Hamlet
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Playing until 29 March
This is an extraordinary production. However many times you might have seen Hamlet I doubt whether you will have seen a Hamlet like it before. Perhaps the most striking thing about it is the design. Set on a huge tilting stage it soon becomes apparent that it’s set on a boat. And if you haven’t got it Polonius tells Ophelia to go to her cabin. Why a boat? Well, there’s a boat towards the end when Hamlet is sent to England and Ophelia drowns in water. When it becomes clear to the audience (I suspect at different times in the course of the play) that the ship is the Titanic I began to have mixed feelings, especially when the downstage right digital clock appeared to be counting down the time to the catastrophe. The Titanic disaster (following Thomas Hardy) might have been inevitable, but in Hamlet the audience’s focus is not on when the character will avenge his father but whether he will. The specificity of the ship, then, for me ran a bit counter to what Shakespeare was portraying. Nevertheless the Titanic notion does lead to the incredibly dramatic and unexpected way that the play ends.
Putting aside the Titanic concept designer Es Devlin and director Rupert Goold have some brilliant ideas. For a start the play is very cleverly and effectively cut leading to a fast paced two and a half hours performance time. We miss a bit of the way Hamlet delays his revenge seemingly for ever until the confusions of the very end of a very long play, but we do get to understand why he delays. Much of this stems from Luke Thallon’s playing of Hamlet. He is a very credible figure whose emotions are very clear to the audience at every stage. His soliloquies are delivered with excellent verse speaking but without anything over-theatrical. He is not an actor who is showing off. Neither is Hamlet a figure who is self-aggrandising or affected. Thallon shows him as living in the moment, tormented by religious and philosophical ideas. I haven’t noticed before that he, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are studying philosophy at Wittenberg, though I couldn’t really figure out why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are American. Is that just another Titanic thing?
Jared Harris is a credible Claudius and Nancy Carroll plays Gertrude well. The surprise characterisation, though, is Elliot Levey’s Polonius who isn’t at all played as a buffoon and is clearly at sea with his daughter’s relationship with Hamlet. The characterisation makes one think again about his place and his death in the play.
One of the most striking innovations is the doubling of the ghost of old Hamlet and the Player King, played by Anton Lesser. The audience is aware that both parts are played by the same actor but I have never seen Hamlet fooled before in the way he is here. When the Player King enters Hamlet is shocked and for a moment thinks that it is his father’s ghost – striking as it is the Player King who mimics his father in The Mousetrap. The whole players sequence is wonderfully handled. The nightmare of having the dumb show precede the play within the play is avoided as they are rolled into one. Clever, theatrically effective and stimulating. The masterstroke, though, is the ending.
It’s an exciting and fascinating production which shouldn’t be missed.