Timothy J. Shields is Audrey S. Geisel,
Managing director of the Old Globe. For the Globe thanks
to sound director Paul Peterson and Assistant to the Sound
Director Evan Eason, Director of Marketing and Communications Dave Henson,
(33:26):
Assistant to the artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd, The
Theodore and Audrey Geiselfund provides leadership support for The Old
Globe's year round activities. To learn more about the Tony
Award winning the Old Globe one of America's leading regional
theater companies, visit the Old Globe dot org. If you
love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus
(33:48):
content and add free listening across our network for four
dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Find the Pushkin
Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Where there's
a will, We'll be back December eighth, Thanks for listening,
Pushkin beat, nibat schluck dujaviets. She took Australia, Sheili destiny,
(00:37):
Hey m hey, Barry. You know what that is we're
hearing um. It sounds like someone very serious speaking in
an Eastern European language of some sort exactly. And we're
also hearing the sound of a busman's holiday. A busman's holiday.
Beg your pardon. You know, when you go on vacation
and end up doing the same thing you do at work.
Sounds like stories coming. So I run a Shakespeare theater
(01:01):
right the Old Globe in San Diego. Now. My wife
is in the travel business, and last summer her company
took a group on a riverboat trip down the day
Ube River. We made that our family's summer vacation. That
sounds amazing. It was gorgeous, Vienna, Budapest, all these little
Austrian villages, and the scenery on the Danube is like breathtaking.
(01:23):
One day we dock in Bradoslava, which is the capital
of Slovakia. My wife had to work, my kids didn't
feel like getting off the boat, so I went wandering around.
One of the highlights of this really charming city is
a huge medieval castle that's perched on a hill overlooking
the whole place. I hiked up and the views are stunning.
(01:45):
You see what looks like half of Europe nice, and
the castle itself is amazing. I went walking around through
gardens and big old gates and huge wooden doors. I
go down this long corridor and I turn a corner
into some random courtyard, and all of a sudden, I'm
facing a little stage with lighting and rows and rows
(02:08):
of seats and sound equipment and like an army of
people milling around. And I realize that somebody's made a
theater here, and there's a company of actors rehearsing a play,
and so I watch for a while. Umbria sput niche
fiats a namich. Let's see, there's a guy who's the star.
(02:31):
He's smoking a cigarette, which everybody in Bratislava is doing,
and he's wearing this long black coat. He's intense looking,
his eyes are darting around like his soul is on fire.
And he walks center stage and he launches into this
long speech and I'm listening and the penny drops. He's Hamlet.
(02:52):
I've left my own Shakespeare theater to get some R
and R and I go halfway around the world, and
I wander around some old tourist site, and I end
up at a rehearsal of Hamlet, a busman's holiday. Yes,
it's like a magnet berry. Once Shakespeare is in your soul,
you are is drawn to him. You find him everywhere.
It's like there's no getting away. There needs no ghost
(03:14):
come from beyond the grave to tell us this truly
TuS vedomia zenasorobis bubbiltsov lutska. I'm Barry Edelstein, and I
run the Old Globe in San Diego, one of the
(03:35):
countries leading Shakespeare's theaters. And this is where there's a
will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and pushkin industries. Our
show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of unexpected places and
asks what he's doing there and what his presence means
about him and about us. My companion on this search
for old William is a friend and colleague with their
(03:56):
own deep interest in Shakespeare. The writer and director am Weinstein.
That sounds like it was a great vacation. Barry the
cameo from The Melancholy Dame. Notwithstanding he made a cameo
in my vacation. But he's been a star everywhere else.
It's been the year of Hamlet. M The Metropolitan Opera
in New York premiered a new Hamlet opera, da Here's
(04:40):
that Home. The twenty twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Drama
went to a play called Fat ham which takes the
Hamlet story and puts it at a backyard barbecue in
the South. I think my uncle had my father killed,
and my father wants me to kill my uncle. Jo,
what do you do? Wind up a kill nobody? Yeah,
(05:02):
I think it's probably mad Heart exactly. And a film
called The Northman brought the story that Shakespeare based Hamlet
it on to multiplexes and streaming services everywhere. I am,
I'm not a bad wolf son. I'm going out of
London war Rafen and I WHOA. That is intense, you think? Oh?
(05:32):
And there was more. The Stratford Festival in Canada had
a major production of Hamlet, starring the first black woman
to play the part there and a famous avant guard
director did a Hamlet in London that became a breakout
hit and was remounted at the Park Avenue Armory in
New York, and the Old Globe My Theater did a
radio version of the play that you could download to
(05:53):
listen while you're folding your laundry or going on your
morning run. My father's spirit in arms. All is not well.
Hamlets having a moment right now. But Barry, why that
is the question in this moment of Hamlet, or yet
another moment of Hamlet in a string of moments of
Hamlet in the last four centuries since the play was written.
(06:15):
Let me ask you, Barry, what do you think he's
going on with all this Hamlet am all? I have
her theories. But I've been lucky because I've been able
to talk to some really smart people who have some
really thoughtful and provocative things to say on the subject.
People like James Iimes, the winner of the twenty twenty
two Pulitzer Prize for his reimagined Hamlet, Robert Eggers, the
(06:39):
visionary filmmaker who's drawing meaning from the myths that informed
Shakespeare as he wrote the play. And Matthew Jocelyn, the
librettist of the Mets Hamlet opera. We'll get into my
conversations with them after a break. A full disclosure, I
(07:15):
did not see the opera at the Metropolitan Opera House.
I saw it at nine am in a multiplex in
San Diego, me and twenty other you know, hardy souls
who got up early. You are virtuous beyond words. That's
Matthew Jocelyn. The MET Live in HD simulcasts Metropolitan Opera
performances to cinemas all over the world, including a really
(07:37):
thrilling new opera of Hamlet. Matthew is the librettist. I
asked him to explain what that means. It's funny. When
I arrived at the Met for this present series of performances,
it took a couple of days for me to get
my security pass. So I finally went to the head
of security and said, I, you know, I need to
check in every day with all of my certificates. Why
(07:58):
don't I have my security pass? And she said, oh,
you're Matthew Johnson. You're the librettist. I just don't know
what category to put you in. I've never met a
liberty before, and I said, that's all right, most of
us are dead. So to explain what is a librettist,
we are essentially the book writer. That is where the
(08:18):
people who write the text and the words that are
going to be put to music for an opera. Matthew
and composer Brett Dean have reinvented Hamlet really with this
sweeping and hugely moving score and a collage of a
text put together by someone who clearly knows his way
(08:38):
around the play. Shakespeare has been frequently brought into the
opera house, famously, Giuseppe Verdi did a bunch of them, Rassini, Brittain,
Oddists right, Purcell, What is that about? Why make Shakespeare
into an opera? Great opera is inherently theatrical. It's looking
(09:00):
for theatrical moments and broad, large theatrical gestures that at
the same time contains some kind of broad emotional content,
a sweep with which one can tell a story and
grip the emotional fiber of the audience. And Shakespeare was
(09:20):
a master of that. He was a master of finding
a narrative that had both the dramatic content and the
emotional content and the intellectual or the thinking content. That
(09:52):
music is amazing and it really gets under your skin,
and also it's really innovative. I'm no music scholar, and
I don't really have the language to talk about how
music works and what it does. But Brett Dean has
composed modern class music and you can hear in it
the influences of the twentieth century minimalism, atonality, and like
(10:17):
the play, it's also got these passages of Romanticism. And
he kind of broke the orchestra out of the orchestra pit,
didn't he. He placed small satellite orchestras around the huge
auditorium of the met There was a small percussion section
tucked away in a high balcony, and sometimes singers sang there.
There were other little installations of instruments kind of hidden
(10:40):
away in corners of the theater. So you were surrounded
by the score, immersed in it. That is so cool.
And on top of that, Dean used this wild combination
of found objects to make sound. Plastic water bottles that
scrunched and crunched, rusty springs from an old car, and
stones banged together. Matthew told me about it. The principle was,
(11:03):
how do we get inside Hamlet's head? How do we
have the experience of something that is all invasive and
all pervasive, and from which one cannot extricate oneself, And
Hamlet cannot extricate himself from his own thoughts, and that's
exactly what the orchestra is providing us with as an experience.
