October 15, 2018
If ever a playwright was a chameleon, it’s Theresa Rebeck; she is bound by no genres, no styles, no conspicuously recurring themes; it’s as if, since she makes so much of her living writing for episodic television, where she’s restricted to format, she turns to the theatre as her anything-goes laboratory, where she’s untethered and free to explore. It’s not so much that she breaks new theatrical ground, but she’s constantly breaking new ground for herself.
Her latest, Bernhardt/Hamlet, is in the tradition of historical speculation, the what that situation might have been like play, and the rarefied sub-category of what might it have been like backstage at this or that historical production—like Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow, about the production that almost happened in which Kenneth Tynan produced Orson Welles directing Laurence Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Only this production did happen (and a silent film clip exists as evidence). And in it, the world-renowned and highly controversial actress Sarah Bernhardt (Janet McTeer) controversially gender-bent to play Hamlet (in Paris, in French). Her quest is to find her inner Hamlet; not male Hamlet, not female impersonated Hamlet, but the very soul of the Hamlet within her, and breaking through the language to get to that is her creative struggle. In an era before realistic acting is a thing, she’s devoted to exposing the truth.
There’s not a great deal to the story in terms of linear development: Bernhardt in and around rehearsal, Bernhardt’s effect on those around her (most crucially Edmond Rostand, her married lover, who would go on to write Cyrano de Bergerac), Bernhardt post-opening, the end. But the build within the scenes progressively explores two different themes: the nature of incandescent genius and the allowances that the “satellite people”—friends, lovers, colleagues, family—make for the eccentricity and inconsistency of having, by dint of nature or choice, that force in their lives; and the nature of womanhood variously striving for (and sometimes achieving, via means both extravagant and subtle) its power base in male dominated society.
Inevitably, partly by deliberate choice and partly because working as a contemporary dramatist offers you no choice, Ms. Rebeck’s play is much less about Ms. Bernhardt’s world and era than it is about aspects of our world and era, retrofitted to the storytelling universe—a universe which possesses its own integrity and also serves as poetic metaphor. And in that wise, she manages the unique trick of offering what is at heart a play of sociological debate in the guise of behind-the-scenes dish.
Under the direction of Moritz von Stuelpnagel (whose very name makes him sound like he might have directed Bernhardt), the cast is exemplary, with Ms. McTeer every inch the charismatic legend she’s cracked up to be (in any time line you choose), Dylan Baker as a reliable actor of the oldschool (generationally and by dint of technique), Jason Butler Hamer as the smitten Rostand and Matthew Salvidar as the differently smitten artist Bernhardt engages to design her show posters, and seeks the truth in his own way.
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