Three new Shakespeare productions opened this week. Nicholas Hytner’s Richard II livened up London’s Bridge. Tom Hiddleston shed his shirt in Much Ado About Nothing at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. And Rupert Goold directed a revised Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon?
That’s the one Alastair chose to review:
by Alastair Macaulay
Royal Shakespeare Theatre. To March 29. www.rsc.org.uk/hamlet
How mad is Shakespeare’s Hamlet? When we first see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest interpreter of the famous role, Luke Thallon, he’s already tense with advanced melancholia. (This does not preclude humour). He then grows more eccentric with every scene; and we’re never quite sure how much he counterfeits this madness. Thallon, entirely vivid, is an actor of daring, charm, and fun. From the first,
he the most visionary and philosophical person onstage. And madness (anguish, isolation, rage) makes his Hamlet the most modern, unnerving, engrossing, and free character onstage.
The production surrounding him, directed by Rupert Goold, has its own madnesses. These, which have less to do with Shakespeare and are kinds of window-dressing. This “Hamlet” is set on board a doomed ocean liner in 1912. (Yes, think “Titanic.”) Its visiting acting company has wondered out of the Ballets Russes. Occasional clock times suggest the play’s action all occurs within the Titanic’s final twenty four hours. The stage keeps tipping more and more steeply. At the end, the fatal shipwreck has begun.
All this proves very watchable – though it keeps adding further layers of complexity to a play that scarcely needs them. The action starts out with the maritime burial of the elder Hamlet. This dead monarch, having appeared to his son early in the action, then returns with the actors as the player king. (Young Hamlet, seeing him, reacts as if he’s truly haunted.) Finally, this same parent Hamlet turns up as the Gravedigger.
Because the actor of Hamlet’s father and these other roles is Anton Lesser (who himself played Hamlet in the last century), we take all this seriously. And these further manifestations of young Hamlet’s father all become turns of the screw, for Thallon’s Hamlet. And Gould’s staging is strongest in the highly individualised acting it elicits from most characters. Jared Harris’s seemingly clubbable Claudius – though he would register ten times better if he has crisper enunciation – becomes astoundingly poignant as he, in his main soliloquy, admits both his crime and his inability to repent. Nancy Carroll’s brand of charming posh totty works marvels for Gertrude. As Polonius,
Elliot Levey is wonderfully human – his nasal, urbane voice lodges in your head – even when spouting clichés. There’s a problematic acoustic around most of the voices (though not Hamlet’s), a dull echo.
This is a three-hour “Hamlet” (one interval) that omits, among other things, Fortinbras and the final Norwegian invasion of Denmark. Hamlet speaks his most famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be”, several scenes later than usual.“Hamlet” is made of such strong stuff that it can take these and other revisions.
But Gould has jettisoned the Royal Shakespeare Company tradition of verse-speaking. This was forged in the 1960s by Peter Hall and John Barton (but based on the work of William Poel and other pioneers): it revealed Shakespeare by making the iambic pentameters of his verse become the pulse of the play. Thallon is a riveting Hamlet – but he chooses to speak his words as if they were made of prose.
images (c) RSC/Marc Brenner
The post The Alastair Macaulay Review: Heading off with Hamlet appeared first on Slippedisc.
