A chronicle of our times

Some people collect china; others, baseball cards. Me? I collect Hamlets and have ever since I saw Brian Bedford play the role at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn.

Years later, I interviewed Bedford for an article on Hamlet, and he predicted — correctly — that Ralph Fiennes would win a Tony Award that year for his portrayal of the role.

I fondly remember Fiennes' Hamlet, along with Laurence Olivier's; Derek Jacobi's; Mel Gibson's; Kenneth Branagh's; Kevin Kline's (in two productions); Liev Schrieber's; and Jason Asprey's at Purchase College's Performing Arts Center.

To these I can now add Jude Law's at the Broadhurst Theatre in Manhattan.

One of the truisms of arts criticism is that if you do it long enough, you'll end up proving yourself wrong from time to time. I must admit I always considered Law to be an overrated movie star whose main part on the world stage was as fodder for the celebrity mags.

But Law's Hamlet is good, very good, surprisingly good. Certainly, his performance stunned the ladies seated behind me at a recent matinee and sent them riffling through their programs at intermission for his other credits. (I for one am now really looking forward to him playing Dr. Watson to Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes in the January film release.)

One of the most miraculous things about "Hamlet" is that each actor who plays the title role always does at least one thing better than any other Hamlet, no matter the quality of the production or his overall performance. I remember, for instance, not loving Fiennes' rapid-fire "To be, or not to be." But I thought his transformation from the damaged Mama's boy of the earlier acts to the serious man who comes to accept the responsibilities of life and the reality of death was just terrific.

Law's gift to the role is a superbly lucid portrait of a rational man — a Renaissance geek as it were, often scribbling — who cannot wrap his mind around the murderous mediocrity that is his uncle. At the same time Law makes clear that Hamlet's bell jar of grief and disenchantment is not merely the result of his circumstances but his own inability to transcend them.

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," Hamlet tells frenemies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

But he cannot move himself to act on that belief, or perhaps he doesn't really believe it.

They say we get the Hamlet we need. Watching Law wring every bit of poetic bitterness from "What a piece of work is man," I couldn't help but think that his melancholy Dane was perfectly suited to our depressed times. It helps that Christopher Oram's stage design and Neil Austin's lighting render Elsinore truly the bare, wintry prison of Hamlet's mind.

Then, too, Kevin R. McNally's Claudius follows in the tradition of most recent interpreters of the usurper, presenting him like one of those middling managers who's done so much to destroy the American economy — jocular, venal and ultimately cowardly.

"That one can smile and smile and be a villain," Hamlet the geek notes emphatically in his journal.

Indeed.

"Hamlet" opens at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre Oct. 6 for a limited run. Tickets are available at TeleCharge.com, 212-239-6200. Catch Jude Law tonight at 11 on PBS' "Charlie Rose."