(11:23):
And in the same way that Brett Dean sort of
fractured the orchestra into bits and spread it around the place,
Matthew took a kind of kaleidoscopic approach to the text
of Hamlet. You reassigned lines from one character to another,
you rearranged scenes, so you entered into almost as a
co author with Shakespeare. Is that fair to say? Yeah?
(11:46):
He was very generous with his co authorship, I have
to say, because he provided me with the essential material
and he made put up no obstacles whatsoever to my
delving into it. I asked Matthew the big question, why Hamlet?
Why now? Yeah, there's a kind of prevalence of this
(12:08):
unknowah will hero this person who seems to experience life
in such an intense way, experiences loss in such an
intense way, and love in such an intense way. The
play is essentially also about this moral battle. Do I
(12:31):
follow my father who's asking me to be untrue to myself,
who's asking me to become a man of revenge, when
I'm a man of philosophy, who's asking me to become
a man of prosaic action when I'm a man of poetry,
or do I follow my own poetic self and be
the lover that I am with Ophelia and be and
(12:55):
be the soul that I am within the world. There's
(13:17):
a very famous and very waggish English stage director who
likes to say that the first rule of working on
Shakespeare in the theater is to remember that you're alive
and he's dead. There's a certain license granted to a
contemporary theater maker when you engage with a writer who's
been six feet under for centuries. Pretty Much every production
(13:40):
of Shakespeare we see today, in whatever form, is an adaptation.
Matthew Jocelyn's libretto is the Hamlet we all know, and
at the same time it's something totally fresh. Fat ham
kind of works in the same way, like it takes
the raw material of Hamlet, but it rearranges it, It It
makes it new, It moves it to a new location,
(14:01):
a new time, even a new culture, where there's a
will We'll be back after a short break. I want
to talk to you about what My daddy is dead.
(14:22):
You know what I'm talking about. The King, my queen
is dead. Huh, it's Shakespeare kind of. My name is James, IIMs.
I am the playwright of fat Ham, among other plays.
I am associate. Yes, is that right? I am an
(14:44):
associate professor of Theater of Villanova. That's right. I have
tenure and I am a co artistic director of the
Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You are also the most
recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That's correct.
I've quite gotten used to adding that to like the
list of things that I've done. James's play is a
(15:06):
loose adaptation of Hamlet. The bones, the players still there,
the fathers died, the uncle's murdered the father, the uncle
marries the mother right, but then it becomes its own thing.
It follows a character named Juicy who's my Hamlet, and
Juicy is trying to figure out what he wants the
rest of his life to look like, and then he's
(15:26):
visited by the ghost of his father and all those
questions sort of get blown up for him. But while
fat Ham follows the basic outline of Shakespeare's play, James
doesn't set his version in Denmark. Juicy is black and queer,
living in a small town in the South, in a
family a very colorful, bright but complicated people. Nic what
(15:52):
Shakespeare if you burn up that dead oh white man wal,
I want to talk about his ass. At it's core,
it's a question of what of our family's legacy in
history do we want to hold onto? And what of
our family's legacy in history do you want to release?
And Juicy has to sort of make those decisions for himself.
(16:12):
He leads the family through a transformation. Yeah, and which
I find that, you know, in my family, I feel
that younger generations are often the ones that show me,
and you know, my mom and my mom's siblings, new
ways of thinking, new ways of experiencing the world. So
I think it's very true to how this current moment
feels in terms of how the generations are interacting with
(16:34):
each other. The striking thing about fat Ham is how
funny it is. It's a raucous, wild comedy, which Hamlet
generally is not. No, the pile of corpses on stage
at the end is not exactly a laugh riot. I
asked James about that. Early drafts of this play were
(16:55):
really quite faithful to Hamlet proper, and then you run
into the problem of the end of the play. It's
not really a problem that you run into the reality
of the end of the play, which is that everybody's
basically dead at the end of the play. And I
didn't want to write that story. And so, you know,
Hamlet was the thing that got me going in terms
of working on a play that was exploring cycles of violence,
(17:18):
inherited trauma, all of these things. All of these things
that Hamlet, the Shakespearean character, deals with, and he just
decides to engage with them in a different way than
Juicy does. But the same questions were really interesting to me.
