When she speaks up fearlessly to Gertrude ( Naomi Watts), turning the queen’s “alas” into “a lass,” she is taken on as a lady in waiting, washed, corseted, and taught the rules of courtly behavior.
“Ophelia” is filled with clever wordplay matched by an equally clever perspective flip of one of the central texts of Western literature.Īs a young girl Ophelia is first mistaken for a boy because her widowed father Polonius ( Dominic Mafham) is not able to give her the care she needs. An Elizabethan wit could take a word, toss it up into the air and make it do a triple gainer on the way back down. In Shakespeare’s plays, whether comedies, romances, or tragedies, characters constantly jab at each other verbally, flipping words like tiddlywinks, with multiple layers of meaning. She is fully alive in every moment and ready to act to protect herself or those she loves. In this story, neither she nor the Danish prince she loves waste time worrying about whether to be or not to be. Played by “ Star Wars” heroine Daisy Ridley, she has courage, intelligence, integrity, and agency. In this version, she is not the helpless girl driven to madness and likely suicide by a lover’s rejection. But in this version, adapted by Semi Chellas (“ American Woman” and the upcoming reboot of “Charlie’s Angels”) from a novel by Lisa Klein, we hear from Ophelia herself that this time we are going to see her side of the story. That is how Claire McCarthy’s “Ophelia” begins, the girl drowned in the river.
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