Many a great director (the above link to Brook as example) and ensemble have faltered on this work & even more have chosen to write about what they have seen and experienced ... i join the slide into obscurity & so I add to this endless work of sisyphus ... shakepeare on the saskatchewan 2002 ... all worked hard to chronicle the narrative with clarity, pace, energy and a sense of purpose - to share the shakespeare story trippingly well ... filling the space in front of us ... the actors presented the complexity of action with a fresh & direct simplicity without denying the richly textured language ... the feel of the performance, though in a setting removed from contemporary time, felt amazingly today like ... Hamlet searched the stage with a neurotic passion ... Rosencrantz and Guildenstern patterned the stage with a cold, suspicious rhythm ... there was a stroke of fortuitous brilliance in casting one actor as the Ghost, Player King, Gravedigger & the final words ... all worked, even when moments flattened into mere illustration, to drive the narrative line ... risks, at least what seemed like risks were attempted ... opening the play with a collage of voices penetrating our overplayed use of 'to be or not to be' & allowing ritual time & space for the burial of Ophelia ... so ... so ... it was only in the unrealized act of imagination, beyond the mundane denials, where I saluted Hamlet for his passionate, heroic, negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive ... Hamlet is one of the great examples of the imaginative retrieval of a life & circumstance gone beyond repair ... a torch through the dark nights of all our souls ... yes there was madness ... but not the tortured darkness which tears the body into ten thousand notorious aspects from which a new body will be assembled in which you will never again be able to forget hamlet ... this night will fade & be forgotten ...