Hamlet

PRONE TO INSANITY Stuhlbarg lies on Ambrose.

Photograph: Michal Daniel

There comes a time in every critic’s life when he or she loses track of how many Hamlets they’ve seen. I’ve watched deconstructed Danes (by the Wooster Group and Robert Wilson), British brooders (Simon Russell Beale, Adrian Lester) and homegrown “to-be-or-not-be-ers” (Liev Schreiber, Michael Cumpsty). Countless more escape me. In a few years, how will Oskar Eustis’s staging—which stars Michael Stuhlbarg—stick in my memory? More like a school assignment than a revelation.

This Hamlet takes its physical world directly from the text: Elsinore (and by extension, Denmark) truly is a prison (as Hamlet calls his country), a massive wall of white steel that suggests the hull of a battleship or the exterior of a bunker. The playing space before this wall is a “sterile promontory” of gray slate. The monochromatic palette is relieved by a riot of hues introduced by the traveling players.

Eustis stages the classic unfussily and without a reductive high concept, but the costuming is a hotchpotch of 19th- and 20th-century couture with no point. And, longer than three hours, the overindulgent production begs for cuts. But enough superficialities: What about the acting? It’s uneven, as is often the case in the Park. Stuhlbarg’s sweet prince is a compound of antic fop, sickly poet and tantrum-prone manchild, speaking his deathless soliloquies in a honeyed, calming tenor. Lauren Ambrose does her emotionally naked best with the impossible role of Ophelia. And Sam Waterston evokes a Polonius whose incipient senility touchingly counterpoints Hamlet’s feigned madness. If you’ve never seen the masterpiece, this is a decent place to start. If you’ve seen the tragedy too many times, it may just seem like a shadow of itself.