By legend, Keanu's greatest performance
"Sweet prince," indeed
WHAT IS KEANU REEVES’ GREATEST ROLE? I did not see this performance, but heard about it, related as if at a seance. On this night within a gentle Santa Ana, the zoo bus of journalists traveled remorseless circles along back roads toward Culver City for an early screening of a movie with Keanu Reeves. Los Angeles was dark and the bus was dim. The hacks were in jolly form, trashing recent movies, making mock of actors or celebrities they had encountered in recent weeks. The journalist called up one of their treasured stage memories. They had seen decades of Hamlets, in the West End, on Broadway, at the Stratford Festival, and they had simple-sum descriptions of major performances which were never committed to another medium (Daniel Day-Lewis…) Yet, they said, there was the stellar performance, in at least one attribute: Keanu Reeves’ 1995 “Hamlet,” in Winnipeg at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. Audiences were ecstatic, reviewers rapt. They reassured me that except for the now-familiar flat affect of Reeves’ voice — this was just past Speed — no other Hamlet came close to the physical needs of the play in the Northern Hemisphere for fathoms and fathoms of the mid-to-late twentieth century. “Lanky and feline. Confounded youth. He was beautiful and present.”