They're interesting to me as a person. They were interesting
to me in terms of how I wanted to approach
the story of Hamlet, which is not you know, that
(17:39):
question isn't always central to when people are working on Hamlet.
James digs deep into Hamlet in his play. He finds
something remarkably personal there. The to be or not to
be speeches quoted so much because I think it is
central to how people think about Hamlet, this ambivalence of
like whether or not to move forward or to stop,
(18:02):
and I think that the play holds a much more
interesting question of whether or not one wants to stop
or continue, but rather how one wants to continue. And
I wanted to see what happens if Juicy was sort
of not sure about my Hamlet wasn't so sure about
how he felt about that, what he wanted to do
(18:23):
about that, how he wanted to move forward. So the
question shifted from to be or not to be? Do
I be this way or do I be that way?
Like the B stays, the being is consistent, you know.
The how was slightly more interesting to me. I love
hearing about the personal connections artists make the Hamlet. The
(18:46):
play had a huge impact on me when I first
read it. When I was in the tenth grade, I
took an English class, and suddenly Hamlet was my entire identity.
It's an odd thing about this play, am It grabs
people and it never lets them go. I know an
actor who's played the part twice and he's won Tony
Awards and an Oscar and he always has a copy
(19:07):
of Hamlet on him wherever he goes. People just they
go all in with it. It's a play you wrestle
with over a lifetime, not a play you just do it.
As foretold that I would slay my father's killer in
a burning lake till that they comes. I will torment
(19:29):
the man who made my life. Hell. Hi, I'm Robert Eggers.
I'm the director and co writer of The Northman. Robert
Eggers is one of the most original filmmakers working in
the American cinema. He makes historical epics and they're like
touched by violence and horror. He's known for his scrupulous
(19:52):
research and his meticulous recreations of the periods where the
films are set. The Witch is an amazing film, and
The Lighthouse is one of my favorite movies of the
past few years. It's this crazy Herman Melville meets Hitchcock
meets Bergman thing, and it's as impossible to describe as
it is to forget. I just love talking with the
(20:14):
person who made it, this idiosyncratic visionary artist. I asked
him to tell me more about The Northman and what
it has to do with Shakespeare. Well, funnily enough, when
I describe it, I often say that simply put The
Northman as Viking Hamlet. So it is based on a
Scandinavian folk tale of am Lev. So young boy his
(20:40):
father is murdered by his uncle and he needs to
avenge his father's death as an adult. Basically, it's basically
the plot of Hamlet. Yes, basically yeah. And revenge is
something It's not something that I feel every day. That's
something that doesn't excite me. But a good revenge story works.
(21:01):
So of course, what makes Hamlet potentially so resonant is
that you have today the protagonist who's unsure about the revenge,
and in my film, Amlet is quite sure revenge the
whole time. And while this act of vengeance is satisfying
(21:25):
for our protagonists, like you know, to me, it seems
like a waste of an entire life obsessed with the vengeance.
So in a sense, your film does the thing that
Shakespeare's play does, just in a different kind of way.
It's still problematizes revenge as an idea, it just does
it differently. I think that's fair. It's so interesting that
(21:47):
this film that isn't even Shakespeare ends up somehow illuminating Shakespeare.
I think it happens m because Robert manages to grasp
something profound about Hamlet's character, and wonderfully, it's the same
thing that Matthew Jocelyn and James i'ms talked about Hamlet's
essentially unknowable. There's a bottomless sense of mystery to him.
