REVIEW: Dream in High Park offers an abridged, ethereal Hamlet

iPhoto caption: Photo by Dahlia Katz.

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/By Aisling Murphy / Jul 29, 2024

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“A dream itself is but a shadow,” says the Prince of Denmark in Hamlet’s second act. 

Perhaps that spooky fantasy was the inspiration for this year’s Dream in High Park, now playing in Toronto’s largest open-air theatre space until September. Outdoor Shakespeare usually implies a comedy or pastoral — a great many Midsummer Night’s Dreams and As You Like Its have played on summer stages over the last few centuries — but this year, Canadian Stage has opted for a moodier, less lighthearted play to grace High Park’s amphitheatre. 

Jessica Carmichael’s Hamlet is stylish, mysterious, and above all, starry. Diego Matamoros and Raquel Duffy make a luxurious pair as Claudius and Gertrude, while Qasim Khan offers a fresh spin on Shakespeare’s greatest anti-hero, drawing on the same vulnerability that made his Eric Glass so compelling in The Inheritance this spring. Khan’s far from the only Inheritance alum here — Breton Lalama and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff are great as Marcellus and Horatio, respectively.

But clocking in at an intermissionless two hours — a far cry from the advertised 90 minutes, although Canadian Stage has recently updated the runtime on its website — this Hamlet occasionally feels like it’s running in place, reaching for a destination it can’t quite find. 

Some of Carmichael’s cuts to the text are excellent. Hamlet’s first half is exhilarating in its speed and efficiency — when we reach “to be or not to be,” it almost seems as if a heavily truncated Hamlet could work. Carmichael’s emphasis on grief lands well; the production offers a unique, successful peek into Hamlet’s despair, and the use of grief as an entry point makes inarguable dramaturgical sense.

But the production’s back half languishes in high drama, twisting in on itself like a snake eating its tail. The second hour of this Hamlet catapults its characters to a place of frenetic despair, and seldom leaves space for feelings of panic and paranoia to echo. Plus, High Park’s architecture makes it tough for an audience to engage with an extended theatrical event at all — chairs are at a premium, and the vast majority of audience members tend to picnic on the amphitheatre’s steps, which don’t allow enough space to stretch legs or shift weight. 

In Carmichael’s cut, there’s not an obvious place for an intermission, but the production begs for a short pause, an interlude during which patrons could briefly stand, or put on a sweater, or remove their shoes. Would Carmichael’s take on the text feel too long in a more traditional theatre space? It’s hard to say. But outdoors, and with unforgiving seating, this Hamlet demands a brief reprieve.

Length aside, there’s plenty to enjoy at this year’s Dream. Amelia Sargisson and Christo Graham make a terrific Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and James Dallas Smith rocks his ghostly get-up as Hamlet’s dead dad. Joshua Quinlan’s set and costumes are just to die for — he’s created a dreamy landscape of sage greens and rough textures that suggest a haunted, historied grave. Chris Ross-Ewart’s sound design and original music, too, contribute to Carmichael’s ideas of physicalized grief — the music, in particular, plays an important role in the construction of this particular Hamlet.

All in, 2024’s Dream in High Park has its work cut out for it. Beck Lloyd, for instance, presents an Ophelia who occasionally plays into historical tropes of infantilization and hysteria — Lloyd executes that vision well, but it’s a tough reading of a character with much more depth available to her. I found myself yearning for more of the material that makes Ophelia so complicated (including, yes, “get thee to a nunnery,” which has been scrapped in this cut).

And that there’s the problem — there’s a lot to lose when you cut Hamlet to less than half its original length. On the surface, this summer’s Hamlet is elegant and mercurial, an interesting enough experiment in what happens when you adapt Shakespeare for new sensibilities and constraints. But whether or not that experiment is actually successful may well depend on a given audience member’s seating and existing familiarity with Hamlet. If “to be or not to be” is your jam, great; if you’re interested in the more granular details of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, this one might not be for you.

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Hamlet runs until September 1 at the High Park amphitheatre. Tickets are available here.

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Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Aisling Murphy

Aisling is Intermission's former senior editor and the theatre reporter for the Globe and Mail. She likes British playwright Sarah Kane, most songs by Taylor Swift, and her cats, Fig and June. She was a 2024 fellow at the National Critics Institute in Waterford, CT.

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