HOW DARING? CONSIDER, FIRST OF ALL, how the playbill presents the play: “Hamlet is a true artist in search of his art and himself, whereas his object of affection [Ophelia] is a hardcore rocker belonging to a family with a cross-dressing father and compulsive neurotic brother. The new king [Claudius] and Queen Gertrude are obsessed with sex, and the duo spying on Hamlet, Rosencratz and Guildenstern, are homosexuals.”
Welcome to a truly rotten state of Denmark, where you thought it couldn’t get any worse.
It needs no belaboring, of course, who “Hamlet Redux’s” director is. Tony Mabesa is a multi-awarded director, actor, playwright and teacher who, in over five decades of prolific artistic work, has become a lion of local theater.
Under his firm, steady stewardship, Dulaang UP, the official performing group for theater of the University of the Philippines, has staked out a robust position as the country’s most consistent interpreter of Filipino and world drama, as well as the birthing ground for generations of artists and performers who have enriched Philippine theater, movies and TV.
Mabesa, 69, is now retired from teaching, but he is not about to throw in the towel when it comes to his first love: the stage.
“George Abbott was working and directing on Broadway even when he was 84 years old,” he points out.
Nowhere is this youthful fire more evident than when he talks about his latest project, “Hamlet Redux,” slated to run Nov. 22-Dec. 10 at Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, Palma Hall, UP Diliman, as part of Dulaang UP’s 31st theater season.
“‘Hamlet,’ uncut, runs over four hours,” says Mabesa. “I can’t afford to do the entire uncut play given that our audience is composed mostly of students who have to be home early. So I edited the text to make the play run for at most two hours.”
It’s not so much the truncated length, however, that will define this “Hamlet.” It’s how Mabesa plans to use his openness to new modes of stagecraft and technology to heighten the play’s theatricality and, in effect, turn it inside out.
Contemporized version
Banish the thought of a historical-boring “Hamlet.” Like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” which married period narrative and scenery with a joltingly contemporary soundtrack and sensibility, this play will be contemporized in look and appeal, with the actors dressed in modern garb and moving about in a gleaming set of steel and glass.
“But the poetry will be there,” says Mabesa. “The most famous lines are intact. We have two versions, the English one and the Filipino version using the translation of [National Artist for Theater and Literature] Rolando Tinio. I intend this to be a fun play, but without losing the poetry and the images that Shakespeare created.”
Jeremy Domingo, Richard Cunanan, Adriana Agcaoili, Jacques Burlaza, Boojie Santiaho and Mica Pineda headline the English version, while the Filipino translation will be performed by Arnold Reyes, Dante Balboa, Angeli Bayani, Allan Palileo, Ian Lomongo, Patrick Valera and Cherry Mae Cantos.
Mabesa’s reinterpretation will range from outright cutting (“the entire Fortinbras section is out, and the watchmen portion at the start has also been edited, reduced to its essence that they’ve seen a ghost, just to establish the atmosphere”) to highlighting radically new subtexts.
The fair Ophelia, for example, is no longer a swooning virgin in this production.
“She’s been screwing around with Hamlet,” says Mabesa with customary directness. “We will establish this via the use of projected images. Ophelia also has this unnatural, quite possibly incestuous relationship with her brother, Laertes. And with an overprotective father like Polonius and a very rough lover like Hamlet, she sure has reasons to act the way she does.”
In fact, says Mabesa, “‘Get thee to a nunnery!,’ although Rolando translated it as going to a monasterio, actually refers to a whorehouse!”
Shocking twist
And Polonius, he of the “To thine own self be true” unsolicited advice—too bad for him, because Mabesa has determined that his past work as an actor (at one time playing Brutus) renders him psychologically suspect as well.
“There is something actorish about him, so I’d like to show that behind his very conventional façade, he is doing something really unconventional pala.”
That rather shocking twist, revealed in the scene where Hamlet argues with and nearly strangles his mother while Polonius hides behind the drapes, deserves to be seen without warning or spoilers.
Speaking of Gertrude, she, too, gets a reappraisal. In this “Hamlet,” “she is very carnal, and young enough for Claudius to have to kill to get her. It’s also a way to emphasize the Oedipal complex of Hamlet.”
Sex, intrigue, violence, the ever-present specter of death. Add to these the hallucinogenic effects of drugs. “Dito, lahat sila nagdo-droga,” says Mabesa. And there you have a vision of Shakespeare’s most famous play unlike any other—“Hamlet” on crack.
Given all these woes, it’s no wonder Hamlet will feign madness and go through all sorts of contortions to get what he wants. To make sure young audiences would get the character’s inner turmoil, Mabesa plans to accompany Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy with images that vivify the meaning behind the lines.
“Even the music will be very eclectic,” he says. “In Claudius’ scene, for example, when he is asking the heavens for forgiveness, we will be using African tribal music, to highlight the fact that what he did—murder—was a very primal act.”
All these contemporary touches, he says, is simply to make the Bard more accessible to students, many of them perhaps encountering a staged Shakespeare play for the first time.
“I’m at this point in my life when I just want Shakespeare to be enjoyed by the audience,” says Mabesa.
His evergreen flair for the atypical and the hyper-theatrical, poised to explode once again in “Hamlet Redux,” should guarantee that.
“Hamlet Redux” runs Nov. 22-Dec. 10 at Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, Palma Hall, UP Diliman. Call 9205301 local 6441, 9818500 local 2449 or 0927-2464946.
E-mail the author at gcadiz@inquirer.com.ph, visit www.gibbscadiz.com
