“There is only one good reason for becoming an actor and that is to aspire to the role of Hamlet. If that desire is not there, you shouldn’t become an actor. You might have a career in the theatre as a performer, you might become a personality. You might even become a star – but you won’t become an artist." – Former Stratford Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Richard Monette.
In 1991, at The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, actor Colm Feore played the role of Hamlet, one of the greatest hurdles in actor's career, a role which he says tells an actor the most about himself. This is an excerpt from that chat.
Who is the best Hamlet and why?
Colm Feore: "Well…. that’s an awfully difficult question. I don’t have a best or a favourite. I like bits of all of them from Richard Monette and Nicky Pennell here to the (Kevin) Klines and the (Mel) Gibsons and (Lawrence) Oliviers and Nicol Williamsons on film and television stuff and I found even if you disagreed with the interpretations A, B, C and D – suddenly you come to E and thought Gosh, I never thought of that; he does that really well, and then of course, you steal it."
Are there do and don’ts? How do feel about the relationship between Hamlet and his mother. Do you see him as effeminate?
Colm Feore: "No, I don’t see him like that at all. I don’t think that much touted Oedipal underpinning for the character is a very good idea because then it all becomes a play about a boy’s relationship to his mom, and it just ain’t so. That’s not what it’s about. Shakespeare makes that clear. If anything, Hamlet has an enormous problem with women. He thinks they are just disgusting and weak and frail; he cannot forgive them their moral corruptibility, and so his anger and dismay and disbelief with his mother Gertrude is far more important than the ridiculous notion that he wants to sleep with her himself.
"It gives you the scary heebee-crawlies just thinking about it. Hamlet's disappointment is cosmic and enormous with his mother. It’s taken her from the man she allegedly loved and Hamlet certainly idealized and probably mythologized slightly – his father. Once her husband is gone, it’s taken Gertrude a full month to remarry to his uncle Claudius, who Hamlet has never liked and who is not nearly the man his father was, so Hamlet discovers in the ghost scene that this has been going on before he died. So this is a huge disappointment and I think sex is about the last thing on his mind."
How long did it take you to prepare for this role?
Colm Feore: "About a year. We started this when David William, the director, who had directed five Hamlets and seen God only knows how many others, asked me if I wanted to do it last year, I guess around August. We bandied around ideas and then started meeting for four and five hour sessions on a regular basis through the latter end of the fall and coming to conclusions about what we both wanted to do with it. We agreed on every point and therefore were allowed and able to present the company on the first day ,with a unified front saying this is what we have decided we would like to do. Can we all come online and go for it? So it was very useful, but it did take a long time."
Did you modernize Hamlet at all?
Colm Feore: "I don’t think that’s necessary. The man speaks English, and speaks it clearly and brilliantly, so what is the need to update, if you will, the sensibility? The things we are talking about are human nature, our place in the world, which has not really changed for thousands of years.
How about the delivery of lines and the correct pacing of those universally known soliloquies?
Colm Feore: "It’s got little to do with pace really, but more to do with thinking. This is a man stuck with these enormous problems that the audience has witnessed. Hamlet has the idea that he’s got to revenge the murder of his father, told to him by a ghost. He has to face the fact the king is an adulterer and that his mother is just as bad. Everyone around him is a spy, so he is completely and utterly alone. It begins to make great sense when this man is stuck with his back against the wall and says “
'What are we doing… I don’t know how to … well.. um … to be or not be will have to do.'
"Hamlet thinks as far as he is concerned, that every one of those soliloquies is inadequate. They’re not good enough and he is making it up as he goes along. He is searching for each image, each idea trying to come to some conclusion and he never does. If you look at those things as never having been said before, and simply thought at that second, then they don’t become dull readings of a speech you had to study when you were in high school, but a living breathing human being who is struggling from underwater to get to the surface and to understand."
In Part Three, Colm Feore, who returns to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival to play Macbeth and the lead role in Cyrano de Bergerac for 2009, chats in this 1991 interview about his comedic roles and the fact he does not treat comedy as comedy.
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