Those pesky clichés

While in Canada, I saw Stratford Festival's Hamlet this past weekend.  The production and the actors were fantastic, especially Tom Rooney as Polonius and Robert King as Grave Digger #1, both of whom gave such nuanced and incredibly specific performances that I think I could have understood what they were saying even if they were speaking a foreign language.  Jonathan Goad as Hamlet was such a wonderfully physical Hamlet that the words seemed to live in his body as much as in his voice, and while some Hamlets come across as passive in their inaction, the sense that this Hamlet was constantly filled to the brim with conflicting impulses taking him in different directions, both physically and emotionally, underscored his conflict and made him seem more vividly alive than any Hamlet I've seen.  The decision to make the time setting of the play nebulous because "the story's relevance defies limitation to one era," with time, as the program notes state, "changeable and compressed, and the world begins to look more and more like our own," was a fascinating decision, but one that perhaps does not read effectively on stage without having read the program notes beforehand.  And maybe it is not necessary for that choice to read on stage for its impact to still be made, as long as the discrepancy in costume design throughout the play is not distracting.... 

All of these topics and more I could happily converse about for hours.  However none of these topics is what this blog post is about.  No, this blog post is about the complaint that the woman behind me had with the show.  When it was over, she haughtily and loudly complained to her companion, "They put in way too many clichés.  I thought that pretty early on, but by the time Gertrude said 'The lady doth protest too much, methinks,' that was really too much.  One or two might be okay, but the play was full of them.  It was a bad choice."

...Yeah, Shakespeare really used too many well-known phrases, huh?  I mean, what was he thinking when he put in "to thine own self be true" and "brevity is the soul of wit" and "to be or not to be: that is the question," and the other dozen famous lines in the play?  Gosh, he needs to come up with some original phrases....