Interview: David Melville His New Solo Show HAMLET (SOLUS)

The title role in Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy Hamlet is on the bucket list for many actors wishing to challenge their range of emotions while offering their own interpretation of the iconic role. And in his new solo play, Hamlet (Solus), creator and performer David Melville (pictured), co-founder of Independent Shakespeare Co., plays all the roles while intertwining the text with original songs.

I decided to speak with David about his interpretation of the role he has played many times, including why he decided to stress the grief in the story as well as making (the skull of) Yorick an important character, and how the production evolved.

Thank you, David, for speaking with me today. And congratulations on completing your opening weekend. Was it everything you hoped it would be?

Hello! Lovely to be talking to you! It is quite an undertaking so I am very glad to have got the first few shows out of the way. “Any landing you walk away from” as they say - but fortunately it all went very well.

For those not familiar with your theater work, please describe your illustrious history, especially after you arrived here from England.

I came to the US in 1995 in the Almeida Theatre production of Hamlet (starring Ralph Fiennes) which transferred to Broadway after a run in London. The UK cast was joined by a few American actors, one of whom was Melissa Chalsma, and we married 10 months later. We co-founded Independent Shakespeare Co. in New York in 1999 and made LA our home in 2001. In 2003, we started doing free outdoor performances, and that grew into what is now the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival. Last year, we presented our 100th production, As You Like It, in an innovative in-the-round staging at our outdoor home at the Old Zoo in Griffith Park. We also have a small indoor space in Atwater Village where we develop new work, often but not exclusively centered around Shakespeare. Hamlet (Solus) was one such project that we worked on last year.

So this the second time you have staged it there?

Yes, we gave a few workshop performances last year and are remounting it for a full run this year.

You seem to have mastered most of Shakespeare’s roles for ISC including Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V, Richard III, Richard II, Iago, Titus Andronicus, Benedick, Feste, Bottom, Prospero, Oberon, and Julius Caesar, and have directed eight the ISC productions in Griffith Park. What do you see as the major challenges of presenting such intense plays outdoors?

I think the relationship with the audience in the park is probably more akin to the relationship Shakespeare’s audience had with his actors. A nice indoor theatre is a much more controlled environment – one must work a lot harder in the park to corral attention to where you want it. The comedies play really well outdoors, the tragedies too, but you have to be very clear about how you delineate shifts from comedic beats to serious, tragic ones. We believe there is always humor, even in the darkest moments, but one has to be careful not to let the festival atmosphere carry everything away with itself.

Are you directing or acting in their summer shows this year? What are they?

Yes, I’m directing Love’s Labour’s Lost and playing Faustus in Dr Faustus.

What or who first inspired you to study the work of Shakespeare? Was your dedication to interpreting it with you from the start?

I don’t think I really got into Shakespeare until I went to drama school (Webber Douglas Academy in London). We had a brilliant Shakespeare teacher there, and she made us all do a Shakespeare one-person show project. I chose Angelo from Measure for Measure. It was a great exercise, not only in character exploration but also in learning how to develop a piece by yourself. As soon as I left drama school, I was out of work, so I pretty quickly learned how to produce my own stuff.

Describe your history with Hamlet.

Hamlet was the play that brought me to the US, and through Hamlet, I met my wife, had two children, and started ISC. So, it is a very consequential play for me. I first played the role in 2005, and over the next seven years, we came back to the play five times. The last time I played Hamlet was in 2012, but I always thought it was unfinished business somehow. A few years later, when I was doing a school workshop, including some speeches from Hamlet, I had the epiphany that I wanted to actually do this as a one-person show. But if you do a one-person show, you're not just playing Hamlet, you're playing everyone, and that gives you license to be creative.

Are you performing the entire play?

We're not doing four and a half hours of me saying absolutely every line. I've had to cut quite a lot of roles, and I've really centered certain themes and certain relationships. For example, I'm giving a little bit more space to a character who I think is probably the most important character in Hamlet, outside of Hamlet, who doesn't have any lines, and that's Yorick. He has a very interesting perspective, I think, because Hamlet is so much about death and grief. And that's one of the themes I'm exploring in this.

Please tell me more about your process for expanding Yorick’s importance in the play.

I came to realize, late in the day, that Yorick is the key to Hamlet. He is certainly the most iconic character. I’d bet at least 75% of all poster designs feature him, and if you think of the quintessential image of Hamlet, he is contemplating Yorick’s skull. But he is more than a prop. Hamlet is a play that grapples with the totality of human existence and asks all the big questions about what happens after we die. With the possible exception of the Ghost, Yorick is the only character Hamlet meets who knows the answer to those questions. And he’s a clown. There is a deep, dark vein of biting humor in the play, mostly expressed by Hamlet himself, who is an adept performer and easily assumes an antic (clownish) disposition. When he talks of Yorick, he speaks so lovingly of him, and it is clear their relationship is deep, that Yorick was perhaps a second father. Hamlet was brought up a Prince, but perhaps he owes much of his personality to the man who had “borne him on his back a thousand times.” Hamlet’s grief for Yorick is expressed in a much more personal way than his grief for his father.

So, I wanted to give the voiceless skull a voice. Initially, I had thought about writing scenes for Yorick and Hamlet in his youth. But eventually, I decided that Yorick would help narrate the show through songs, which I accompany on the banjolele, in the style of the great British music hall comedian and movie star George Formby.

Is Yorick the most challenging of all the characters you present? Or someone else? And why?

Ha! Well, let me tell you, trying to play ukulele like George Formby is pretty challenging. Add to that the puppeteer work and singing at the same time - playing Hamlet is a breeze compared to that!

How else are you examining “the blurry line between humor and grief”? Can you give me a few examples?

