Three Hamlet ballets from World War II to the Ukrainian crisis

Hamlet has been transposed into ballets rather frequently, but with much less success than other Shakespeare plays. No Hamlet ballet has survived for more than a few decades (and many of them were only performed for one or a few seasons), and none has found the international recognition of works such as Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet or George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is certainly due to the difficulty of transposing the multi-layered play and the complex inner life and rhetorical flourish of the main characters, and in particular of its protagonist, into physical movements. Although the play’s fame attracts audiences who know the story well, which makes it easier to convey the action in a visual medium, it is often difficult to convince them that a Hamlet who does not speak his iconic lines is truly comparable to the character created by Shakespeare. If, as Edward Gordon Craig has asserted, ‘Hamlet’s tragedy lies in the fact that he talks instead of acts’, ¹ it is extremely challenging to convey this tragedy in a genre which does not feature any talking and in which every inner movement must be translated into physical motion.

Early choreographers – then called ballet masters – of Hamlet, such as Francesco Clerico (Venice, 1788, and Vienna, 1798) and Louis Henry (Naples, 1812, and Paris, 1816), created their ballets in environments in which the play was little or not at all known. Their works were not directly based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but on a French translation-adaptation of the play by Jean-François Ducis which brought the play closer to a French classical tragedy, and a translation of Ducis’s work into Italian by Francesco Gritti. In Clerico’s and Henry’s ballets, Hamlet resembled the hero of a French classical tragedy and became a typically active, determined male ballet protagonist. Instead of Hamlet’s inner struggle with his own doubts and temperament, Clerico and Henry showed the audience a more classical conflict between duty and love, both romantic (in Ducis’s version, Ophelia is the daughter of Claudius, who is no longer Hamlet’s uncle) and filial (in both ballets, as in Ducis, Hamlet’s mother takes part in the crime and her son tries to kill her but does not have the heart to do so). ² Such patterns, which were well known from classical Greek tragedies such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia and from French tragedies such Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, helped the audience to understand the action and adapted the unruly English play to the theatrical conventions that prevailed in Italy and France at the time.

In the 20th century, the rise of modernism and psychoanalysis as well as Freud’s writings on Hamlet led to a shift in the way the play was transposed into ballets. Instead of trying to recreate the action of the play in their visual medium, choreographers created a number of short, fragmented, and allusive ballets which focused on the psyche of the main character. One prominent example is the Hamlet ballet which the actor and choreographer Robert Helpmann created in 1942 for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, which later became the Royal Ballet in London. Due to the familiarity of English audiences with the play, he could use the material more freely than his predecessors (Helpmann’s version seems to be the first Hamlet ballet created in the English-speaking world). Helpmann originally choreographed the ballet for himself, with Margot Fonteyn as Ophelia, Celia Franca as Queen of Denmark and David Paltenghi as King of Denmark. It was revived several times (later performers of the main role included Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Dowell), and was last performed in its entirety in 1981. In spite of its mixed critical reception, ³ it has possibly been the longest-lived Hamlet ballet in history so far.

Helpmann chose to create his ballet to a single piece of music, Piotr I. Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet fantasy overture (1888). Although the overture is barely 20 minutes long and does not directly refer to any specific events in Hamlet, Helpmann endeavoured to transpose most of the key scenes of the play, probably relying on the audience’s knowledge to fill the gaps. Inspired by the line ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come’ (3.1.68) ⁴ in Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, the ballet told the story in flashbacks, as a series of visions of the dying Hamlet. ⁵ This allowed Helpmann to treat the source rather freely and disregard narrative logic and linearity.

The ballet opens with the funeral procession of young Hamlet, whose body is floating above the heads of a number of pallbearers. Shortly after, the drunken gravedigger appears with a skull in his hand. Hamlet enters, touches his shoulder, looks at his hand and then covers his face with both hands. The gravedigger holds the skull in front of Hamlet’s face. This scene, which does not appear in Shakespeare, refers to the moments before Hamlet’s death: in the fencing match at the end of the ballet, Laertes wounds Hamlet’s shoulder. Hamlet then dances a short solo and meets his father’s ghost. As the ghost whispers to his son, Hamlet covers his ears with his hands as if poison had been poured into them, and collapses. The next scene shows a dance at Claudius’s court and Laertes’s departure. Ophelia dances a pas de deux with her brother and another one with Hamlet. At first, her duo with Hamlet is harmonious and lyrical, but when Hamlet realises that they are being watched, he throws Ophelia to the floor; she eventually runs away. Moments later, Hamlet stages the dumb show. As he points his finger at Claudius, Gertrude and Polonius seem appalled. Hamlet kisses Ophelia, and she is carried away, floating above the other courtiers in a similar way to Hamlet’s body at the beginning and the end of the ballet. This is followed by the scene in which Hamlet fails to strike Claudius, and the murder of Polonius, whom he kills almost in passing. His confrontation with his mother is reduced to a few seconds; a little later, Ophelia dances a short madness solo, dressed in white. The gravedigger reappears and presents Hamlet with the skull again; this is followed by a fist fight between Hamlet and Laertes. After a short solo by Hamlet, the ballet moves on to the final duel in which Helpmann follows Shakespeare rather closely: Claudius presents Hamlet with the poison which Gertrude drinks, Laertes strikes Hamlet with his poisoned sword and receives a fatal blow from his own weapon, Hamlet kills Claudius with his sword. The corps de ballet assumes various poses of grief as the gravedigger reappears, this time drinking from the skull. Hamlet feels his shoulder wound again, the gravedigger staggers off, and Hamlet reaches out for the ghost before he collapses and is carried off as in the ballet’s opening scene. ⁶

