Good night, sweet prince
Director Robert Icke is the king of the highconcept classic, having reimagined Aeschylus and George Orwell as piercingly relevant pieces of theatre that are respectful of, but unshackled by, their literary history. You hardly need to blow the cobwebs away from Hamlet, so timeless is its psychological acuity. But in this production, previously seen at the Almeida, Icke has brought theatrical Ronseal to the rotten state of Denmark. By and large, it works magnificently – aided by leading man, Andrew Scott.
Here, Elsinore is reimagined as a paranoid surveillance state with security cameras tracking every move on the (figurative) battlements. For the famous Mousetrap scene, we see the reactions up close (via a video link-up) of Claudius (Angus Wright) and Gertrude (Juliet Stevenson), as the story of their murderous crimes unfurls via a geriatric dumb show. This adds piquancy to a scene too often scuppered by the fourth wall. The aesthetic of designer Hildegard Bechtler reveals paranoid power games played out within chic Arne Jacobsen-style function rooms, where everyone is overlooked and overheard.
There’s a chilly atmosphere, but that’s not to say that familial bonds aren’t strong. This is a production where blood ties are keenly drawn – where Polonius (Peter Wight) clucks around his children, Laertes (Luke Thompson) and Ophelia (Jessica Brown Findlay); where Claudius and Gertrude, all too often a couple portrayed as sexless power brokers, give the impression that they are constantly at it hammer and tongs.
Occasionally, Icke’s wilful desire to reconfigure the most famous play in the world feels muddled. A sometimes arbitrary use of Bob Dylan songs (though wonderful in themselves) jars against the prevailing psychological mood, while the decision to have Claudius confess to his brother’s murder in front of Hamlet is frankly bewildering.
Whenever Icke opts for out and out naturalism, the poetry lacks articulacy, but otherwise the performances are excellent. Brown Findlay, hemmed in by a wheelchair for the madness scene, brings a weirdly effective (and heartbreaking) sense of control to Ophelia’s unravelling, while Stevenson shows, through subtle glances of disdain, that she feels compromised over lusting after a man whom she has realised, too late, is a corporate bore. I was slightly less taken with Wright’s bleating, bland monotone, confessing to fratricide as if addressing a group of grey-suited auditors.
And Scott? Well, he is a sweet prince indeed. There were concerns that this confessional, intimate performance would lose its power when taken out of the snug Almeida and transplanted in the echoey, maddeningly configured Harold Pinter Theatre. But this is not the case. Scott moves swiftly, mercurially, turning on a pin. Sometimes he is weary of his own self-searching rhetoric (“To sleep, perchance to dream”) and at others, deeply unsettling in his testing of sanity’s boundaries (“Excellent, i’ faith, of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air!”). He is exhilarating and exhausting.
Ultimately, this is a Hamlet with heart. I went to the press night with a friend who had never seen the play, but who came out with a genuine enthusiasm for both the devastating effect of the story and the mournful clarity of the language. I can’t think of a better validation than that.
Until Sept 2. Tickets: 0844 871 7623; atgtickets.com