Robert Lepage talks about creating a Hamlet without words

Shakespeare’s brooding Danish prince has never been far away from stages around the world. But in Chicago, we’ve seen some innovative reimaginings of Hamlet in 2024. Eddie Izzard’s one-person interpretation played at Chicago Shakespeare in April, Red Theater offered a stripped-down take on the text in May, and the New York Circus Project’s physical interpretation hit the Studebaker in August.

Now, internationally renowned French Canadian director Robert Lepage comes to town with The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, a piece he created in collaboration with choreographer Guillaume Côté, who performs the title role. The show, which premiered at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre in early April, makes its U.S. debut at the Harris Theater on November 23 and 24.

The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark
Sat 11/23 7:30 PM, Sun 11/24 1 and 6:30 PM; Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $58-$168

Lepage, whose lengthy résumé stretches back over 40 years in theater, film, opera, and circus—and whose use of new technologies in performance has long been a hallmark of his work—tells me in a phone conversation a few weeks ago he has directed the play several times in the past and even played Hamlet at one point.

“I think I know and have a command of the piece. But then at one point, you go, ‘OK, I’ve staged it enough. I think I pretty much know what the whole thing’s about.’ And you kind of get bored and move on to other stuff. But I started working with Côté, who’s the star dancer of the National Ballet of Canada. We got to do a project a few years ago, based on the biography of a film animator from the 40s and 50s—a Canadian guy called Norman McLaren.” (McLaren, who was born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada, was particularly influential for his advancements in synchronizing animation with music.)

That 2018 piece, Frame by Frame, premiered at the National Ballet of Canada in 2018 and won widespread acclaim, particularly for the visual framework provided by Lepage’s vision. Afterward, notes Lepage, Côté told him, “I’m gonna turn 40 soon, and I think I’m gonna be past my prime to do Hamlet.”

Shakespeare as the inspiration for dance is not new, of course: the Shakespeare and Dance Project lists 16 versions of Hamlet alone stretching back to 1788. But for Lepage, the challenge of telling Shakespeare’s story without text was irresistible. He also notes the project began life during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, which meant there was a lot of time to work with Côté and dancers from Côté Danse, the company Côté formed in 2021 to explore forms outside ballet.

Lepage describes the makeup of artists in those initial workshops as “old chums from the classical world but also a lot of contemporary dancers and a few street dancers, and there’s even a guy that was krumping.” In thinking about the class dynamics in the original play, where, as Lepage notes, “[Shakespeare] doesn’t make the king and queen speak in the same language as the gravedigger or the clowns,” it became apparent removing the words would allow the story to explore those dynamics through what Lepage calls “the hierarchy of dance.”

“It’s a braid of the classical, the contemporary, and the street dance. By developing that, it created all these amazing situations and characters” that gave the dancers a lot to work with dramatically. With a laugh, Lepage notes when they did a workshop at a small theater in Montreal, “I had some people congratulating me on how I had found some great actors who knew how to dance.

“It’s a very different approach for a lot of the dancers. They’re used to conveying traits of character or action in a dance fashion. But I took a lot of time reading passages and lines [from the play], which a lot of choreographers don’t do. I really said [to Côté], ‘If you want me to do this with you, you do the choreography, I’ll intervene into it and try to feed all of the complex ideas.”

Lepage observes, “The thing that’s interesting is that Hamlet’s profound paradox is action versus nonaction, right? Because he complains all the time, ‘Why is it I have all the motivation to take action, but I don’t take action?’ Suddenly with dance, there are very interesting ways of conveying that and incarnating that paradox.”

I ask Lepage whether he thinks there’s any particular significance to the uptick in new interpretations of Hamlet, such as Izzard’s show. “I won’t have any kind of intelligent answer to give you, but I think it’s probably a sign of something,” he says. “Certainly with what’s going on in the U.S. right now with Trump and the resurgence of extreme-right dictators. The political thing is very embedded in a lot of the Shakespeare dramas, and you would find clues of that in Hamlet for sure.”

The piece has been evolving through subsequent performances, including one at a Shakespeare festival in Romania. But the essence of the original story remains.

“That’s what’s so great about Shakespeare plays. You remove the words, and you’re not necessarily depriving the story of a lot of stuff,” says Lepage. “Everything’s already in there—the skeleton of it. There’s a lot of action, there’s a lot of muscle, there’s a lot of passion going on.”