Helpmann’s interest in psychoanalytical readings of the play is obvious throughout the ballet. Its frame suggests that the whole action is a dream or vision (recalling Puck’s lines at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream); as the boundary between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred, it is more and more difficult to distinguish between the dying Hamlet’s memories and his delirious fantasies. Dominated by a huge figure, possibly an allegory of revenge that seems to descend on the protagonists with a drawn sword, Leslie Hurry’s highly colourful set could also be the monstrous creation of a dream. In the foreground, a giant hand holding a dagger between two fingers seems to hand it down to the members of the company, as if inviting murder and suicide. Dominated by the oversize figures, the dancers, who often assume exaggerated expressionistic poses, seem to be reduced to puppets, trapped in a course they cannot change. As Hamlet watches his own life unfold before his dying eyes, he remains somewhat distant from the action he is involved in. ⁷ This reflects his own inability fully to invest himself in his revenge in the play. Shakespeare’s Hamlet eventually sees himself as guided by his own destiny as he agrees to fight Laertes in spite of his dark foreboding: ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. (5.2.165–8).

Helpmann also emphasises the circularity of the action; Simon Palfrey has argued that the play could start all over again with young Hamlet taking his father’s place as a corpse and ghost (except that there is no longer anyone to take revenge or to be revenged on). ⁸ The ballet begins and ends with the same scene, Hamlet’s funeral procession and the appearance of the gravedigger. Part of young Hamlet’s spirit, like his father’s, lingers even when he is supposed to be dead: in the play, he utters his last words and dying groan 46 lines before the end of the play and Fortinbras’s order to carry his body out, which makes it highly unlikely that he is still alive at the point at which, in the ballet, his delirious vision begins.

Helpmann’s focus on Hamlet’s psyche and the oniric quality of his ballet was doubtlessly influenced by early 20th-century productions of the play, such as Constantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig’s staging at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1911-12. ⁹ This production focused on Hamlet’s state of mind and presented the play as a series of dream-like visions of the main character. Moreover, Helpmann certainly knew of John Barrymore’s Freud-inspired production, which was first performed in New York in 1922 and came to London in 1925, and Tyrone Guthrie’s 1937 production at the Old Vic, which starred John Gielgud as an Oedipal Hamlet (the same year, Helpmann played Oberon in Guthrie’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). ¹⁰ Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet was also influenced by Freud, with his 1948 film depicting the relationship between Hamlet and his mother as openly erotic.

Due to the absence of spoken words, family ties cannot easily be expressed in a ballet; nothing indicates clearly that Gertrude is Hamlet’s mother and Ophelia is Laertes’s sister. Both relationships are erotically charged in Helpmann’s ballet, which is particularly easy to convey through body language. Hamlet kisses his mother on the mouth, and the two female characters merge into one another at various points. In the initial court dance scene, there is already some confusion between Ophelia and Gertrude. In the dumbshow, Ophelia plays the role of the player queen (who, in the ‘real’ world of the play, is supposed to stand for Hamlet’s mother), the ghost of Hamlet’s father interprets the role of the player king, and Claudius re-enacts the murder of his brother by poisoning the player king. At Ophelia’s funeral, a figure that seems to be the queen removes her veil, and Hamlet suddenly sees his dead lover before him. Thus, Helpmann blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality and between natural and supernatural occurrences even more than Shakespeare.

Like a number of theatre directors, including Barrymore (to the displeasure of George Bernard Shaw), ¹¹ Helpmann also hints at incestuous desire between Ophelia and Laertes. At the beginning of the ballet, Ophelia dances an affectionate pas de deux with her brother in which they could easily be mistaken for a couple of lovers; Polonius separates the siblings several times. In the madness scene, Ophelia kisses her brother.

Funerals occupy a prominent place (the twenty-minute ballet features three funerals and three appearances of the gravedigger), which may not be surprising for a ballet created during World War II. The special emphasis that Helpmann placed on the drunken gravedigger, who is both a figure of comic relief ¹² and, in this choreography, a prophetic character who foretells Hamlet’s death, might hint at the absurdity of the massacres occurring on the ballet stage and the world stage. The choice of transposing this masterpiece of England’s national author into a ballet during this conflict might also have patriotic reasons: it recalls Olivier’s decision to produce an optimistic film version of Henry V in 1944, in which he idealised the English king and his defeat of the French more than Shakespeare does in the playtext.

