The Shakespeare’s Globe company specializes in a kind of irreverent reverence, emphasizing the informality of the Elizabethan playgoing experience. (Each performance begins and ends with a jig.) This approach works best at their London “Wooden O” replica, however, and has not always traveled well. In the proscenium space of Pace University’s Schimmel Center—where they have brought Hamlet—the best they can do is keep the house lights on, occasionally use the aisles and set up a small raised platform. With eclectic costuming and minimal props, a hardworking cast of eight nimbly navigates the epic narrative and its outlandish events, even if it means milking more laughter from the text than pity and terror.
Such a “plank and a passion” approach has its charms, but in this case, we get Hamlet lite. The boyish Michael Benz does makes for a refreshingly likable and unmelancholy Dane, and the production is easier to sit through than many interminable and ponderous Hamlets of yore. But aside from some nifty fun with the play-within-the-play “Mousetrap” scene (necessitated by the challenging double-casting of Claudius and the Player King), the staging by Bill Buckhurst and Dominic Dromgoole (the current head of the Globe) offers little directorial invention. The uneven ensemble generally “speaks the speech” well, but their genial blandness wears thin under the weight of the nearly full-length text (which clocks in at more than two and a half hours). A swifter, streamlined adaptation would have better suited this bare-bones mounting, but instead, the directors even supplement the script with a handful of lines from the infamous “Bad Quarto” of 1603. However, when the Gravedigger asks his apprentice to fetch him a Starbucks skinny latte, that isn’t Bad Quarto—just bad.—Garrett Eisler