(22:08):
You can read the play and study it and see
production after production, but still you never quite feel like
you fully know Hamlet. I think in some ways, am Let,
my Amlet, is knowable, but there's something that's so brutal
and fatalist and horrible about it that it's hard to
sort of wrap your mind around. But I do think
(22:32):
you know Hamlet because I've played Hamlet. He's a different
person in every single scene, you know, and in many
ways that's why he seems the most human of any
character written. Maybe you played Hamlet ware the Edwin Booth
Theater in Dover, New Hampshire. So m At this point
(22:54):
in our conversation, Robert Eggers reaches behind him and from
a shelf he grabs a skull, his own personal Hamlet
like skull. Oh my goodness, never never leave home with
no this question of Hamlet being knowable or not, it's
(23:15):
so provocative. Do you think it's somehow connected to him
having a moment right now? I asked James. I'ms about that.
I think there are some Shakespeare roles that you can't
really get to the bottom. You can't really get to
the bottom of the Scottish King, you can't really get
to the bottom of Juliet. And I think Hamlet is
also in that category. Cleopatra is in that category Falstaff,
(23:37):
but I think Hamlet in particular, there's just so much
to mine. He says to people, you can't figure me out,
you can't pluck out the heart of my mystery, right,
And of course the action of the play is everybody
trying to figure out what's going on with this guy.
And he's dressed in black, and he's moping around, and
he's stalking around, and nobody can figure him out. So
there is this sense that he is this walking mystery
(24:00):
whose depths are unplumbable and unknowable. Hamlet just sort of
is isolated and trying to figure and move through this
world by himself. Isolated and moving through the world by himself,
that's Hamlet's problem. He's all alone. He sees a world
(24:20):
upside down, out of order, not functioning, and he understands
that fixing it is entirely up to him. More than
all the other amazing things about the play and the character,
this is the reason I think he's around so much
right now, this thing of being alive at a time
when the world is turning upside down, when everything we
(24:43):
think we know is changing. It's so heavy and it's
a burden we can all relate to, especially after the
few years we've just lived through. This is the perfect
time for Hamlet to show up to light the way forward.
You've directed this play a couple of times. I've been
really lucky. Yeah, your most recent was really about that,
(25:04):
about Hamlet in this upside down world, right in the
middle of the pandemic, right on the radio, when the
old globe was closed because of the virus. Oh, that
this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve
itself into a due well, that the Everlasting had not
fixed his kin and against self slaughter. What was the
(25:27):
genesis of the production? What was your inspiration? Well, in
the summer of twenty sixteen, my father of Blessed Memory
died and he was in his mid eighties, and you know,
we loved each other dearly, and I remember sitting in
a hospice room with him in New Jersey in the
final days of his life, and to my astonishment, what
(25:51):
came into my head were lines from Hamlet nature's common
theme is death of fathers. Your father lost a father,
that father lost his just these strange echoes of Shakespeare
rattling around in my head while I was sitting a
loan at two o'clock in the morning in a dark room,
with my father breathing heavily in a hospice bed and
(26:17):
literally the final hours of his life. And when my
father passed away, I thought something was speaking to me
here that I've got to explore, and I really should
go look at Hamlet. I am my father's spirit doomed
for a certain term to walk the night. So now
(26:40):
I want to talk about your twenty twenty one production
of Hamlet, right in the height of the pandemic. You
did a very technically innovative take on the play, and
I'd love to hear about what at that time inspired
you to tell this story again. So, the pandemic hit
in March of twenty twenty and shut down the theater
(27:01):
very quickly. So, like many American theaters, we pivoted to
digital programming. We did some educational material, we did some
community based material that we streamed on YouTube or Facebook,
or that we recorded and then distributed, and at some
point we said, well, what about the radio. So at
the very beginning of twenty twenty one, I thought, let's
(27:23):
get everybody back together from the twenty seventeen Hamlet and
put some Shakespeare in the world. Maybe this kind of
nimbus of Shakespeare might be a way to connect everybody
who was out there alone, hunkered down. So that's what
we did. What did it feel like to re encounter
this play after the pandemic? Did you see it differently?
(27:45):
Did it feel like it a change for you at all?