Although some critics admired Helpmann’s ballet, others complained about the extreme compression and viewed it not as a self-contained work of art, but as ‘a stimulating essay’ on the theme of Hamlet, which exists only as a comment on Shakespeare’s play. ¹³ In contrast, A. H. Franks thought that Helpmann succeeded in shedding new light on the source through his psychological reading of the play and by creating a ballet that is both abstract and literary:

The choreographer who attempts to translate a literary work piecemeal into the language of ballet is attempting an absurdity; and even if he succeeds, he is accomplishing nothing. But if, on the other hand, he enlarges our conception of a literary work, then he is very definitely accomplishing a great deal.

According to Franks, Helpmann ‘develops his theme beyond the scope of the play into new and exciting psychological possibilities’. ¹⁴ Audrey Williamson pointed out the novelty of ballets which did not only try to visualise parts of the plot of the literary source, but engaged with its underlying themes and motifs. She called Helpmann’s Hamlet

a purely balletic vision of the theme, a work which has original genius as a ballet as well as being vividly suggestive of the play’s psychological and emotional content. It is, in fact, a critical commentary on Shakespeare’s play and as such something quite new in ballet.

She also argued that the ballet ‘conveyed the spiritual essence of the play’. ¹⁵

Helpmann’s Hamlet was the first Shakespeare ballet created in what is today the Royal Ballet, and the only one until the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday in 1964, when Frederick Ashton created The Dream and Kenneth MacMillan choreographed Images of Love for a mixed programme that was completed by Helpmann’s Hamlet. A year after his relatively unsuccessful Images of Love, a ballet that consisted of short scenes inspired by lines from Shakespeare’s plays, MacMillan created his extremely popular Romeo and Juliet ballet. In this work, which is still performed regularly around the world, MacMillan laid special emphasis on the psyche of the title heroine. MacMillan’s next and last Shakespeare ballet was Sea of Troubles, a half-hour ballet based on Hamlet that he created for Dance Advance, a small company of former Royal Ballet dancers, in 1988. ¹⁶ The music was by Anton Webern and Bohuslav Martinů.

In spite of its fragmented structure, which recalls Helpmann’s adaptation, this experimental chamber ballet for a small group of little-known performers was far removed from the 1942 Hamlet, which featured famous dancers such as Helpmann and Fonteyn and possibly had patriotic undertones. It also differed radically from the grandiose spectacle of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, which became a showpiece for what had by then become one of the world’s major ballet companies and for the star couple of the premiere, Fonteyn and Nureyev. However, Helpmann’s ballet and both MacMillan ballets share their focus on the inner worlds of the protagonists.

MacMillan’s ballet, which was performed by six barefoot dancers on an almost empty stage, defies summarisation because of its fragmented, circular structure. ¹⁷ As critics pointed out almost unanimously after the premiere, the ballet requires previous knowledge of the play. ¹⁸ Key moments are represented in a continuous flow of action, in an order that does not correspond to the literary source. Some scenes are repeated over and over again while others are eliminated, and the performers constantly change roles. The six characters – Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and the ghost – are given near-equal importance so that Hamlet loses his central role in his eponymous play. The performers wear near-identical clothes: a white shirt and black trousers for the men, long, fluid grey dresses for the women. Various accessories help to identify the role a performer is playing in a given scene: Claudius and Gertrude wear crowns, Ophelia wears a chaplet of daisies on her head, and Polonius holds a blood-stained cloth in front of his face (he does not appear before Hamlet stabs him). The ghost is wrapped in a transparent shroud, whereas Hamlet is identified by the absence of accessories, although he sometimes carries a book (in one sequence which evokes the closet scene, the book seems to turn into a picture of his father which he brandishes in front of Gertrude’s face).

The book, a symbol of Hamlet’s attachment to words (since the Romantic period, he has often been represented with a skull or a book, which identifies him as a solitary thinker and philosopher), might also stand for the law here, and for the sacred marriage vow that Hamlet’s mother broke. The book also represents Hamlet’s mastery of words – his alleged madness is expressed through clever puns which prove his superiority over other characters, his soliloquies mark him as a man of great intelligence, and a letter he forges saves his life – a skill that he is deprived of in the ballet, which might be one reason why he has even more difficulty to impose himself here than in the play.

