Captivating ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ reveals a remarkable actress centuries ahead of her time

Looking back from the vantage point of 2019, it’s difficult to wrap your head around the kind of celebrity Sarah Bernhardt cultivated in a time before the internet, TV, radio or film.

The most famous stage actress of the 19th century, Bernhardt became a household name across the globe, touring extensively and managing her own theatrical company. She embraced the new media of the time, paying close attention to the way she was covered in newspapers and frequently posing for photographs that could be sold to magazines or directly to her fans, who snapped them up as collectors’ items.

The illegitimate daughter of a prostitute, Bernhardt raised her own son as a single mother, bringing him along on her tours. She courted controversy in the image she projected of her private life, playing up her transgressive sexuality and frequent affairs in a time of restrictive morality. Had she been active today, it’s easy to imagine her racking up millions of followers for her savvy Instagram presence, or letting camera crews follow her around for a reality show on E! As several biographers have noted, the woman who earned the adulatory nickname “the Divine Sarah” could be considered one of the first modern superstars.

But Bernhardt was also serious about her craft, and continually looked for new acting challenges across her decades-long career. It’s one such moment that playwright Theresa Rebeck seizes on in her 2018 work “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” set in 1899. Having aged out of playing ingenues like Ophelia and finding little interest in the matronly Gertrude, Bernhardt decided she should take on the great Dane himself.

The Danish prince is widely considered the most coveted role in Shakespeare’s canon for any male actor who hasn’t yet reached the age of King Lear. Just ask Kenneth Branagh, Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Ralph Fiennes or Jude Law — just to name some of the highest-profile actors who’ve essayed the role on stage or screen in the last 30 years. Why wouldn’t Bernhardt want to try her hand at Hamlet, too?

In Rebeck’s play, now in a sparkling Chicago premiere at the Goodman under the direction of the Stratford Festival’s Donna Feore, Bernhardt is compellingly played by Oregon Shakespeare Festival vet Terri McMahon as a gale force, practically daring anyone to tell her no. But the question isn’t “why wouldn’t she?” so much as “why shouldn’t she?” And several of the men in Bernhardt’s life have their own answers.

Liz Lauren

Those include the playwright Edmond Rostand (John Tufts), best known for “Cyrano de Bergerac” (which plays a crucial role late in “Bernhardt/Hamlet”). Rebeck positions Rostand as Bernhardt’s lover, in addition to their artistic collaborations, and though initially supportive, he balks when she asks him to rewrite “Hamlet” for her, “without the poetry.”

Bernhardt’s friend Alphonse Mucha (Gregory Linington), the Art Nouveau illustrator who painted all of her theatrical posters, struggles to capture her as Hamlet: “I’ve drawn her a hundred times, more than a hundred; she is always magnificent. But not as a man.”

Bernhardt’s grown son, Maurice (Luigi Sottile), worries that both playing Hamlet and his mother’s affair with the younger, married Rostand could be bad for business: “You know what? When women want everything? Men do not like it.”

Only the veteran actor Constant Coquelin (a wry Larry Yando) seems completely unbothered by the idea of handing off Hamlet to Bernhardt, while he moves up to Polonius. “I like Polonius,” he says. “Straight-ahead fellow, really. You play him, you go home, you go to bed.”

Liz Lauren

That’s indicative of the tone Rebeck strikes through much of the play: smartly breezy backstage comedy, rendered in modern-sounding language that contrasts with Shakespeare’s dulcet iambs. Some of the most engaging scenes in “Bernhardt/Hamlet” involve watching Bernhardt, Coquelin and the other members of her acting company (played by Amanda Drinkall, Travis Turner and Nate Cheeseman) in rehearsal, arguing over the potential meanings of Shakespeare’s lines and working through moments of discovery — not unlike the script analysis class I sat through as an undergrad theater major, though far more entertaining. And the glimpses we get of McMahon’s Hamlet make us wish for more.

Rebeck doesn’t let us miss — though Bernhardt’s male associates seem to — that Bernhardt’s frustrations with the character of Hamlet are those characteristics that might be traditionally coded as feminine: his poetry, his interiority, his hesitancy to leap to action.

Bernhardt’s contempt for them is bred of familiarity — years of playing pining ingenues and tragically dying heroines, with no agency of their own. “Women. All we ever get to do is sit around and mope for love… Maybe that’s why Hamlet is driving me mad,” she says. “All that privilege and he can’t figure out how to do anything? A woman would never have got away with it.” As modern celebrity followers might say: We cannot help but stan.

Kris Vire is a local freelance writer.