Shakespeare’s Hamlet Staged on the page by Nicki Greenberg
Allen & Unwin, $59.99
Nicki Greenberg loves Shakespeare, she "gets" Shakespeare, and she has done something wondrous with him, a thing I have never seen done before. People are always trying to make the Bard new, often it seems as though the real point of some new production or interpretive strategy is to prove that "new" is still a word that can meaningfully be associated with the most produced, most analysed, most chewed-over dramatic properties in theatrical history.
Nor is it unusual to see one of the plays re imagined as a graphic novel. In fact, this has been done to death: often attractively, often cleverly, but never before, to my knowledge, in a way that works terribly well.
The problem is very basic. Shakespeare uses lots of words. If you put them all on the page, there's no room left for the pictures.
The usual solutions to this are either to abridge heavily, not merely reducing the overall word count but avoiding long speeches wherever possible. This approach preserves the broad outline of your play at the cost of every other aspect of it. Or you can cram in most of the text, using a very small font and not very many pictures. This is the favoured approach of the "making Shakespeare more accessible to kids" school of graphic adaptation, and, as with so many attempts to foist great writing on the unwilling, it's deathly.
Greenberg, in her new version of Hamlet, tries something different. She breaks each speech of each character down into individual sentences - or more often into individual phrases, because some of these sentences are brutes - and assigns each one its own speech bubble, dispersing the famous language across many, many panels.
This allows her to present the text dramatically, using some panels to represent a bare second of stage time, others to convey long pauses for reflection, others again to stage complex multiword-bubble montages in which time and words flow like water. In essence, and this resonant phrase is her own, she stages the play on the page.
The only downside of the method is that it eats up an awful lot of high-quality paper. How Allen & Unwin's accounting division was persuaded to sign off on the production costs of this large, thick, richly coloured book I cannot imagine, but we should all be grateful to them. It's a treasure.
Greenberg has one previous graphic adaptation to her name, a version of The Great Gatsby, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters appear as seahorses, trolls, and far stranger things, each one's form reflecting some aspect of their personality. It's a strange and lovely book, but it can only be an echo or secondary version of the original, because it discards so much descriptive language. Hamlet, on the other hand, is built out of spoken language, and Greenberg uses all of it. Though it has never been used like this before: she puts it into the mouths of a cast of weirdly charming anthropomorphic ink blots. They extrude pens from their bodies whenever sword-play is called for and use them as weapons.
In other words, and I can't stop giggling over the sheer cleverness of this, Greenberg has found a way to bring Shakespeare's words to life.
Nor does the ingenuity of the concept get in the way of the story: these ink blots, absurd as they sound, are not just surreal abstractions. They have all the expressiveness of the best comic characters.
Many other metaphors take concrete form in the course of the play. For instance, the backdrop to the Elsinore scenes is a collection of dismembered clock gears: time, here, really is out of joint.
But the book's primary attraction, quite aside from these brilliant interpretive flourishes, is that reading it is very like watching a stage production, in a way that reading the bare text never quite can be. The play, Greenberg understands, is indeed the thing. She's done it proud.
David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
