A sweet prince among Hamlets
They came from around the world to see Benedict Cumberbatch at the Barbican, flocked to the Almeida and the West End to see Andrew Scott and a lucky few crammed into Rada’s theatre to watch Tom Hiddleston – but Paapa Essiedu is going out to them. One of the most captivating Hamlets of the decade, and arguably quite the sweetest, he is heading off on tour for the RSC, where he made (belated) history in 2016 as the first black actor for the company to take on this dauntingly immense role.
That matters hugely. There’s nothing like a rising star of this calibre and from this background (the 27-year-old Londoner has Ghanaian heritage) going on the road, along with a predominantly non-white cast, to bang the drum loudly for diversity and accessibility as well as the come-on-in universality of the Bard. Before going to Washington, the show will reach parts of the UK – including Hackney – that don’t often get treated to full-fat, no-expense-spared Shakespeare. It’s inspiring stuff.
So I love Essiedu even more this time round than I did at Stratford and am even prepared to enthuse more than I did then about Simon Godwin’s revival, though his conceit of setting the machinations at Elsinore within the vague context of a West African state (with other influences infused too) remains more arresting on paper – and in production photos – than it proves on designer Paul Wills’s imposing but coolly geometric rather than geographically transporting stage.
Whenever the show’s handful of drummers start pounding away, though, the energy levels rise and there’s a fantastic moment early on when Essiedu twitches and judders to a frantic beat, summoned to see the ghost of his father. At a stroke the relationship between this mourning, modern-dressed son and his colourfully berobed forebear is freshly reimagined as a form of possession.
Such invigorating strokes are alas used too sparingly and where, say, Robert Icke’s production at the Almeida reiterated the familiar but necessary point that the Danish court is a place of continual surveillance, here the tools by which Clarence Smith’s Claudius has cemented his newly acquired power remain subject to our conjecture.
What needs saying above all, however, is that there’s not a jot of weariness about the lead performance; it’s as spontaneous as it was in its infancy and thrillingly refuses to flaunt itself. Essiedu – who has cropped up this past month as the drug-dealer father of an abducted and murdered girl in the Jack Thorne-scripted thriller Kiri, just concluded on Channel 4 – is softly spoken, wellspoken too, and combines brooding introversion with coltish command, intelligence with grace.
Not a line of the soliloquies feels forced, or false; he can express reams of thought with the simplest dart of the eyes and switches readily between innocuous gentleness and hard-flinted resolve.
He ambles mischievously on the line about his faithless mother Gertrude (an eloquently restrained Lorna Brown) – “O most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets...”, then grief makes him suddenly serious at the words “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”.
Back in 2016, much was made of Essiedu’s subway-artist antic disposition – he takes an aerosol-can to the new royal portrait and when he confronts Ophelia, saying “Get thee to a nunnery” in direct contradiction of their yearning physical proximity, it’s amid all kinds of voodoo-ish artwork. Yet Essiedu is a miniaturist in his approach, able to josh while holding Yorick’s skull and slip in a heartbeat into a mournful register.
The ensemble around him deserve the best digs in town – again, none of them grandstanding, all contributing subtle but weighty detail. Mimi Ndiweni’s Ophelia goes on a journey from uneasy acquiescence in her own marginalisation to full-throated anguish that battles a swamping tide of madness. The early composure of Buom Tihngang’s Laertes likewise stands him in good stead when he becomes Claudius’s stooge in an impassioned bout of stave-clashing, chest-baring combat at the end. James Cooney makes his mark, too, as a concerned, finally crumpling Horatio, hugging the dying prince. “What is it ye would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search,” he says to Fortinbras. Absolutely true.