Is the era of the big celebrity Hamlet over? I mean, probably not: the play is 400 years old, and some seasonal variation is to be expected. Nonetheless, after a period where it felt like you couldn’t move for an Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Sheen, Maxine Peake, Tom Hiddleston, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Michelle Terry etcetera etcetera playing the Dane, we’ve reached the midpoint of the ‘20s with very few sleb takes at all ( really only one – Cush Jumbo – in London).
Does this matter? Not necessarily, but maybe there’s a truth that we overdid it a bit last decade, and now there’s a cultural hangover. The ones we have got in the ’20s have tended to be smaller and weirder: witness the Globe’s intriguingly low key Hamlet-as-a-psychopath take a couple of years back; recall that weirdy Radiohead/Hamlet mashup from the RSC.
I’d say the National Theatre’s first production of the play since 2010 – Rufus Norris was the first artistic director to simply not stage it – falls reasonably squarely into the ‘indie Hamlet’ box.
Hiran Abeysekera begins Robert Hastie’s production as a sardonic, melancholy prince who feels adrift in life after the sudden death of his dad and the even more sudden remarriage of his mum Gertrude to his uncle Claudius. He’s funny: some of Hamlet’s early wisecracks usually feel like forced ‘theatre humour’, but here, for instance, the line about the leftover funeral nibbles being reused at the wedding feels in keeping with a man who seems deeply depressed but hides it behind quips.
Then Hamlet meets his father’s vengeful ghost and suddenly we have a problem. The prince tells his friends that he’s going to pretend to be insane for a bit while he investigates the spirit’s allegations that Claudius killed his father, but the madcap cackle he emits as he says this gives away the game. He is genuinely nuts, or at best the ghost has radicalised him into a singleminded path in which he turns his back on his loved ones in pursuit of revenge.
‘Hamlet is actually mad’ is a tricky one to carry off because you need the character to have somewhere to go over a very long evening of theatre. It can be done: Michael Sheen’s hopelessly ill prince, unable to distinguish between reality and the shadows of his mind, is still my favourite Hamlet.
It’s very funny but does it mean anything?
Abeysekera is certainly tremendously entertaining, from his ratatat gallop through ‘to be or not to be’ to his amusing terrorising of Hari Mackinnon and Joe Bolland’s posho Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to his obnoxious commentary during the play within the play (Alistair Petrie’s Claudius very clearly walks out because Hamlet is loudly commentating on his reactions).
Hastie’s take makes some interesting use of the character’s inner voices - Hamlet bellows out his suspicions of guilt so everyone can hear. Geoffrey Streatfeild’s loveable Polonius has clearly given his ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ speech so many times that his loving children Ophelia (Francesca Mills) and Laertes (Tom Glenister) complete it for him. In the show’s funniest scene, Abeysekera’s Hamlet can simply hear all of Polonius’s asides to the audience and pulls a series of incredulous faces.
It’s very funny but does it mean anything? I’m not sure it does. Abeysekera’s character basically seems to be ‘crazy guy’, which is entertaining scene to scene but it’s hard to remain sympathetic or invested in his fate as he ruins an ever increasing number of lives without a twinge of self-doubt.
Petrie’s Claudius gets the most complete narrative here. He has a weary dignity to him throughout, and his ‘confession’ to his brother’s murder is framed as a piece of role play: not praying to God to forgive him, but addressing an imaginary press conference. It ends badly for him – it always does – but he’s never a cackling villain, more an ambitious politician in a dangerous world who acknowledges he gave it a swing and a miss. There is a clarity to his trajectory missing elsewhere.
Officially the running time is two hours and 45 minutes. On press night it was actually three hours, but that’s still pretty clippy for a Hamlet. Some of that is achieved via Ben Stones’s smartly economical palace set, with most of the scenes in act one careening into each other without pause. Abeysekera’s rapid fire approach to his soliloquies must shave some time off (NB this is clearly a character choice rather than clock watching). But still, there is stuff that feels undercooked – Ayesha Dharker is wasted as a wan Gertrude who doesn’t seem to have particularly strong feelings about any of what’s going on.
A cheeky madman Hamlet is a valid take on the role. But the play remains the thing, and Hastie just doesn’t bring the rigour to bear to make this a classic production - you have to be incredibly meticulous to carry off anarchy in a Shakespeare play.
Still: it’s fun, it’s imaginative, Abeysekera, Petrie and Streatfeild are all great. You should be able to stage Hamlet and it not be too big a deal. But it also makes me miss a really well-worked prestige Hamlet - let’s not leave it another 15 years, eh National Theatre?
