Yesterday I wrote about Legal Project Management seen through the metaphor of David Tennant’s brilliant performance as Hamlet (DVD, Blu-Ray).

One oddity of Gegory Doran’s otherwise strong film is that he cut the ending entirely.

Hamlet concludes seemingly as awkwardly as it begins. Pretty much every important character still standing at the start of the last scene is no longer breathing at its finish — Gertrude poisoned by her drink,  Laertes poisoned by a treacherously envenomed epee, Hamlet and Claudius poisoned by the drink and the sword. Only Horatio among the major characters is left standing — and he only because Hamlet stops him from drinking the remaining poison.

Shakespeare’s theater had no curtain, let alone a movie fade-out, so he had to devise ways to get the bodies off the stage. It would be boring — to say nothing of undignified — for Horatio, perhaps assisted by Osric, to “lug the guts” offstage one at a time.  Luckily, Fortinbras and his army arrive just in time to take over the now-leaderless kingdom — and bear the bodies into the wings so the actors can properly emerge for curtain calls.

At least that’s how many interpret the appearance of Fortinbras — a device to clean up the stage. In other words, he’s akin to a project manager, in their view.

There’s much more to it, however.

There are four testosterone-driven young men — and one older one, Claudius — who populate Hamlet. Laertes is impetuous, chasing shadows of his imagination. Claudius lies to everyone (except himself, in a scene strongly played by Patrick Stewart) in pursuit of earthly gains — and his brother’s wife. Horatio keeps life at a remove, seeking to stay emotionally uninvolved, and can’t even decide whether to kill himself or not. Hamlet, of course, also wrestles with being and not-being, as well as with every other decision large or small, from love to revenge, acting crisply only to kill his boyhood friends when he feels they’ve switched allegiance. (And he doesn’t even do that himself, but writes a message to have someone else do the completely unnecessary deed.)

Only Fortinbras acts steadfastly to reach his goals. And it’s Fortinbras who enters at the end to claim the spoils of his efforts, the kingdom of Denmark. Cutting his entrance in the final scene removes an intriguing contrast within the play.

That said, Hamlet is already a long play, Fortinbras’s character is sketched rather than developed, and his entrance is certainly an anticlimax after Hamlet’s moving  final exchange with Horatio. Were I directing (rather that writing almost academically about the play), I might cut it too; it reads in theory better than it plays on stage.

Fortinbras as After-Action Review

Too many projects cut the concluding segment of the final scene — the after-action review/evaluation within the Delivery and Evaluation project stage. The project winds down, and the players scatter to other projects — at least we hope they’re not strewn lifeless about the project’s fatal stage. The work is delivered, the client is satisfied (or not), the poison’s drunk, the unbated sword¹ discovered. As Hamlet says, the rest is silence.

But it shouldn’t be silent. That final scene is the real opportunity to learn. In the theater, we insist that the actors repeat the performance the next night; it wouldn’t do, for example, for Laertes and Hamlet to make amends before they seek to wound each other fatally. In the real world of projects, however, those who don’t learn from the past are condemned….

And projects do often end with bodies and egos bruised and battered, if not left for dead. An after-action review is a chance to repair the wounds delivered by envenomed words and poisoned approaches and messages gone awry.

So feel free to cut Fortinbras the next time you direct Hamlet.

But please, leave him to play his necessary role in your next project.

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¹For some reason, though director Doran kept so much of Willie’s words as to give the movie a three-hour running time, he not only cut the ending, he changed the description of the treacherous sword from “unbated” to “unblunted.” As I’ve noted, there are good stagecraft reasons to drop Fortinbras and his final entrance. But what’s up with random word changes? The meaning of “unbated” (a/k/a “unabated” in today’s parlance) is clear enough from the context even to those seeing Hamlet for the first time. And if you don’t know that practice foils — epees, thin dueling swords — have their tips covered, making them blunt and abating their danger during matches, I’m not sure that “unblunted” is a whole lot more helpful than “unbated,” but it’s sure to bug folks in the audience who know the play. Oh, well, a minor cavil that in no way detracts from the power of David Tennant’s performance.