Cast
Barnado/
1st Gravedigger
David Burke
Francisco/
Fortinbras /
4th Player
Alan Turkington
Marcellus / 3rd Player / 2nd Gravedigger
Henry Pettigrew
Horatio
Matt Ryan
Claudius
Kevin R McNally
Osric
Ian Drysdale
Laertes
Alex Waldmann
Polonius
Ron Cook
Gertrude
Penelope Wilton
Hamlet
Jude Law
Ophelia
Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Ghost of Hamlet’sFather / Player King
Peter Eyre
Reynaldo
Sean Jackson
Rosencrantz
John MacMillan
Guildenstern
Gwilym Lee
Player Queen
Jenny Funnell
Cornelius /
Captain / Priest
Harry Attwell
Members of
the Court
Faye Winter,
Colin Haigh,
James Le Feuvre
Production
Director
Michael Grandage
Designer
Christopher Oram
Lighting Designer
Neil Austin
Composer and
Sound Designer
Adam Cork
|
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
Wyndham's Theatre
29 May - 22 Aug 09
‘A bit like a great song that’s been covered by a load of different singers,’ said film-star Jude Law about the part of Hamlet which he is currently playing at Wyndham's Theatre. Exactly the same problem of well-worn familiarity arises for the play as for the part. And, given the casting of Law, director Michael Grandage has had to cater not just for the percentage of the audience to whom Hamlet is well-known and often-seen, but for the percentage who don’t know the play at all and have come for the singer not the song. Sensibly, Grandage’s solution has been to make the production quite straight, with no particular weighting in the direction of a particular theme, or conspicuous adoption of an era or angle. The sober, dark coloured costumes belong to all eras and none. The protagonists seem confined within a dimly-lit, high-ceilinged vault with huge wooden doors at the back that are sometimes pushed apart but mostly enhance the darkness. ‘Denmark’s a prison’, and the tone of this production is subdued. Little that is obstreporous or ostentatious in the performances either. Although Grandage has spoken of Law as ‘a muscular, visceral actor who has a very direct connection with raw emotion’, he isn’t a deeply emotional Hamlet – it is thoughtfulness and intelligence that distinguish his performance, rather than the ‘raw, exciting energy’ attributed to him. He is convincing as a reflective student, less so when he contorts his face and rants. He is more an Everyman with whose progess through the play we can identify, rather than a striking hero. What is most striking about him (and about the cast in general) is how intelligently he (and they) speak the lines.
Understatement seems to be the order of the day in fact. Penelope Wilton is a wonderful actress but often it is hard to detect (from where I was sitting anyway) what her Gertrude is feeling; which may be the point, reinforcing the seeming-versus-being, cosmetics versus naturalness, theme so central to the play. It was a nice touch that after the bedroom scene she seems really to have taken Hamlet’s advice to heart, and to have refrained from consorting with Claudius. Unemphatic but clear is the sense that a gulf has opened up between the pair. The easy unity with which they had entered, exited and stood together in the earlier part of the play has gone – Gertrude now stands apart from her husband, leaves him on her own initiative and without a backward glance, while Claudius (Kevin R McNally) conveys uneasy awareness of their separateness.
Also understated is Ron Cook’s Polonius, and hard to cram into any typical Polonian pigeon-hole. He avoids character-acting, and his Polonius isn’t over-the-top flattering or pompous, as so many Poloniuses are, but seems remarkably self-aware, indeed anxious about his loquaciousness (this chiming in with his constant White Rabbit-like consultation of his watch). Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ophelia continues the production’s subdued tone, being meek and modest in her madness. Yet she is loud and anachronistically confident at the beginning of the play – an odd reversal of the usual Ophelia that goes against the grain of the play.
Only in two places does the direction obtrude, making one aware of the director pulling the strings. Inevitably anxious at the familiarity of the ‘To be, or not to be’ speech and the expectations as to how it would be played, Grandage has Law sitting against the wall at the back of the stage, behind the opened double doors, with snow falling around him as he muses. This, again, is a reticent rendition – none of the usual striding to the front of the stage, and striding around it – but it works: it really does make the speech feel like a reflective soliloquy. Another novelty, which has been much commented on, is playing the bedroom scene from behind the arras (a sort of huge net-curtain pulled across the stage), so that we have Polonius’s view of it until he is killed and rips the curtain down in dying. This, however, is not only tricksy and drawing attention to itself – it adds nothing, just subtracts from our ease of viewing. As for the trite, clicheed Oedipal business of Hamlet straddling Gertrude as he argues with her, this is merely crass – in a way uncharacteristic of the production – an obvious and unavailing attempt to ratchet up the emotion in a disappointingly unmoving scene.
In general, though, ostentation, bravura and character acting were cut down into a more harmonised and homogeneous ensemble production, so that, rather than a particular performance or performances standing out, the beauty of the lines and their astute philosophising were allowed to shine through.
Jane O’Grady
|