The non-linear structure of the ballet and the shifting links between dancers and characters create confusion and a distancing effect that actively solicits the audience. The spectators constantly have to identify which scene is being performed and who is who; it also takes a while even to understand that the dancers constantly change roles. This ‘cross-fading’ technique, in which a character suddenly becomes someone else, recalls Helpmann’s Hamlet. One might also draw a parallel between Sea of Troubles and Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, according to Julie Sanders, ‘chooses to re-view Hamlet from the theatrical sidelines, from the margins, and through the eyes of minor characters. This serves to render Hamlet, and particularly the idea of the prince, absurd’. ¹⁹ Although Sea of Troubles contains none of the truly minor characters of the play, it does shift the focus away from the title hero as performers and roles become interchangeable.

Unlike previous ballet adaptations, Sea of Troubles does not idealise Hamlet, and does not allow one dancer to outshine the others. No character seems particularly good or bad, and MacMillan poignantly visualises the connections between them: thus, the ghost literally poisons Hamlet with his tale of the murder. As the ghost whispers into his son’s ear, Hamlet shakes and grinds his teeth as if in physical pain, and pushes him away. The process is repeated with his other ear, and Hamlet falls to the ground. Since this eventually leads to Hamlet’s death, the ghost can be seen as replicating Claudius’s offence (in the following sequence, which visualises the ghost’s tale, Claudius seems to hammer the poison into his brother’s ear).

In a later scene, the ghost jumps on Hamlet’s back; this indicates the burden of revenge on Hamlet’s shoulders. MacMillan also shows the psychological toll of a guilty conscience, as revealed by Claudius in his ‘O, my offence is rank’ soliloquy in the play (‘O wretched state, O bosom black as death, / O limèd soul that, struggling to be free, / Art more engaged!’ 3.3.67–9), and embodied in his movement language. The ballet shows the murder of Old Hamlet, and Gertrude, who is Claudius’s accomplice, hands him the crown and tries to wrap him in the royal cloak, but it slips from his shoulders. An oppressive weight seems to press Claudius down, and he lifts his feet from the ground with great difficulty. The king’s attire - his cloak and boots - is apparently too big and heavy for him, which recalls Hamlet’s words about Claudius after his hyperbolic praise of his own father:

This was your husband. Look you now what follows.

Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear

Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,

And batten on this moor? (3.4.62–6)

In MacMillan’s ballet, the murders of Old Hamlet and Polonius are performed several times, which indicates that all the characters are caught up in an inescapable cycle of murder and revenge – the sea of troubles in which the existence of Hamlet and all the other characters in the play dissolves after the original crime and the ghost’s revelation. ²⁰ Moreover, the corpses of Old Hamlet and Polonius repeatedly appear on stage and the characters interact with them, in a way that emphasises how the past remains present and the memory of the dead triggers key events in the play and the ballet.

The bodies of the two dead fathers, Old Hamlet and Polonius, sometimes merge into one another, for instance in a scene which has no direct equivalent in the play and in which Hamlet dances with the mad Ophelia. The corpse that lies nearby could either be Polonius’s or old Hamlet’s. The following sequence recalls the nunnery scene: Hamlet mistreats Ophelia in an apparent fit of madness, while she repeatedly clings to him. It ends with Ophelia tugging vigorously at the corpse as if she wanted to bring it back to life (and it does indeed come to life several times in the ballet). The juxtaposition of Hamlet’s feigned and Ophelia’s real madness, both of which are caused by the murder of a father and erupt traumatically in the presence of a corpse that is not clearly identified, visualises the parallel between Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s fates.

Both Claudius and Hamlet show tenderness to the corpse of the person they killed (Old Hamlet and Polonius), for instance by cradling it. This emphasises the similarity of the criminal and the revenger in the play: as in a revenge tragedy, ²¹ Hamlet overshoots his mark by killing a number of characters that have nothing to do with the murder of his father, including Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Laertes. MacMillan also touches on the theme of repentance which is only hinted at in the play. At different points in the ballet, Hamlet lays both his mother and Ophelia on top of the corpse, as if attempting to reunite Gertrude with her husband and Ophelia with the father he deprived her of. It also emphasises the main protagonist’s obsession with death and female sexuality.

MacMillan uses both the movement language of the characters and stylised gestures of his own invention to express the emotions of his protagonists: thus, Ophelia’s grief is symbolised by her holding her hands next to her eyes with outstretched fingers, an image that suggests flowing tears. ²² This gesture is not directly taken from traditional, 19th-century ballet mime – in Swan Lake, for instance, the Swan Princess tells the Prince about her mother’s grief by moving both index fingers from her eyes downwards over her cheeks to visualise crying. MacMillan thus combines a gesture that is loosely related to the mime tradition in ballet, and a more naturalistic movement vocabulary that expresses grief, such as Ophelia’s bent posture as she walks sideways while she holds her upper body almost horizontally.