When you heard the line the time is out of
joint in the beginning of twenty twenty one, you just thought,
oh my god, is it ever? Is it ever? Just
the world blowing apart, institutions collapsing trust, evaporating, people alone
(28:06):
at home? By that point, I think we were nearing
million Americans dead from the coronavirus. The time is out
of joint indeed, you know, and following the journey of
this young man who feels like it's his devastating burden
to try and set things in order, felt incredibly personal
(28:27):
and felt very very powerful, and felt in a way
like we were no longer alone, Like Hamlet could be
our spirit guide to trying to figure out how to
put the shards of our lives back together. The time
is out of joint. Oh curse, it's spite that ever
(28:49):
I was born to set it right. These four Hamlets
that we've been interrogating in the opera house, in the cinema,
on stage, they become like our companions in this disoriented time.
It feels like Hamlet has never really been far from
our collection. Unconscious, his melancholy, his indecision, his struggle to
(29:14):
do right when he knows that he's honor bound to
do something morally wrong. Hamlet distills human experience like no
other fictional character. And sometimes, when the circumstances are right,
he steps out from our unconscious and he blazes his
way into the world with his inky cloak and his
(29:36):
customary suits of solemn black, with his mournfulness and his eloquence,
with his madness and his wit, with his deep, unknowable soul.
He speaks to us a friend, a guardian, a guide
to be or not to be? That is the question.
(30:01):
Whether it is nober in the mind to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, what to take arms
against a sea of troubles? And by opposing. And then
(30:25):
I remember one time when it was being broadcast, I thought,
I'm going to get in my car and listen to
this thing on the radio in the same way that
I listened to all things considered on the radio or
the ball game. And so I don't know, eleven o'clock
on a Sunday morning or whenever it was four o'clock
on a Sunday afternoon, I just got in my car
and just started driving around San Diego with Hamlet playing Wow.
(30:50):
I remember sort of sends chills for me to remember it.
And you know, you're like, oh, look there's the waterfront.
To be or not to be? That is the question,
you know. And oh, now I'm going to turn left
past the school where my kids attend and your year.
Oh that this two two solid flesh would melt. And
it was this kind of sense of benediction, you know,
(31:13):
of Shakespeare just visiting this city for a couple of hours,
with his healing power, with his beautiful voice, with his
sense that humans are extraordinary, you know what a piece
of work is a man? And I thought, oh, what
a good thing to just sort of blanket san Diego
(31:33):
with Shakespeare for a couple of hours felt wonderful? What
a piece of work is a man? How noble in reason?
How infinite and faculties inform and moving? How express and
admirable an action? How like an angel in apprehension? How
(31:57):
like a god? Where there's a will? Finding Shakespeare is
written and hosted by me Barry Edelstein. My co host
(32:20):
is m Weinstein. Our show was produced by Buffy Gorilla
and Nisha Vencott, with assistant producers Jennifer Sanchez and Salman
Ahat Khan. Our executive producers are Katherine Girardo from Pushkin
and Alex Lewis and John Myers from Row Home Productions.
Our editor is Audrey Dilling. Our mix engineer is Justin Burger.
Our theme is an original composition by Hannis Brown. Samuel
(32:43):
Buzid is our fact checker. Vicki Merrick is our voice coach.
Our show was recorded at Bill Corkery Productions, Leopard Studio,
and The Old Globe. Special thanks for use of audio
clips to the Public Theater for fat Ham the Metropolitan
Opera for Hamlet and focus features for The Northman. Thanks
to actor Johnny Costrey for Hamlet in Slovak, Where There's
(33:05):
a Will is a co production of Pushkin Industries and
The Old Clobe Barry Edelstein That's Me is Erna Fincy
Veturbi artistic director and Timothy J. Shields is Audrey S. Geisel,
Managing director of the Old Globe. For the Globe thanks
to sound director Paul Peterson and Assistant to the Sound
Director Evan Eason, Director of Marketing and Communications Dave Henson,
(33:26):
Assistant to the artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd, The
Theodore and Audrey Geiselfund provides leadership support for The Old
Globe's year round activities. To learn more about the Tony
Award winning the Old Globe one of America's leading regional
theater companies, visit the Old Globe dot org. If you
love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus
(33:48):
content and add free listening across our network for four
dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Find the Pushkin
Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Where there's
a will, We'll be back December eighth, Thanks for listening,
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