Bernhardt/Hamlet REVIEW 8 March 2023 ***1/2

THEATRE

Written by Theresa Rebeck, by Melbourne Theatre Company

At Sumner Theatre, Southbank, until 15 April 2023

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ***1/2

This review is published only on this blog. I’ll present an audio review on Arts Weekly, 3MBS on Sat 11 March 2023. KH

Charlie Wu, Tim Walter, Kate Mulvany, John Leary in Bernhardt/Hamlet_photoPiaJohnson

 

Sarah Bernhardt was perhaps the most famous French actress of the late 19th and early 20th century. She was renowned for her mellifluous, entrancing, almost musical speaking voice and her charismatic,  presence as she posed, gestured and declaimed, delivering dialogue in the histrionic acting style of the period. Hers was no truthful, Method acting.

 

At the time of this imagined episode in Theresa Rebeck’s play, it is 1899 and Sarah is 55 and no longer able to play the ingenue roles that made her so famous, such as the ailing, and histrionically dying, Camille that sent audiences into paroxysms. (Her fans were known as ‘saradoteurs’, Sarah doters, i.e. those who dote on Sarah.) To recoup financial losses and make a splash, she decides to play Hamlet, perhaps the most famous and most notoriously difficult of Shakespeare’s male characters. A woman playing this role in 1899 was outrageous.

 

Kate Mulvany – who very successfully inhabited Richard III a few years ago – may not have the melodic voice and magnetism of Bernhardt, but she captures her ambition, vision, drive, larger than life personality, her compulsion to maintain her celebrity and her hearty appetite for sexual adventure, although the seductiveness and charisma is lacking.

 

Mulvany’s Bernhardt is brash, bold, often bullying, although the play also explores her vulnerability and trepidation. In Rebeck’s play, Sarah’s doubt, uncertainty, and almost paralysis in the face of playing the enormous role of Hamlet, is an echo of Hamlet’s own procrastination, self-doubt, confusion and self-examination.

 

Although, in reality, Bernhardt engaged Eugène Morand and Marcel Schwob to write a French translation of Hamlet for her, in Rebeck’s play, she enlists (bullies and charms, more like it!) the enamoured Edmond Rostand (Charlie Wu), the celebrated playwright, and writer of Cyrano, to write a new version of Hamlet that ditches Shakespeare’s poetry because Sarah finds it too wordy. Do I hear screams of horror?

 

The most successful and compelling moments in this production are extracts from Shakespeare and Rostand. The first is when Mulvany performs the famous soliloquy, “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I”, the second is Marco Chiappi’s poignant and riveting depiction of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and the last is Chiappi delivering a poetic excerpt from Rostand’s Cyrano.

 

In her first directorial role for MTC since becoming Artistic Director, Anne-Louise Sarks steers the production effectively, with the often-witty dialogue moving swiftly and the quirky characters engaging the audience. The evocative set design (Marg Horwell) is cunningly modular, with small set pieces moving on and off stage and a spectacularly vivid representation of Sarah’s exotic salon.

 

However, the casting does not do the play any favours, and the script itself sometimes labours with characters discussing the difficulty, intricacies and complexities of performing Hamlet and the struggle to deal with the poetry without annihilating Shakespeare. The pace of the production slows when the action does not advance and the play spins its wheels, but thankfully, finally arrives at a resolution.

 

By Kate Herbert

 

Tahlee Fereday, Kate Mulvany, Marco Chiappi Bernhardt/Hamlet_photoPiaJohnson

Kate Mulvany Bernhardt/Hamlet_photoPiaJohnson

CAST

Constant Coquelin Marco Chiappi

Lysette Tahlee Fereday

Louis John Leary

Maurice William McKenna

Sarah Bernhardt Kate Mulvany

Francois / Worker Dushan Philips

Raoul Sahil Saluja

Alphonse Mucha Tim Walter (poster designer)

Edmond Rostand Charles Wu

Rosamond Izabella Yena

 

CREATIVE TEAM

Director Anne-Louise Sarks
Set & Costume Designer Marg Horwell
Lighting Designer Amelia Lever-Davidson
Composer & Sound Designer Joe Paradise Lui
Fight & Movement Director Nigel Poulton
Voice & Text Coach Geraldine Cook-Dafner
Voice & Text Coach Amy Hume
Associate Set Designer Jacob Battista
Costume Associate Sophie Woodward
Assistant Director Tasnim Hossain
Intimacy Coordinator Amy Cater
Assistant to the Fight Director Tom Royce-Hampton
Fight Captain Tim Walter
Assistant Fight Captain John Leary

Stage Manager Whitney McNamara