Towards the end, the ballet increasingly moves towards abstraction, especially in a scene which features all the dancers and which cannot be related to any scene in the play. In this scene, the performers – three crowned queens and two kings, with a bare-headed Hamlet at the centre – hold each other by the hands. Their dancing expresses shared grief and the characters become indistinguishable, except for the fact that Hamlet still wears no crown. This move towards abstraction is suddenly reversed as a couple wearing crowns – now clearly Gertrude and Claudius – appears dressed in Old Hamlet’s cloak. Hamlet seizes the cloak and sweeps it over the other dancers, and eventually over himself, causing everybody’s death. This final appropriation of the royal cloak might indicate young Hamlet’s claim to the kingship of which he was deprived by his uncle.

MacMillan offers another perspective on his dramaturgy which expresses the exact opposite of Hamlet’s ‘relativisation’ and fits with the themes of many of his ballets: he states that is is about the tortured psyche of an outsider. According to MacMillan, the focus of his ballet lies firmly on the main character:

I chose Hamlet because I liked the world he lived in. I believe that paranoid people have a heightened sensibility and the way they think about other people is that they almost become the other person, and that’s how I’ve done my ballet. The identities change the whole time. It’s not like the real play and I would want the audience to leave thinking: well, who was Hamlet? Because that’s exactly what he’s thinking himself. I’m not telling the real story of Hamlet like the play. I’m interested in Hamlet’s world and the way he sees it, his beliefs and the characters around him and the essence of the emotion, what he’s feeling, that’s what I’m after. ²³

The question of Hamlet’s identity is therefore unresolved both from the audience’s and from Hamlet’s own perspective, which in turn recalls Simon Palfrey’s comment on the play:

In some crucial sense, this Hamlet has gone before the play starts. We piece bits of him together from the report of others, but these reports are, increasingly, of what has been lost. He might be mourning for his father: but the play is in this sense an act of mourning for him. ²⁴

The circular nature and lack of closure in the play are brought out in the ballet through its departure from linearity, the absence of Fortinbras and the repeated scenes of murder and death.

Elizabeth Klett has pointed out that critics reviewing the degree of proximity between the play and the ballets it has inspired tend to present ‘the Shakespearean text as the generator of authoritative meaning, with the dance work as its “baffling”, “confusing”, “puzzling derivative”’. ²⁵ She emphasises that the play also defies logic and linearity and is devoid of a clear meaning or message, and that its textual history complicates the idea of an authoritative ‘original’. However, MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles can indeed be called ‘derivative’, in the sense that it could hardly hold its own ground as a dance work without its reference to Shakespeare. Nonetheless, MacMillan’s allusive ballet finds striking images for the characters’ inner struggle, for instance the burden of guilt and revenge weighing on Claudius and young Hamlet respectively, and Hamlet’s obsession with his father’s murder, which is repeatedly shown on stage. The constant change of roles highlights the fact that in the play as in the ballet, good and evil, innocence and guilt are never quite clearly distributed among the characters.

Despite the move towards abstraction and condensation, the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have also seen a growing number of more or less successful full-length Hamlet ballets. Several of them were created in Russia, which is doubtlessly due to the fact that full-length story ballets have been the predominant balletic genre there since the 19th century and to the huge popularity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Russia. ²⁶

The identification of Shakespeare’s Denmark with Russia dates back at least to the 18th century, when Tsar Paul I, who was to become known as ‘The Russian Hamlet’, lost his father, Peter III, under mysterious circumstances. Peter’s death in 1762 is attributed to Grigori Orlov, the lover of his wife, who would become known as Catherine the Great. Shakespeare’s play was banned, officially and unofficially, several times in the history of Russia. During other periods, for instance in the years following the death of Stalin, it was performed frequently; a number of productions reinterpreted the play in order to comment on current political events. ²⁷ It was during this period that the first Hamlet ballets appeared in the Soviet Union: from 1969 to 1971, three choreographic adaptations of Hamlet were created in Saint Petersburg and one was created in Tbilisi. Another version was choreographed for television in Moscow in 1991, by Svetlana Voskrenskaya.

Since theatre directors in the Soviet Union tended to relate the play to the political situation in their home country, it hardly seems surprising that several Hamlet ballets have also had political undertones, even though political reinterpretations of literary works are much less frequent on the ballet stage than in the spoken theatre. The 1991 television ballet, which moved between storytelling and rather abstract explorations of the characters’ inner lives, focused both on psychology and on politics, reflecting the uncertainty and chaos created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. ²⁸ In 1999, Boris Eifman created a Russian Hamlet ballet on the murder of Peter III for his own independent company.

In spite of those precedents, the decision to create a Hamlet ballet that apparently alluded to a highly sensitive topical issue, the Ukrainian crisis, in one of Russia’s two most important ballet companies, the Bolshoi Ballet, seems like a bold move. The 2015 ballet was the brainchild of the Hungarian choreographer Radu Poklitaru, and Declan Donnellan, co-founder of Cheek by Jowl. Known, as Susan Bennett puts it, for its ‘irreverent and smart readings of Shakespeare’s (and other) texts’, ²⁹ this British theatre company has produced plays like Measure for Measure with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre under the direction of Donnellan in which the visual aspects of the performance were particularly expressive. ³⁰ Hamlet was commissioned during a period of great turmoil at the Bolshoi Ballet by Sergei Filin, the company’s controversial director who partially lost his eyesight following an acid attack on him in 2013. Poklitaru stated that he would not have chosen this particular Shakespeare play ³¹ (he had already created a Romeo and Juliet ballet with Donnellan in 2003), ³² which might indicate his awareness of the difficulty of transposing Hamlet into a ballet. According to the journalist Ismene Brown, ‘Sergei Filin, the battered ballet director, insisted on the new Hamlet going ahead this season, even as the administration have been retailoring the Bolshoi repertoire for more nationalist and traditionalist preferences during the Ukrainian crisis’. ³³ Hamlet, which was performed to music by Dmitri Shostakovich, was not a success with critics, and Filin lost his job the following year.

The ballet is set at a militarised court in the middle of the 20th century; this echoes theatre productions that have set the action in various dictatorial regimes. ³⁴ On the ballet stage, such reinterpretations are much less frequent, although some adaptations of Romeo and Juliet transform the conflict between the two warring families into a class struggle. ³⁵ In Poklitaru’s and Donnellan’s Hamlet, most of the male characters are depicted as violent and tyrannical, Claudius is dressed in a military uniform from the start, and after the murder, he commands a highly obedient army of soldiers and male courtiers.

The ballet begins before young Hamlet’s departure to Wittenberg and his father’s death, and it includes tender scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia. In an early pas de deux, they play childish games. Hamlet lies on the floor and lets Ophelia float above him while he gazes tenderly at her; she rests in his hands and on one of his knees and lifts one leg up in arabesque. ³⁶ Their contemporary movement language in this pas de deux (including a short lift of Hamlet by Ophelia) strongly recalls the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, especially towards the end of the pas de deux when they run across the stage and joyfully toss their limbs in various directions with non-balletic abandon. A little later, Hamlet departs to Wittenberg; as he is seen off by his father and his uncle, they perform a slightly comical dance around his suitcase. Ophelia desperately runs after him and is stopped and mistreated by her brother and father who throw her around in the air and cast her to the floor.

Claudius then expresses his evil intentions by performing a brief, angular, scheming solo, which identifies him as a typical stage villain. After the murder, he feigns grief and seduces Gertrude even as she cries over her husband’s corpse, in a scene that evokes Richard III’s seduction of Lady Anne (although she shows no initial disgust and is all too readily consoled by her new admirer). All the corpses eventually get up and walk into a foggy afterlife at the back of the stage – a reminder, perhaps, that in this play where action is triggered by a ghost, death does not necessarily mean closure. Thus, for instance, Yorick appears to Hamlet when he finds his skull and his multicoloured umbrella.

In the wedding scene, Claudius’s angular movement language is imitated by a crowd of men in black suits and bow ties who carry their leader. They let him float above their heads and he dives down into the sea of his courtiers in a way that rather comically evokes Manon’s dance with her admirers in the brothel scene of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon (1974). After dancing an affected pas de deux with Gertrude, who wears a bridal veil, Claudius mimes a banquet behind a long cloth which is stretched across the stage to indicate a table; the guests move their hands and upper bodies like puppets. All the court scenes, including the one just before the duel, are performed on a grotesque note, and Claudius rarely appears as a thoroughly serious figure, which somewhat alleviates the ballet’s otherwise remarkable gloominess.

Hamlet then returns and quickly sets out to challenge the court etiquette, by wearing a tie in the midst of an ocean of bow-ties and behaving irreverently in the presence of the new king. In his feigned madness, he also breaks balletic conventions by uttering weird noises, and he fires a number of gunshots, including at the audience. In the nunnery scene, he pretends to threaten Ophelia and then shoot himself in the mouth (a gesture that might allude to his ideas of suicide in his most famous soliloquy). Their subsequent pas de deux moves between tenderness and aggression; after a moment of harmony during which they repeat some movements from their previous loving duo, Hamlet swings Ophelia in the air like a puppet and pushes her around on the floor. She eventually steps onto his stomach, dramatically extending one leg in front of her in a développé devant, and leaves Hamlet in a shoulder-stand with shaking hands. After another tortured and affectionate duo, Hamlet eventually becomes aware of the presence of the hidden spies (Claudius and Polonius) and storms off in a rage. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, Ophelia appears more as an equal partner than a passive victim of Hamlet’s mistreatment in this scene. The dumbshow is turned into a silent film, and Hamlet films Claudius’s appalled reaction with a hand camera.

