This vanity project should have stayed in the Brandreths’ kitchen
Hamlet Park Theatre London
No, not the Tom Hiddleston vehicle directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh that opens tonight at RADA, not least because it’s virtually impossible to see that show: tickets were available only through an online ballot. Don’t, though, think for one minute of consoling yourself with this alternative – and decidedly less A-list – Hamlet, born from the egos of the Brandreth family, who have devised their own 90-minute take on Shakespeare’s greatest play featuring themselves.
So Gyles Brandreth plays the Ghost, Claudius, Polonius and the Player King; his son Benet plays Hamlet; and Benet’s wife, the American actress Kosha Engler, plays Ophelia, Gertrude, Horatio and Rosencrantz. As if to ram home how weird and incestuous this is, the production takes place in a modern kitchen complete with a handy knife drawer presumably based on the Brandreths’ own.
By anyone’s standards, though, this is an act of extraordinary hubris. Are we really meant to assume that the relationships between father, son, daughter-in-law and wife in the Brandreth household are so muddled that only the narrative of Hamlet can make sense of them? Engler can be flirty and playful with Brandreth Snr all she wants but this real or imagined psychosexual domestic drama is of interest only to themselves.
At least Benet, as a rhetoric coach for the RSC, can be depended on to know a bit about projection and enunciation – a hallmark of this show is the clarity of the verse speaking. But it’s a clarity invariably deployed to the wrong ends. Special care seems to have been taken to ensure that Shakespeare’s most familiar lines ring particularly loud and clear, to the point that I started to think the trio were reciting from one of those tourist tea towels that list the Bard’s most famous quotes. Benet gives an eloquently febrile performance but you can’t shake off the suspicion that he’s the sort of chap who likes to deliver Shakespeare soliloquies to himself in front of the mirror at home.
Director Simon Evans has terrific form working in small theatre spaces but this, co-directed with David Aula, must surely rate as one of his blandest and dullest productions. It doesn’t help that he seemingly has almost no resources at his disposal – I’ve never heard a thunderclap sound less convincing. The Brandreths should have done us all a favour by staging this vanity project in their own kitchen to a group of non-paying – and very forgiving – close friends.