Claire Underwood Goes to Denmark

But seriously. That was all I could think of!
To start at the beginning, we filed into the Alexandrinsky Theatre for V. Fokin's 2010 adaptation of Hamlet. I was immediately confused; onstage were rows of bleachers, facing away from the audience. I felt like I was going to watch a high school couple make out on stage right, like during a football game. Then someone would bring out some cigarettes stage left and peer pressure some underclassmen to try them, like in a bad health class video from the early nineties. I thought, "Oh, no no no no! This will not do!"
But the moment the actors stepped down from the bleachers, working in, under and around them, it was hard to imagine the show without them. It heightened the sense of private court intrigue and scandal, of secrecy and deceit. And of course, when Gertrude stepped down in her little black dress and blonde pixie undercut I could only think of the cunning Claire Underwood from a modern plot, House of Cards. Like Claire, Fokin's Gertrude is a ruler herself. She works literally hand in hand with Claudius as his support and at times his minder. It seems even that the whole affair is her doing. Confidently confronting Hamlet, bolstering Claudius and inciting Laertes, she is in control at all times; even her death is knowingly self-inflicted! By thrusting Gertrude into a much more active role in the intrigue, Fokin updates the classic for a new repertoire and a younger audience that wants more explicit complexity from their female characters.
In theory, I would probably have been opposed to such radical deviations from Shakespere's folios. I always was loathe to complete high school assignments that challenged me to "update" classics like Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. What a pointless, fruitless exercise, I thought. How could it compare with the the original? How could taking it out of context improve the story in the slightest? Even though I would still hate the assignment, I can now grant the pedagogical reasoning behind it, and would hate it not for having to take Hamlet out of context, but for having to work so hard to put it in our context. I see now that updating the story is more than just live-tweeting it; putting it in context may take some radical revision. And someone like Claire Underwood is a well-chosen catalyst, even if she's under the bleachers.