Chris Coleman never aspired to direct Hamlet.

The artistic director of the DCPA never saw himself in that role. He had played the title character onstage twice — senior year in college at Baylor University and again at Actor’s Express, a theater company he founded in Atlanta — and “literally never wanted to direct it because I couldn’t get those (productions) out of my head.”

But now, as director of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s season opener, Coleman said, “it’s like visiting an old friend, seeing it through new eyes.”

His understanding of the play has evolved as he has aged. He now sees it as “a play about growing into your destiny. What’s at stake politically in that kingdom is giant. I don’t know that I felt that or got that in earlier times.”

The setting Coleman has created for his Hamlet is inspired by Norse legends, referring back to the peak of the Viking period. “I told the costume designer everybody should look like they could go into battle within half an hour. We’re not trying to be literal about it, but that gives us permission to have the story make sense.”

Coleman is a self-described history nut, political junkie and lover of Shakespeare. Those interests all come together in directing this play— he sees parallels and historic relevance everywhere.

In the course of discussing Hamlet, he references a number of historic and contemporary world figures and cultural moments that echo for him. Elizabeth I (someone who was groomed for the throne from childhood, unlike Hamlet), Barack Obama (a professorial leader and nuanced thinker who, like Hamlet, could be slow to act), Alexander the Great, Elizabethan theater and pre-Christianized Viking Scandinavia.

The history and politics combined with the incredible language, he said, “just feels so rich and fun to play with.”

Two of his undergrad professors first turned Coleman on to Shakespeare and he’s felt connected ever since. “Every time I’ve worked on one (of his plays), I’ve learned a little bit more about how to decode the structure of the language.” Directing Hamlet has been “the most glorious pleasure in the world,” he said.

In Elizabethan times, Coleman said, the revenge story was the runaway hit of the day, akin to our action-adventure story. Audiences couldn’t get enough. What Shakespeare did that was revolutionary was allow the audience to see inside the mind of the hero in a way they hadn’t before.

“Shakespeare revealed consciousness before psychology was defined as a science,” Coleman said.

“It’s almost like Hamlet’s psyche is transparent to us. We get to see every internal twist and turn that he is struggling with.”

Rather than depict Prince Hamlet as depressed or inactive, as some literary critics suggest, Coleman prefers to believe “he’s heartbroken at the beginning of the play.” He feels deceived by his mother, Gertrude, who has married his uncle, Claudius, shockingly soon after the death of his father. Hamlet takes a long time testing whether the ghost encouraging him to avenge his father’s death is a benevolent spirit or, as he says, “a demon come to lure me into hell.”

“What I never considered as a young man,” Coleman said, “is, if Hamlet were a more intuitive politician, like Alexander the Great, who charged into battle when his father was stabbed in the middle of the court…” things would have gone differently. Imagining an alternative fictional history, Coleman wonders, for instance, what if Hamlet had met Fortinbras and his army at the border, where the Norwegian crown prince is waiting to regain territory his father lost?

“But that’s not who he is.” A different political mind could have pursued it, Coleman said, but not Hamlet.

Instead, “it takes Hamlet the whole play to become the man who is as ruthless as he needs to be to operate at this political level.”

In most productions, Hamlet is cast as a mature man. But Coleman believes the character is quite unformed. “I think he’s a kid, he’s in college, completely unprepared to step onto the throne.”

Coleman cast actor Ty Fanning to play Hamlet, an accomplished actor who, Coleman is happy to say, can appear to be mid-20s. That suits the director’s idea of the prince as youthful, even immature.

The character is “very overwhelmed with his emotions at the top of the play. He’s got an amazing mind…he’d be a great professor. He can see every facet of a possible action. But that can be paralyzing. I think in some ways about Obama, such an inspiring speaker and person but if your thinking is that nuanced…it was tougher for him to get to a solution.”

Given his many insightful reflections on history and the relevance of Shakespeare’s play, does Coleman perhaps see parallels to a certain modern revenge-seeking politician in the play that is all about revenge?

“I would rather leave you room to see the correlations that you find,” he said. “Certainly there’s a lot to be thought about.”

Ultimately, how does a director approach such an iconic play, often cited as the greatest of all time?

“It’s like, how do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time,” he said. “You take it a piece at a time and pay attention to the story, that’s the exciting part, decoding the language enough to get to hear the truth of the story.”

DETAILS
Hamlet
Sep 13-Oct 6 • Wolf Theatre
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