Bread And Puppet Theater’s “Out-of-Joint Hamlet”—which the legendary experimental, activist puppet and mask troupe is performing in their Paper Mache Cathedral in Glover, Vermont, on Friday nights at 7:30 through July 6—reframes Shakespeare’s most celebrated play for our Trump-ian moment.
“Hamlet,” which dates back to around 1600, has most frequently been presented in the past couple hundred years as a psychological study of the young prince of Denmark wracked by grief over the murder of his father and inflamed with a desire for revenge. Contemporary performances seem to ask whether Hamlet was too thoughtful, too lacking in action, especially in comparison to the other young men in the play whose fathers have been killed—Prince Fortinbras of Norway, who threatens war on Denmark after his father is killed by Hamlet’s father, and Laertes, who threatens to overthrow King Claudius after Hamlet kills his father, Polonius.
Instead, Bread And Puppet Founder and Director Peter Schumann has edited and condensed “Hamlet” down to an impressionistic retelling performed with giant cardboard kings, tiny hand-puppets and masked performers. He highlights Shakespeare’s “best poetry and the funniest lines” (as pointed out by my friend, James Cook, who taught the play to students at Gloucester High School for many years), and endeavors to foreground the politics that are just background scenery in many productions.
“I didn’t try to make psychiatry by doing the whole thing psychologically correct. Too much work. But the fascist moment,” Schumann tells me, “makes it similar to this year.”
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“Hamlet” is about fascism?
In Shakespeare’s script, Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark, has killed the king of Norway and won his lands. Norwegian Prince Fortinbras seeks to win his territory back by making war on Denmark. But Claudius, who has killed Hamlet’s father to seize the throne of Denmark, cuts a deal with Fortinbras’s uncle, who has become king of Norway, to offer him Poland instead.
In Act Four, Scene Four, of the script, Hamlet bumps into Fortinbras’s troops as they cut across Denmark—with Claudius’s permission—on the way to attack Poland. A Captain tells him: “We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name.” Hamlet replies, “Why, then the Polack never will defend it.” To which the Captain says, “It is already garrison’d.”
This is what Schumann is identifying as the fascism in the play—various scheming strongmen carving up the world. This is the fascism that he believes rhymes with Trump’s America. “The whole issue of Denmark in cahoots with Norway devastating Poland,” he says. “They call the Polish the ‘Polacks,’ like the Nazis did.”
“And now we are in that situation and Americans don’t go into the streets and protest it,” Schumann laments.
“Total brutality,” Schumann says of the way the U.S. government is handling immigration, separating children from their parents. “They help making this war and then no asylum.” Schumann says, “Trump has his imitators in Hungary, in Poland, all over Europe, all over the place. All this neo-fascism. It’s fascism. We live in a Hamlet moment—totally out of joint.”
Bread And Puppet’s “Out-of-Joint Hamlet” debuted at the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro, Vermont (about a half hour’s drive southwest of Glover), on April 7 and 8. (It’s been revised somewhat for this incarnation.)
The center opened in 2017. “The building design blends a bow to Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London with a nod to Greensboro’s rural character. The faux roof mimics the thatched roof of the Globe,” management wrote as construction was wrapping up. They originally planned to call it the Mirror Theatre, in reference to a line in “Hamlet” in which the prince suggest actors “hold as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”
“They built an imitation of the Globe Theatre in Greensboro,” Schumann says, funded by millionaire donor Andrew C. Brown, a part-time resident of the town. “When I stepped in there I saw that imitation Globe Theatre. It had catwalks 30 feet in the air. So I decided this needs a 30-foot-tall Hamlet.”
Hamlet himself ended up being played by a forlorn-looking hand-puppet. But the ghost of his dead father, a skeleton, and his murderer uncle, King Claudius, are portrayed by giant cardboard puppets, multiple-stories-tall, operated by rigging of ropes and pulleys.
Why choose “Hamlet” from all of Shakespeare’s plays? “We want the most intense and decrepit and whatever you can get. And ‘Hamlet’ lives right up to that,” Schumann says. Also, “It’s wonderful to have a ghost represent your inner ghost—like a puppet. It deserves a puppet show.”
The title of Bread And Puppet’s “Out-Of-Joint Hamlet” comes from lines in Shakespeare’s script. In Act One, Scene Two, King Claudius assesses that Fortinbras is threatening Denmark because, amid the change of kings, the Norwegian prince suspects a weakness: “Our state to be disjoint and out of frame.” The theme reoccurs at the end of Act One, Scene Four, when Hamlet meets the ghost of his murdered father and decides, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”
Bread and Puppet’s version is edited down and condensed. “I had to reread it because I hadn’t read it since high school times,” Schumann says. “As you read through it, the beauty is so fascinating, the intensity of the poetry, the riddles … the totally crooked way of putting things together that don’t belong together.”
At the same time, Schumann says, “I’m not sure of the action. … It’s very ill conceived.” He adds, “I have a lot of problems with Claudius. Why did Shakespeare leave this self-confessed pounding his chest confession in there? Why didn’t he leave it out for us to figure out?” Schumann jettisons much of Claudius overboard.
Also, Schumann is bothered by the way Shakespeare makes Hamlet angry at his mother for remarrying—to his uncle—after his father’s death. “The outrageousness of her marrying the brother was common sense all over the middle ages,” Schumann says. It was a way of maintaining family stability and providing for widows and their children. “It’s totally meaningless to interpret that into meaningfulness.” Schumann makes Hamlet more of a crazed misogynist.
Schmann still touches on many of the play’s key points and famous lines, but if you’re not quite familiar with the play, it can be easy to get confused. Familiar pieces appear seemingly without context. Often four hours long if performed in full, Schumann whittles the play down to about an hour.
The show opens with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy read by a pair of narrators: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” The cast, dressed in white, lays on the dirt floor as if collapsed, stands about in seeming random formation, sits in chairs.
A giant naked cardboard ghost of the dead king, Hamlet’s father, appears to two hand-puppets in a small puppet theater at the back of the stage. Then a giant cardboard skeleton emerges from back door of stage with a tiny hand-puppet that plays Hamlet. A narrator reads text (in Shakespeare, a Hamlet speech) scrawled across the skeleton’s face and ribs: “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!… How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!”
Young girls dance in front of a giant cardboard king in red robes—Claudius, I presume. Then the girls play violins as masked fools dance and perform a “dumb show” reenacting the murder of Hamlet’s father.
“The Out-of-Joint Orchestra” plays an “interlude,” in which Schumann conducts the horns and strings and drum players and one narrator who recites, “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! / how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how / express and admirable! in action how like an angel.” It’s another Hamlet speech, though as is often the case here, the source is not identified.
Hamlet and his (hand-puppet) mother talk. “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,” she says. “Mother, you have my father much offended,” he replies. Hamlet realizes someone is spying on them and stabs the person dead—who turns out to be Polonius. Hamlet defends his action by attacking his mother: “A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother.”
Soon the cast sits before the small puppet theater at the back of the stage to hear Hamlet and a chicken puppet trade off speeches. Hamlet: “What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.” The chicken spouts Donald Trump statements: “My I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”
Chicken/Trump: “We’re rounding ’em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they’re going to be happy because they want to be legalized. And, by the way, I know it doesn’t sound nice. But not everything is nice.” Chicken/Trump: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”
The scene ends with hand-puppet Hamlet declaring, “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”
A cardboard Ophelia appears for the first time—and dies. Cast members run around the giant red cardboard king as a narrator declares: “Save yourself, my lord: / The ocean, overpeering of his list, / Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste … The rabble call him lord.” Schumann doesn’t spell it out, but this is from Act Four, Scene Five, when a crowd with Laertes bursts in on King Claudius threatening to overthrow him as Laertes demands to know who killed his father.
Schumann announces, “Now the Out of Joint Dance Company will perform for you the U.S. Congress’s favorite incompetence dance.” Masked goons try to drag the giant red cardboard king down. The puppet king laughs at them.
“They’re trying to pull him down and he says, ‘Ha Ha Ha!’ And they can’t pull him down. That’s exactly what’s happening now,” Schumann tells me, referring to Trump. “If they were to pull him down we’d be worse off.”
Two clowns come out in front of the giant red king and repeatedly fall to the ground as the puppet king finally lowers to floor. The cast kneels at the front of the stage as cardboard people descend from ceiling and all fall to floor as if dead. Then the play concludes with a choir’s song.
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