For early modern audiences, the question of how to represent Hamlet’s dead father was answered by trap doors, white flour on armored faces or the actor playing the bleeding corpse. After the spectral phase of lighting and sound technology standardization, the film answers with magic of superposition and green screen. Recently, the public theater production of 2023 puts ghosts uniquely owned by him. In a fanatical show, Ato Blankson-Wood plays in a great show tomorrow, turning his eyes to his head and declares fiercely to his father’s fiery appeal.
In the new audio production, Jeremy McCarter, a disciple of Oskar Eustis Public Theater, founder of the production company Make-Believe Association, takes a step forward from the Delacorte stage. McCart not puts ghosts, but us, the audience, in Hamlet’s role. The sound of his environment blends with the sound of his body. We heard what he heard.
Readers may know that McCart is the co-author of Lin-Manuel Miranda Hamilton: Revolution As a public historian himself. But since the establishment of Make-Believe in 2017, McCarter’s collaborative efforts have focused around original live audio dramas by Chicago writers. With the pandemic, the company moved to longer studio works, including recently Song of the Lakethis is a Water World For modern ears. Listening through Make-Believe’s stream, I thought: What would have happened if Studs Terkel, Norman Corwin and Octavia Butler gathered together and used 21st century recording technology?
Maybe that’s the case. But even today’s audiences need to be warmed up village From the perspective of the protagonist only. McCart knows this. Episode 1 doesn’t start with “Who is there?” In the famous Sentinel scene (Hamlet is absent after all), but in the listening direction of the modern commuter: “The story you are about to hear, its flesh, its bloody and unnatural behavior,” Daveed Diggs whispered, if you’re going to hear it for the sake of vividness, the frolic craze on the playtext, if you’re going to hear it…
And it is indeed the case. When we first met Hamlet, sound designer Mikhail Fiksel remembered an actor who was about to enter the stage. We hear footsteps echoing in the lonely silence of the stereo landscape, breathing deeply, and then a heavy door opening a heavy door to Claudius’s crowning stage. Suddenly, Elsinore’s social space – music, laughter, chat. Daniel Kyri, who plays a dancer in the small village and rarely plays for the actors, himself grabbed himself from the start and hopes that “this too strong meat will melt.” Under McCarter’s guidance, the solo is not a private thought spoken out loud, but a long-running internal monologue.
adapt village Audio is not new. Orson Welles’ Colombia Workshop It was conducted in the fall of 1936 and 12 years later by the BBC. These adaptations can be traced back to our present day, but they are part of the vibrant auditory culture of the time. As Neil Verma wrote, radio dramatists built a fourth wall for the audience while the stage dramatists tried to break down for the audience. Contemporary works about Audible tend to avoid the manifesto style of these early works, and sadly their acoustic experiments. This is McCarter’s production as a welcome intervention in this overproduction but unidentified game: Back to the imagination of the acoustic medium.
Instead of sacrificing visual effects, the series spaces it: the complex arrangement of lavalier, shotgun and binaural microphones captures sound in all directions. Pulps might cry, McCarter cuts the text to highlight Hamlet’s audition, but they are dress-ups. Any Shakespeare scholar knows that the text we read today is highly mediated by itself, which is a combination of at least three different versions. At age Big theft small villagedespite its formal innovation, this edition offers extraordinary loyalty.
Intimacy may just be a word that describes the achievements this team has achieved here. Indeed: We do hear Hamlet’s heartbeat, breath and memory in the context of his social world. I think the experiment works best when we hear that Hamlet is not prophesied but embedded in his place and time. When the microphone is not inside him, hebut on his lapel, the soundscape is captured when the fusion of his views. What is most memorable in episode 3 is that when the sound of the bell not only illustrates the time of day, but also tells the scale of psychological decline.
However, there are dangers to achieve such intimacy by reducing village A drama that plays a role. We might call it McCart’s “Hamiltonization” village: The character’s personalization of his social world. For example, the “lonely man” is done entirely underwater. It makes the audio, Methinks makes it riveted, but it eliminates that most solos of the script are heard. This included the speech of the usurping of King Claudius, who regretted the “limèd’s soul” of “working for freedom/art is more dedicated”. This kind of speech is translated in audio into eavesdropping noise, but we will be better at listening to a wider range of sounds. Claudius compared his soul to animals caught in glue traps, and sometimes, when it tries to become more free, it makes people’s production more troubled.
McCarter said the purpose was to boycott Hamlet’s commonplace, and Laurence Olivier famously expressed “can’t make up his mind” in his 1948 film. But this remark ultimately keeps this romantic individualism going on, rather than challenging it, making society a social, critical, murder, love, which may be a conscience problem. In this way, the artwork will eventually be privatized with very public issues: what system will we adopt when we should create injustice? How do we test the authenticity of beliefs when we cannot believe our own opinions? As McCart in his New York Times He was most interested in the question: “Who among us didn’t feel it,” he wrote, “that time is not in union’?” But when turning the drama into a universal adult narrative, we lost what “we” is.
So, how do you “enter the ghost” in this stage of production? I won’t give it up. Sounds great, even if not meaningful. (Especially if you’re a nerd like me and research the script with audio. How do Hamlet write something while in the ocean?) But, it doesn’t matter anything, because this adaptability makes less sense.
Indeed, the most compelling adaptation of the stage direction “Enter Ghost” is not adaptation at all, but Isabella Hammad’s 2021 novel Enter the ghost. It tells the story of a British Palestinian actress village On the West Bank. This novel is not about characters like us, but about trying the opposite: forcing readers like me to face a world that is completely different from their own. That’s what all great art should do. Or I heard it.
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