Hamlet an obsession for actor in self-produced show

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This article was published 28/04/2015 (4143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Today is Rodrigo Beilfuss’s 32nd birthday and his gift to himself is the greatest role in English theatre.

The Brazilian-born actor is self-producing Hamlet (with another local indie stage company) at Studio 320 until Sunday. The University of Winnipeg graduate will play the most daunting of all Shakespeare’s characters.

Beilfuss is well aware his vanity project is setting himself up for potential “Who does he think he is?” reaction from peers and audiences for casting himself in such an famous part.

“I sincerely don’t approach this play as a vehicle for myself to be showcased, or to prove anything other than to share my sincere belief in the power that this play has to change people and celebrate the magic of theatre,” he says.

“It changed my life profoundly, and I’m doing it because if I don’t create this opportunity myself, chances are it will pass me by and then it will never happen.”

He then quotes Uncle Monty from the film Withnail & I: “It is the most shattering experience in a man’s life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself ‘I will never play the Dane.’ At that moment, all ambition ceases.”

That was not the way he wanted to wake up, so he has spent the last six months preparing to take on the melancholy Dane and his thousands of lines. You may have seen him walking through the Exchange District mumbling Hamlet’s famous speeches.

“It’s ridiculous, it consumes my every waking moment,” says Beilfuss, who earned his masters in classical acting from the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Arts in 2013. “It’s only a part in a play. We’re not curing cancer or anything.”

But it’s been on his mind a lot longer than half a year.

His Hamlet obsession goes back to 2001 and his Grade 12 English class with his teacher Gordon McLeod. Beilfuss had just immigrated to Canada from Brazil and was apprehensive that his English was not up to studying Hamlet. He credits McLeod’s enthusiastic teaching with unlocking Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy and turning him on to theatre.

“I was hooked,” says Beilfuss, who added that McLeod, who has since retired, will be in the audience this week. “The image of a guy wearing black, walking around brooding was so appealing. It’s such a cliché but it was so fresh, ironically, to me.”

This DIY project was always going to be a labour of love but he didn’t realize how much until he began crunching the numbers.

At 14, the cast is large for a collective production and no actor or designer will be getting anything near to minimum wage for his or her work. The venue capacity is 50 seats and the top ticket price is $20, which means a maximum box office take of $1,000 for each of the six performances. The actors will have to be satisfied with the pride from getting to recite Shakespeare’s beautiful poetry on a stage.

“It’s really a stupid, stupid, romantic, beautiful idea that we can hopefully produce something of meaning,” he says.

The tiny venue does have an upside for audiences, who will get a close-up view of a story about a son avenging the murder of his father by his uncle’s hand.

“I wanted to give the Winnipeg audiences this intimate perspective,” Beilfuss says. “Hopefully, they will come out thinking they’ve heard the play for the first time. I hope someone in the audience has the feeling I had when I first encountered the play.”

Beilfuss, who directed Cock and Bull for Theatre By the River last September, completed the first edit of the text followed by another by director Sarah Constible. There are three versions of Hamlet — a First Quatro (1603), a Second Quatro (1604) and the First Folio (1623) — so all Hamlets are adaptations. This modern-dress version has been pared to a running time of two hours plus intermission.

Hamlet is back in the front of minds of theatre-makers worldwide as revivals are scheduled to open Friday at the Stratford Festival in Ontario to go along with an off-Broadway production in New York featuring Peter Sarsgaard, which ends May 10.

Meanwhile, the most anticipated version stars Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch beginning Aug. 5 in London.

If the mounting pressure of opening night were not enough, Beilfuss is having to break his concentration on Hamlet and focus on flying early Tuesday morning to Toronto. A car will be waiting to take him to the Stratford Festival for a callback audition for its Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre.

He will knock off five monologues for an audience that includes artistic director Antoni Cimolino before getting back on the plane to Winnipeg and a date with the skull-fondling prince.

It makes him wonder who is crazier, Hamlet or Beilfuss himself, for trying to squeeze in the audition at the worst possible moment.

“It’s sheer madness to be doing this, but it was the only time they could see me. I know I’m flirting with absolute failure.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca