Theatre

Will a ‘Doctor Who’ Hamlet help a young generation of Time Lord fans discover who Hamlet is? Very probably, but David Tennant’s mercurial stab at the great Dane is too compelling and complex to be damned with such faint praise. Tennant’s Hamlet is no ‘great’ Romantic rebel, but a vulnerable, barefoot student, who gasps out the big soliloquies as softly and clearly as if he were coining them in his bedroom, but who’s visibly trapped in a court whose walls are cold mirrors behind which hypocrites lurk. Some of the emotional depth and breadth of existential inquiry that the role can sustain does get thinned out by Tennant’s quicksilver performance. But this is a play-acting prince whose critique of the world lives most vividly in his eyeball-swivelling, lanky limbed parodies of the parasites around him. Feature continues

Gregory Doran’s modern-dress production taps into the play’s rich vein of morbid hilarity: Hamlet and his mother (a sexy, aristocratically callous Penny Downie) collapse in laughter together when he accidentally shoots Polonius in her boudoir, and the mordant laughs keep coming to the bitter end. The director cuts some sub-plot to keep the pace gripping (and imposes a weakly melodramatic cliff-hanger by breaking for the interval just as Hamlet raises his dagger over his uncle’s head). But the great strength of the production is its supporting cast.

Oliver Ford Davies makes Polonius a powerfully nasty piece of work as well as a comically long-winded one. And Patrick Stewart portrays the murderous King Claudius with chillingly smiling ease: when Hamlet puts on a play (here a bawdily subversive pantomime) to uncover Claudius’s guilt, he rises to examine his nephew with deadly calm. Stewart doubles as a gruffly dominant armoured ghost. As he stalks his son grimly round the stage, you see the play’s central aesthetic collision anew – a thoughtful and self-conscious modern man exits, pursued by an implacable, old revenge tragedy.