You cannot make a Hamlet without cracking a few eggs. David
Farr’s new Stratford production gives the very first line, ‘who’s
there?’, not to officer of the watch Bernardo, as the text states.
Instead the line is whispered by Jonathan Slinger’s Hamlet.
He stands alone in Elsinore’s salle d’armes — its fencing hall, a cavernous room that doubles as a theatre. Low gymnasium benches line the sides. A hunting trophy is on one wall.
Through the glass panels of a pair of swing doors we can see a corridor. This Elsinore is the sort of pile which, were it in Britain, might have been turned into a prep school in the Twenties. You can almost sniff the dust, the smell of boiled mince, the lack of privacy.
Say Cheese! Jonathan Slinger's Hamlet is not subtle. He is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon
There
is another ingenious early moment when Hamlet and the officers, already
a bag of nerves, are given a shock. The swing doors suddenly open.
Yikes. But it is only a couple of blokeish Elsinore servants going about
some menial chore. ‘Evening!’ they grunt. ‘Evening,’ reply Hamlet and
his friends in relief.
How easily, if we allow it to, can the mundane unsettle us.
Fencing is big in Mr Farr’s sparky vision. The old king’s ghost (Greg Hicks) is dressed as though for swordplay, his weapon hand twitching. Last time I saw Mr Hicks play the ghost he was stripped to his bare, bony chest, all lime-whited. That was spookier, but this is pretty good, too.
In
this production Mr Hicks also plays the new king, Claudius. This is a
slippery man of modern power, excusing himself from blame, more
interested in high office than in his wife Gertrude (a matronly turn
from Charlotte Cornwell).
Though the evening lasts for more than three-and-a-half hours, the first half whizzes past. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Oliver Ryan and Nicolas Tennant) are not the usual young college lads. They could be a couple of rough Danish detectives, one in a leather jacket, the other with stubble and a lurker’s gait. They smoke a joint and it is clear that they have been Hamlet’s wenching mates rather than anything more intellectual.
Pippa Nixon’s Ophelia is also a fresh, clever take. She is one of those young women who combines the blue-stocking look with a pixie-like, trendy air (hair short and ill-brushed, her eyes ablaze with bookish worry).
And Mr Slinger? I found myself torn. This Hamlet is at the top end of the age range. He has splayed feet, sometimes wears thick-framed spectacles, is quick to fly into a temper.
I liked the flashes of enthusiasm: his initial greetings to friends (a proper grope with Ophelia before they are interrupted) and the excitement with which he seizes on evidence of his uncle Claudius’s criminality. I was less taken by an inclination (you sense that director Farr has reined it in as much as he can) to overact the soliloquies so that each line seems to be given a new grimace and hand gesture.
Hamlet’s madness feels more like a grotesque Richard III selfishness than an oppressive, princely melancholy. It is perhaps as well that, as happens too often these days, one of the play’s essential elements, the closing scene with Fortinbras, is dropped.
Had we heard the line ‘he was likely, had he been put on, to have prov’d most royally’, I am not sure we would have believed it.
He stands alone in Elsinore’s salle d’armes — its fencing hall, a cavernous room that doubles as a theatre. Low gymnasium benches line the sides. A hunting trophy is on one wall.
Through the glass panels of a pair of swing doors we can see a corridor. This Elsinore is the sort of pile which, were it in Britain, might have been turned into a prep school in the Twenties. You can almost sniff the dust, the smell of boiled mince, the lack of privacy.
Say Cheese! Jonathan Slinger's Hamlet is not subtle. He is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon AvonHow easily, if we allow it to, can the mundane unsettle us.
Fencing is big in Mr Farr’s sparky vision. The old king’s ghost (Greg Hicks) is dressed as though for swordplay, his weapon hand twitching. Last time I saw Mr Hicks play the ghost he was stripped to his bare, bony chest, all lime-whited. That was spookier, but this is pretty good, too.
Though the evening lasts for more than three-and-a-half hours, the first half whizzes past. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Oliver Ryan and Nicolas Tennant) are not the usual young college lads. They could be a couple of rough Danish detectives, one in a leather jacket, the other with stubble and a lurker’s gait. They smoke a joint and it is clear that they have been Hamlet’s wenching mates rather than anything more intellectual.
Pippa Nixon’s Ophelia is also a fresh, clever take. She is one of those young women who combines the blue-stocking look with a pixie-like, trendy air (hair short and ill-brushed, her eyes ablaze with bookish worry).
And Mr Slinger? I found myself torn. This Hamlet is at the top end of the age range. He has splayed feet, sometimes wears thick-framed spectacles, is quick to fly into a temper.
I liked the flashes of enthusiasm: his initial greetings to friends (a proper grope with Ophelia before they are interrupted) and the excitement with which he seizes on evidence of his uncle Claudius’s criminality. I was less taken by an inclination (you sense that director Farr has reined it in as much as he can) to overact the soliloquies so that each line seems to be given a new grimace and hand gesture.
Hamlet’s madness feels more like a grotesque Richard III selfishness than an oppressive, princely melancholy. It is perhaps as well that, as happens too often these days, one of the play’s essential elements, the closing scene with Fortinbras, is dropped.
Had we heard the line ‘he was likely, had he been put on, to have prov’d most royally’, I am not sure we would have believed it.