The best aspect of Dominic Dromgoole’s ‘Hamlet’ is its gallows humour. Pomp is punctured from the get-go when the ghost of Hamlet’s father spooks Elsinore’s hapless nightwatch, with refreshingly funny results.
Denmark’s court and its angry young Prince are both stripped down here. Hamlet’s world is imagined as a bare stage, for strolling players and for farcically violent deaths – the Globe’s production is even built around a scaffold, where the eight-man troupe fiddle, drum, set out their props and wriggle in and out of tabards to play the 27 characters, most of whom dig their own graves, or someone else’s.
This is a punchy, flexible, action-based touring production. Thanks to Drongoole’s pithy editing (which is based on the Folio but inspired by the zippy, impure First Quarto text), it runs at two and a half hours and is almost as explicit as Hamlet’s long johns.
Joshua Maguire’s Hamlet is a prince for the groundlings: his soliloquys, famous for dramatising interior life, become orations to the amused crowd which he always seems aware of. From the gallery seats, the mad-eyed grin and jabbing neck movements, which help Maguire maintain his contact with the standing crowd on three sides of the stage, are distractingly turkey-like. This is one production I wish I’d seen from the floor.
‘Hamlet’ is a play that takes place inside a rotten state and a brilliant, but divided, mind. The claustrophobia and the subtlety of those big existential questions are hard to see in this broad-blown production. The band of players within the play, who help Hamlet unmask his guilty uncle, are on the outside too here, performing the drama. It’s a clever move, but it never lets you leave your disbelief behind. Some elements which can be poorly served by grander productions, such as the ‘Yorick’ scene, thrive in Dromgoole’s poor but feisty setting. But not all of the actors are as successful as John Bett (a comically longwinded Polonius and an excellent Gravedigger).
When your son has accidentally murdered an old man in your closet and broken your heart, you should be able to make the question ‘What shall I do?’ sound more than just narky. This Hamlet might run deeper if his mother, Gertrude (Amanda Hadingue) cared more.