Review | Stratford’s ‘Hamlet-911’ suffers from too many layers of issues and subplots

This long-awaited world premiere aspires to confront the mythos around Shakespeare’s most famous play. It’s a massive task and what has resulted is a production suffering from a Hamlet-level identity crisis.

Acclaimed Canadian novelist and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald scored an early-career triumph in 1988 with “Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet),” which challenged the problematic underrepresentation of women in Shakespeare’s plays by inserting a contemporary female character into two of his great tragedies and having her mess with their outcomes to great feminist comic effect.

Here, MacDonald and director Alisa Palmer attempt a similar intervention with “Hamlet-911,” but the play collapses under the weight of all the issues it attempts to take on.

The through-line of “Hamlet-911” is the story of a middle-aged, white, cisgender male actor, Guinness Menzies (Mike Shara), who gets the chance to play the Dane at the Stratford Festival. Play and production acknowledge that this riff-on-“Hamlet” play is itself happening at Stratford, and a big part of what MacDonald, Palmer and their company are grappling with are the legacies of exclusion at the storied festival.

It is by design that this production is running alongside a history-making production of “Hamlet” in which a Black female actor is playing Hamlet to great acclaim.

Through the character of Guinness’s father Rex (Scott Wentworth), himself a Stratford actor who mythologizes the festival’s origins, MacDonald gives voice to an older generation who dismisses such casting as modish and (this word doesn’t get uttered, but it hangs in the ether) “woke.” Despite good intentions, Guinness is following in Rex’s troubled footsteps: he’s flirting with the younger female actor playing Ophelia (Eva Foote) and getting handsy onstage. He’s also struggling to stay connected to his actor wife, Sue (Amelia Sargisson), and their infant daughter.

There’s comment on the dominance of screen culture over the live performing arts through the fact that Guinness is a TV star who’s too old to play Hamlet but getting his crack at it because he’s famous. MacDonald takes a feminist swipe at double standards around actors and aging by having Sue be cast as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude in their production.

So far, so complex and meta, but these are not the only issues the play takes on. Through the subplot of teenager Jeremy (Andrew Iles), who reaches out to Guinness to ask questions for a school assignment and gets ignored, themes of toxic online culture — in particular suicide chat rooms — are broached. There’s a comic twist on the absurdities of living with and through technology in a funny running gag of Guinness’s mangled conversations with Siri, and an amusing observation about MAMIL (middle-aged-men-in-lycra) culture through Guinness’s costuming and a crucial plot point about him cycling to the theatre.

Through an Indigenous jester character named Yorick (Gordon Patrick White) the play and production attempt to take account of the festival’s participation in colonial histories (“You guys weren’t the first ones to pitch a tent around here,” cracks Yorick following a self-indulgent soliloquy from Rex about Stratford’s early days).

And the play and production attempt to participate in Stratford’s overall moves toward greater inclusivity through the presence of a young chorus of actors of diverse backgrounds and gender identifications. It’s the chorus who start and end the show, piping up from among the actual Studio Theatre audience to ask questions of the actor playing the stage manager (Jacklyn Francis) of the production-within-a-production.

The fact remains, however, that the chorus and central Indigenous character literally as well as figuratively revolve around Guinness: the young actors circle him during one of his many scenes of bewilderment and, however superb White’s performance, Yorick capers from one side of Guinness to the other and exists as a character only to serve his story.

Meanwhile, Jeremy’s plot line about teen suicide nearly gets lost and the introduction of a further chorus of even younger performers representing the lost souls of the internet comes across like a Hail Mary pass to save it.

Most gallingly, by the end of the play it’s suggested that diverse casting that would bring a female actor (Foote) to play Hamlet and a Black actor (Micah Woods) to play Ophelia only happens because Guinness nobly steps out of the way, thus recentering white male privilege. A program note’s assertion that this is a “Hamlet” for Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, women, queer, trans and non-binary artists is not borne out by the play and production themselves.

The actors are uniformly excellent. The production values are as high as one expects from an institution of this stature: Jung-Hye Kim’s set works well with Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting, HAUI’s projection and video design, and Chris Ross-Ewart’s compositions and sound design as the action moves between present-day scenes, flashbacks and online life. Ming Wong’s costumes, especially those for Guinness and Yorick, effectively contribute to the blurring of lines between the fictional “Hamlet” production and the actual Stratford context.

Palmer keeps the pace moving briskly, but the play nonetheless spirals in on itself. As I try to make sense of the show, my thoughts remain with the young cast members placed outside its spotlight. They deserve better, as do Stratford’s audiences.

“Hamlet-911”

By Ann-Marie MacDonald, directed by Alisa Palmer. Through Oct. 2 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George St. E., Stratford. stratfordfestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600

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