This is, without a shadow of a doubt, a handsome production.
A Hamlet out of joint with himself
The opening few minutes are as compelling an introduction to the good ship Elsinore as can be imagined. A lonely trumpet signals the passing of a King. Stiff silhouettes in the late Edwardian style stand in cinematic relief against the background of a tempestuous sea which reflects the rotten state of Denmark. A naval clock tells us that we are not only perilously close to the witching hour… but to an April 1912 point in time forever etched on the collective consciousness as a demarcation between worlds.
Being enchanted by this Titanic concept is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Es Devlin’s set is stunningly imagined and executed: bare ships boards giving way to deck games, royal suites and engine rooms. It is worth seeing for this design alone: the ship which houses the action tilts and lists to a quite spectacular degree, tossing the Danish court about on the literal waves of happenstance. Akhila Krishnan’s background projections are exquisite, elevating an already exceptional staging to legendary levels. It is a fascinating conceit; and one which, for the most part, has some (sea) legs. The suffocation of the location and the tempestuous seas conjure an isolated and febrile atmosphere which has the potential to heighten the already tautly strained rigs: unfortunately, it also has the capacity to drown the source material under the weight of high concept.
It is a brave and original decision to play the eponymous role as a painful overgrown teenager with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. Greasy and lank of hair; grubby of body; sexually awkward… if it was 2025, this fellow would be sitting in his pants in his mother’s basement sending incendiary social media messages to high profile female politicians. Luke Thallon’s anti-poetic delivery abandons any sense of rhythm, inserting full five beat pauses mid-phrase and inviting spontaneous mumbles and mutters that diminish the sense of emotional sensitivity and moral indecision underpinned by the original metrical demands. He is a man bored to tears of his own existence: soliloquies ironed so flat they slip easily beneath the shadowy standards of Hamlets gone by; the only semblance of antic disposition being an omni-gurn which suggests an amateur thesp who has watched Michael Sheen playing Kenneth Williams rather too many times than is healthy.
This is not a Hamlet plagued by uncertainty, but by feeling out of joint with himself: so much so that he is presented as a whining, monotonous bit-player in his own play. There is no sense of any heartbreak over his own father’s death: more an engulfing frustration and indefinable unease that his support network has been removed and that his foundations have shifted. One gets the idea that the old King was the one to manage Hamlet’s outbursts and protect him against the icier expectations of his glacial mother. Bereft of this psychological scaffold, the young Prince unravels at a speed of knots; increasingly unable to maintain a foothold on the reality and self-possession that one suspects was never quite within his grasp in the first place. “Dull revenge” has never been so aptly realised.
This emotional lethargy is rolled out to an Ophelia whose claims to be affrighted at being roughed up by her sometime boyfriend are belied by a shrugging delivery perched casually on the edge of a table. Whilst an interesting enough premise and critique on a generation indifferent even to their own suffering, denying the promising yet undercooked Nia Towle to hint at early distress means she has a much tougher hill to climb when Ophelia finally loses her mind.
And this is where the tightening of the timeline loses its credibility; the scintillae of tension wrought by packing the events into one night failing to compensate for the serial undermining of plot plausibility. Laertes – for example - appears to have magical powers of teleportation: disappearing on a tender towards France one minute, popping back an hour or two later for a cheeky spot of vengeance upon receiving what must be assumed is a telepathic message from his sister. Ophelia drowns and sinks to a muddy death: yet we are expected to believe that, at the very moment of impact with a fatal iceberg, the crew choose to dive into the tumbling billows of the main to retrieve her body only to chuck it straight back in again.
Look: it’s absolutely right that to retain and future-proof engagement and appreciation, Shakespeare should be regularly brought down from his pedestal and given a good old spit and polish. If he is to remain for all time, then we must take what we need from him and celebrate a universality which transcends any decade or any fashion. And there is certainly never anything to be gained by prioritising purity over punch. Goold plays fast and loose with the original text and much of it works: flabby characters are squeezed down the wires of the ship’s telephone and unwieldy passages are pruned to within an inch of their imaginary lives. However, there is also some breathtaking re-scripting that would make even Colley Cibber blush, and which fails - in the only acceptable tenet of textual butchery - to progress either plot or character development. What it does attain is a series of the cheapest laughs by deploying a series of excruciating and repeatedly inserted modernisms which read as though the lower school geography teacher has been unwelcomely tasked with directing the school play but doesn’t quite get the point of the language. Both the cast and the foremost Shakespearean company in the world deserve better.
Frustratingly, there are some ideas beyond such broad crowd-pleasers which actually do warrant further investigation: but remain unexplored. The opening Claudius is a political brutalist: he knows what is necessary for monarchical success and does not balk at making it happen. And God knows, with young Hamlet as the heir apparent to the Danish throne, who can blame him in snatching the crown for himself. In one of several nods this production throws to Richard III, Claudius grabs his skulking nephew and waterboards him in a slop bucket: we know where we are with this guy. He is one of the old crowd, the tough crowd: emotions are for losers. And then… this bullishness dissolves offstage and the excellent Jared Harris is never really able to show off his villainous chops. His ‘offence’ speech shows a conscience which we have not been privy to him arriving at; and his fruity relationship with Gertrude is shown once and then forgotten in what feels like a dereliction of psychological duty.
As an angular Gertrude who has clearly never forgiven her son for being an irritant in both her belly and then her life, Nancy Carroll could also be better used; but she is often reduced to striding about the deck like a libidinous lacrosse captain who has lost her ball. And at precisely the moment when the audience should be able to reconcile the nature of her relationship, her culpability in the murder of her first husband, and the true depth of her love for Hamlet: her closing scenes are played in half shadow and her lines drowned out by an unsatisfactory sound balance which washes any lasting semblance of depth from perhaps the most intriguing of characters.
There is some excellent support from Anton Lesser as the Player King with an uncanny resemblance to old Hamlet; Elliot Levey as a well-meaning Polonius utterly out of his depth in a royal world filled with ego, bombast and brittle sensibilities; and an unusually engaging Rosencrantz and Guildernstern (Chase Brown and Tadeo Martinez). The choreography and stagecraft is beautifully drawn; the segues between each scene conjuring an inevitable and increasingly desperate race towards disaster.
This provokes an unspoken commentary on the pointlessness of a royal family so immersed in the fantasy of their very existence that they actively choose to splash about in navel-gazing and sword play at a time when all sensible people are strapping on their life jackets and getting into the emergency boats. Something is rotten indeed; so rotten that we care little when they roll, one by one, from the brave vessel which cracks under its own weight and tosses them into the brine. It is a bold vision indeed; skewing the angle of the mirror to show that what we always assumed was one man’s tragedy has in fact been those of us subject to such parasites all along.
