Jeremy McCarter’s Audiodrama Puts Us Inside Hamlet’s Head

For early modern audiences, the question of how to represent Hamlet’s dead father was answered by trapdoors, white flour on an armored face or an actor playing a bloodied corpse. After lighting and sound technology standardized the spectral stage, film answered with the magic of superimposition and the green screen. More recently, the 2023 Public Theater production uniquely possessed Hamlet by putting the ghost inside him. In a rapturous performance, streaming on Great Performances through tomorrow, Ato Blankson-Wood rolls his eyes back into his head, fiercely mouthing his father’s fiery plea.

In a new audio production, Jeremy McCarter, disciple of Oskar Eustis’s Public Theater and founder of the production company Make-Believe Association, goes a step further than the Delacorte staging. McCarter places not the ghost but us, the listeners, inside the character of Hamlet. The sounds of his environment merge with the sounds of his body. We hear what he hears.

Readers might know McCarter as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s co-writer of Hamilton: The Revolution and as a public historian in his own right. But since the founding of Make-Believe in 2017, McCarter’s collaborative efforts have centered around original, live audio plays by Chicago writers. With the pandemic, the company shifted to longer form studio productions, including most recently Lake Song, which is something of a Waterworld for the modern ear. Listening through Make-Believe’s stream, I thought: Is this what would have happened if Studs Terkel, Norman Corwin and Octavia Butler got together and played around with 21st-century recording technology?

Maybe so. But even today’s listeners will need to warm up to any version of Hamlet told only from the main character’s perspective. And McCarter knows this. Episode 1 begins not with the “Who’s there?” of the famous sentinel scene (Hamlet’s absent from it, after all), but instead with listening directions for the modern commuter: “The tale that you’re about to hear, with its carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,” whispers Daveed Diggs, in a playful pastiche of the playtext, “will come most vividly to life, if you listen to it…on headphones.”

And so it does. When we first encounter Hamlet, sound designer Mikhail Fiksel conjures a scene reminiscent of an actor readying to enter a stage. We hear footsteps echo across the solitary silence of the stereo soundscape, a deep inbreath and then a heavy door opening unto Claudius’s coronation scene. Suddenly, the social space—the music, the laughter, the chatter—of Elsinore is upon us. Daniel Kyri, who plays Hamlet with a subtleness rarely afforded to stage actors, pummels himself, right from the get-go, with the wish that “this too too solid flesh would melt.” Soliloquies, under McCarter’s direction, are not private thoughts uttered aloud but instead long-running interior monologues.

Adapting Hamlet to audio is not a new thing. Orson Welles’s Columbia Workshop took it up in fall 1936, and the BBC 12 years later. These adaptations sound dated to us today, but they were part of a vibrant auditory culture of their time. As Neil Verma has written, radio dramatists constructed a fourth wall for listeners at the same time that stage dramatists attempted to break it down for spectators. Contemporary productions on Audible tend to eschew the declamatory style of these earlier works, and also, sadly, their acoustic experimentation. This is where McCarter’s production is a welcome intervention into this overproduced yet underheard play: a return to the imaginative possibilities of the acoustic medium.

The series doesn’t sacrifice the visual sense but instead spatializes it: a complex arrangement of lavalier, shotgun and binaural mics captures sound in all directions. Purists might cry that McCarter slashes up the text to highlight Hamlet’s point of audition, but they are posers. Any Shakespeare scholar knows that the text we read today is itself highly mediated, a composite of at least three different versions. In the age of Grand Theft Hamlet, this version offers remarkable fidelity despite its formal innovation.

Intimacy might just be the word to describe what the Make-Believe team achieves here. And it’s true: We do hear Hamlet’s heartbeat, breath and memory against the backdrop of his social world. I think the experiment works best when we hear Hamlet not foregrounded but embedded in the specificities of his place and time; when the mic is not inside him, or even him, but instead on his lapel, capturing the soundscape as it merges with his fractured perceptions. This happens most memorably in Episode 3, when the sound of bells decreasing in half steps tells not just the time of day but also the scale of mental descent.

Yet there is a danger in achieving this intimacy by reducing Hamlet the play to Hamlet the character. We might call this McCarter’s “Hamilton-ization” of Hamlet: the individualizing of the character against his social world. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy, for instance, is done completely underwater. It makes for riveting audio, methinks, but it erases the fact that most of the soliloquies of the play are overheard. This includes the usurping King Claudius’s speech, where he laments that his “O limèd soul, that struggling to be free / Art more engaged.” This speech is translated as overheard noise in the audio, but we’d do better to listen broader. Claudius is comparing his soul to an animal caught in a glue trap, and at times, Make-Believe’s production, too, becomes more ensnared as it attempts to become more free.

McCarter’s stated aim is to resist the commonplace that Hamlet, as Laurence Olivier famously voiced over the 1948 film, “could not make up his mind” by, well, getting us into his mind. But this rhetoric ends up perpetuating that romantic individualism instead of challenging it, making what is social—primogeniture, murder, love—solely a problem of the conscience. In doing so, the artwork, too, ends up privatizing very public questions: What system do we resort to when an injustice has been enacted? How do we test the truth of our beliefs when we cannot trust our own perceptions? As McCarter explains in his New York Times op-ed, he is most interested in this question: “Who among us hasn’t felt,” he writes, “that ‘the time is out of joint’?” But in making the play into a universal coming-of-age narrative, we lose out on asking what an “us” is.

And so, how does this production stage “Enter Ghost”? I won’t give it away. It sounds awesome, even if it doesn’t quite make sense. (Especially if you’re a nerd like me and study the script along with the audio. How exactly does Hamlet write something down when he’s in the ocean?) But that’s no matter, because this adaptation is less about making sense than remaking the senses.

Indeed, the most compelling adaptation of the stage direction “Enter Ghost” is not an adaptation at all, but Isabella Hammad’s 2021 novel Enter Ghost. It tells the story of a British Palestinian actress caught up in a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The novel doesn’t aim to make its characters like us but instead attempts the opposite: to force readers like me to confront a world that is radically different from their own. This is what all great art should do. Or so I’ve heard.

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