In the closet scene, Gertrude is suddenly multiplied. Hamlet points with disgust towards the numerous Gertrudes who interact with an equal number of Claudiuses (the couples perform affectionate little scenes around a number of sofas that look like the one the ‘real’ Gertrude has in her closet). The ‘real’ Gertrude moves between the scenes in growing dismay and eventually covers her eyes with her hands. This multiplication of the royal couple emphasises the impossibility to escape from a vision which haunts Hamlet and, progressively, Gertrude: wherever she turns, she is faced with the shameful image of herself and her new husband that Hamlet conjures up in her mind. At the end of the scene, the ghost hands Hamlet the gun, thus reminding him of his unfulfilled duty of revenge, and Hamlet shoots Polonius. In a departure from the play, Hamlet and Ophelia briefly meet one last time in a highly dramatic scene in which Ophelia, huddled over her father’s corpse, briefly stares at Hamlet. ³⁷ Triggered by the unbearable dilemma of her father killed by her lover and a brother who treats her brutally even after Polonius’s death, Ophelia’s madness scene is particularly excessive, especially for a ballet: she laughs hysterically, flirts with the Claudius’s soldiers in a sexually explicit way, and caresses the gun, clearly intended as a phallic symbol, with passionate abandon. This echoes her bawdy allusions in Shakespeare’s madness scene. However, the scene also recalls the 19th-century classic Giselle, especially in her playful handling of a lethal weapon. As in Giselle, her madness is directly followed by her death, which happens on stage.

Hamlet returns anew and meets the gravediggers; as he holds Yorick’s skull in his hands, the jester appears from the afterlife and teases him. He playfully stabs Hamlet in the back with his umbrella in a way which foreshadows the fatal blow that he will eventually receive from Laertes; as in Helpmann’s Hamlet, the jester is a messenger of death.

During Ophelia’s funeral, Hamlet snatches the corpse, and the dancers scream with terror as he throws her dead body around. The moment recalls numerous Romeo and Juliet ballets, especially MacMillan’s 1965 version in which Romeo, like Poklitaru’s and Donnellan’s Hamlet, drags the corpse of his beloved over the floor by one arm. Laertes grabs Hamlet’s head and brutally pulls him backwards by the hair; he eventually tries to strangle him while both young men and the corpse float above the funeral attendees who carry them. Following a solo of fury and anguish, Hamlet has a vision of Ophelia during which they repeat some movements of their first, loving pas de deux. However, she soon resumes her mad laughter and runs away from him. Like Duke Albrecht in the second act of Giselle, Hamlet vainly chases after a number of ghostly women in white dresses who look like Ophelia. One of them holds a bundle that evokes a baby, to which Hamlet reacts with wide-eyed dismay; this might suggest that in Poklitaru’s and Donnellan’s view, Hamlet and Ophelia were lovers.

Before the final duel, Hamlet has a series of visions that are not in the play. He first meets his father’s ghost and dances affectionately with him; however, the ghost eventually breaks down and curls up in a foetal position. In a reversal of roles, Hamlet, who in this production narrowly misses fatherhood, mimes a cradling gesture which recalls MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles. In the second vision, he sees Yorick who once again stabs him in the back with his umbrella. Finally, Hamlet has another vision of Ophelia in which they repeat some of the movements of their earlier loving pas de deux. When Hamlet lifts her again on his hands and one knee, his father and Yorick carry her away, and the ghosts of the people that Hamlet loved vanish into the foggy afterlife. In his dances with the ghosts of his father and Yorick, and in a pas de deux with his mother shortly before her death, in which Gertrude briefly carries her son (in the ballet, Gertrude dies after Claudius), Hamlet returns to his childhood self. These scenes, which add another psychoanalytical layer to the ballet, emphasise the contrast between Hamlet’s carefree childhood and youth at the beginning of the ballet and the desolate situation at the end. ³⁸

The high drama, violence and explicit eroticism of this production were an unusual spectacle at the Bolshoi Theatre, a highly prestigious state-sponsored opera house with a very traditional approach to ballet (although it probably reflected what was going on behind the scenes around the time of the Filin affair, in which romantic relationships played an important part). ³⁹ Most strikingly, the ballet ended with the invasion of the stage by a group of armed soldiers who were apparently dressed like the so-called ‘polite people’ or ‘little green men’, masked Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms who appeared during the 2014 Ukrainian crisis. ⁴⁰ The political undertones of the ballet were picked up and criticised by the press: the newspaper Izvestia commented on the ‘surprising’ finale during which ‘a group of people in unmarked military uniforms occupy the stage with automatic rifles in their hands’. Although the critic did not go into any further detail, she clearly saw the final scene as a comment on current political events which she considered unrelated to the previous action:

In 2009 Radu Poklitaru told Izvestia that ‘war, politics and pretty much all current events aren’t good themes for art’. Now, evidently, he and Donnellan think differently: they close the saga of mental anguish and love with a mise-en-scène that has no connection with the action gone before it, but pays tribute to the present day. ⁴¹

In Kommersant, Tatiana Kuznetsova stated, without any reference to the Ukrainian crisis, ‘that actually this production is about the death of a decrepit empire, futilely nourishing evildoing in its attempt to save its face’. However, she pursued, this political agenda was presented ‘with the caution of naughty schoolboys’. Referring to a production in the Brezhnev era, she added:

The truth is that in order to make a genuinely political ballet, it’s not enough just to have people playing soldiers and specials. What’s needed is the spiritual force and powerful talent of a Lyubimov, a Borovsky or Vysotsky. It’s here that this international trio has its greatest problems. ⁴²

Not only the political elements, but the ballet itself got a rather cool reception from the press. Tatiana Kuznetsova found it ‘naïve’ and ‘painfully old-fashioned’, telling the story ‘like a soap opera’, with too little dancing and excessive amounts of mime; other critics also bemoaned the predominance of acting and special effects over ‘pure dance’. ⁴³ In fact, the ballet contained almost no virtuosic dancing, which probably shocked some audience members and critics even more than its political, violent or erotic content: although Russian ballet has a strong tradition of acting and mime, virtuosic dancing usually remains a major focus of attention of Russian spectators and critics. To date, the ballet has not been staged again since its first series of performances.

In spite of this criticism and its limited success, Poklitaru’s and Donnellan’s rather daring work constitutes another example – rarer on ballet stages than in the theatre – of how Hamlet continues to speak to contemporary political concerns. Their medium allowed them to include elements that would be more difficult to show in a production that is more or less bound to the text, for instance Hamlet’s numerous visions or memories which allow the audience to get a glimpse of what is happening in the main character’s mind and emphasise how tenuous the border is between life and afterlife. Poklitaru and Donnellan also imagined compelling images to convey their reading of the play: the visions and the final pas de deux show Hamlet longing for his lost innocence and childhood, while Ophelia’s madness scene and the bundle in her arms strikingly suggest that she was Hamlet’s lover. The tender scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia before the actual play starts, repeated in the nunnery scene and in Hamlet’s two visions of Ophelia, show the depth of their love which transcends death. As in many ballet adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, the female roles are highlighted in this ballet. Ophelia’s importance is enhanced since she gets much more time on stage than in the play and becomes an active partner instead of a passive victim. In addition, she evokes Giselle and Juliet, two of the greatest heroines in the history of ballet.

All three Hamlet ballets offer intriguing perspectives on the tragedy and on one of the most famous heroes in the history of theatre. Their choreographers used the freedom of their medium from the text to eliminate certain scenes and characters, shift scenes, and question notions of identity. They created new scenes and images that probed hidden layers of meaning beyond and below the external action. In all three ballets, multiplications, repetitions of scenes and visions serve to show what goes on in the characters’ minds and blur the boundaries between life and death, fantasy and reality. Helpmann chooses a unified perspective but abandons linearity and narrative coherence; he illustrates the confusion in Hamlet’s mind, for instance, between his lover and mother, the jester and the gravedigger; but he also links Hamlet’s inner life to the outer world, whose chaos is reflected in the nightmare-like atmosphere of what amounts to an apocalyptic ballet. The choric figure of the jester, who appears several times in Helpmann’s, as well as Poklitaru’s and Donnellan’s, ballets, announces the tragic ending and seems to beckon Hamlet to the afterlife. MacMillan, who seems to abandon a privileged perspective, dissolves Hamlet’s identity and removes the border between life and death through the repetition of murders and the awakening of corpses who interact with the living. He pushes fragmentation and repetition to such extremes that the spectators, who lose their grip on the sequence of events and the identity of the characters, are obliged to make new sense of the relationships between scenes and figures. This allows unexpected links, parallels and interpretations to emerge: MacMillan’s poignant images stress the parallels between the ghost and Claudius, and between Claudius and Hamlet, questioning the attribution of guilt and the motivations for violence. Poklitaru and Donnellan seem to return to a more conventional form of storytelling – through mime, references to previous ballets and vision scenes – but their production, one of the most radical Hamlet ballets to date (in terms of content rather than form), offers original interpretive possibilities about parental relationships and the links between the personal and the political in the play. Hamlet appears not only as a son, but a potential father who eventually becomes a father to his own father. Laertes, like Claudius, is an unnatural brother, partly responsible for Ophelia’s death. Through the ballet’s opening scenes, that tell the play’s pre-history, and the several visions, we learn more about Hamlet’s relationship with his father and with Ophelia: the choreographic leitmotifs visualise the dissolution of the initially harmonious relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia; and the final visions show a Hamlet who, instead of finally accepting his fate with calm determination, yearns for his carefree youth in the midst of the ocean of death and destruction created by the political reality. The invasion of the royal palace by an anonymous army, which also reflects the destruction of the young prince’s future by Claudius’s political ambition, seems like a fitting conclusion. In spite of their partly old-fashioned means, all three works show the modernity of a medium which, in spite of, or precisely because of, its generic wordlessness, rises above mere illustration to shed new light on the interstices between the words of its literary source.