I think humor is a way many of us process grief. For this piece, though, it is more that I am exploring how humor and starkly tragic situations meet each other in abrupt and jarring ways. Having Yorick manage the flow of the evening contributes to this. His opening song is a jaunty little number about how much more comfortable it is to be dead and in your grave, happily chirping, “You don’t have to exercise/When all you eat is earth!” Gertrudes’s speech about Ophelia drowning herself is mournfully underscored on the piano and goes abruptly into a Vaudeville routine from the gravedigger - who is now employed to dig Ophelia’s grave.

Those are some examples of how Cary [director Cary Reynolds] and I (with help from Melissa) have shaped the show - but Shakespeare’s text abounds with examples of the same thing: after the harrowing scene where Hamlet confronts his mother and kills Polonius, he delivers a glib little rhymed couplet “...indeed this counsellor/ Is now most still most secret and most grave/That was in life a foolish prating knave.” It’s like vaudeville shtick. Then he scoops the body up to haul it off and leaves with a banal “Good night, mother,” like it is any other mundane night, and he is off to have his cocoa. Jarring.

How did you decide which roles to cut from Hamlet (Solus)?

When Melissa and I did the show with Ralph Fiennes on Broadway, Terence Rigby played an amazing triple of the Ghost, the Player-King, and the Gravedigger. They were like three tentpoles supporting the play, iconic characters by which Hamlet measured his grief. I started my first cutting by using them as the three major movements in the piece and then working around the immediate family relationships of Claudius and Gertude and then Polonius and Ophelia.

I knew I wanted to build to the moment in the graveyard with Yorick. That is the point in the play where Hamlet finds that he is ready to meet his fate; everything after that is denouement, and I didn’t have any use for that (or any desire to fight myself in a fencing match!). So, everything else was fairly easy to ditch: the court intrigue (Osric, Rosencrantz Guildenstern) and the geopolitical threats (Fortinbras). Horatio is gone, too, but I like to think that he is the audience and, through them, both Hamlet and Claudius vie for his trust and loyalty.

Hamlet (Solus) includes performing your own original music to add to your interpretation of the tale. Are there musical themes for each character and if so, what’s the inspiration for each one?

Not so much musical themes as styles. Ophelia’s songs are played on the guitar, and they sound like English folk music. Yorick’s songs are played on the banjolele (ukulele on a banjo body), and the style is 1930s English swing/vaudeville style. Hamlet underscores himself on the piano at various moments. I’m not really a piano player, but I think the most emotional musical moments are the piano bits. It’s quite moody stuff - a bit Pink Floyd-y. And I play all three instruments in the production.

Please describe your songwriting process.

Gosh, it is quite mercurial and hard to describe. The best songs take you by surprise when you aren’t expecting them. It’s not something you can force, but I do like to know where a song needs to start and end and what information it needs to contain. Melodies come out of the air - lyrics are a process.

What do you think will surprise audiences about Hamlet (Solus)?

I hope it will give a new perspective on the play to people who are familiar with it. Most people who have seen it respond that they were surprised not only by how funny it is but how deep it goes. It does move some people to tears. Bring a hankie.

What do you hope audiences are talking about on their way home?

Hopefully, that in all the grief, there is life and laughter. The hardest situations are perhaps more bearable when we understand it is a universal path on which we all travel. Nothing much has changed in 400 years.

Are you doing talkbacks after performances? Have you ever changed something in a play after listening to audience comments?

Yes, we are doing three talkbacks on Friday nights. And yes, I have changed things in a play after listening to audience comments and lived to regret it. I’m all about purity of mission these days! Especially with new writing. There are a few people whose opinion I trust and solicit, but mostly I’ve found I’m at a place where I need to trust my own instincts and stick to them.

Tell me about your history working with director Cary Reynolds (pictured).

Cary started as an intern on the summer festival about 10 years ago. She wanted to learn about everything from the ground up so she became my nuts-and-bolts producing side-kick for a few years. She helped build sets, I taught her how to hang lights, run sound, she helped with casting etc. and eventually she worked on several shows as an assistant director. We have a great rapport, and when I started working on this, I thought it would be a great fit for her. I can get a bit crazy, and she knows how to keep me on track, and she contributes great ideas too.

Are all your production team members working on the Griffith Parks shows this year? Or are some of them new to you? (Set Design: BinhAn Nguyen (Example below). Costume Design: Isabel Rodriguez. Lighting Design: Bosco Flanagan. Stage Managed by Lexie Secrist.)

We haven’t figured all that out yet, but they are a great team, and I’d be lucky to work with all of them again. Bosco has always done the lighting in the park. It is such a bespoke system, especially this year in our temporary space where there is no power - everything is powered by batteries we bring in. It is amazing how it works.

Anything else you would like to share about yourself and/or Hamlet (Solus)?

Well, I know this is what everyone says, but tickets are genuinely going quite quickly. We may extend by a few performances, but our summer season is approaching, and Hamlet must close by the end of April. So, don’t wait, book early etc. Thursday nights are pay-what-you can.

Thanks so much!

Hamlet (Solus)

Conceived and Performed by David Melville, Directed by Cary Reynolds

March 6 - April 13 on Thursdays, Fridays, & Saturdays at 7:30 PM; Sundays at 2 PM

Independent Shakespeare Co. Studio

3191 Casitas Ave., Ste 130 (between Fletcher Drive and Glendale Blvd.)

Atwater Crossing, Los Angeles, CA 90039 - Free lot and street parking. 

Tickets start at $27.50. Student ticket: $25. All Thursdays are pay-what-you-can.

Group rates available.

Complimentary tickets available for those in our community who have been displaced by the fires.

For details please call (818) 710-6306 or email indyshakes@iscla.org

For reservations, please call (818) 710-6306 or reserve online at www.iscla.org

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