Jumbo is a female Hamlet up there with the best of her male peers
Hamlet Young Vic, SE1 ★★★★★
This summer, Sir Ian Mckellen gave us, at 82, the oldest Hamlet the British stage has seen. Now, Cush Jumbo delivers another first. Not only is Jumbo the first actress of colour to take on the role at the Young Vic, 20 years after Adrian Lester excelled in the part there. But, more than that, it appears she is the first professional non-white actress to play the Prince on an English stage tout court.
Judging by a recent interview, though, such novelty value doesn’t interest the Londoner, who has leapt to fame in the US and beyond starring in The Good Fight, the spin-off TV series to The Good Wife, in which she played luminously bright lawyer Lucca Quinn.
The play’s the thing for her, it’s not about nominal milestones. Her declared artistic interest in this mighty role – which has a higher word-count and arguably greater emotional demands than any in the canon – is masculinity itself.
“A man who’s born too early, in the wrong time,” she says.
Is that what emerges in this Covid-delayed production by Greg Hersov, who directed her to awardwinning acclaim as Rosalind in a Manchester As You Like It a decade ago? Yes, and no. Jumbo offers us a figure who is transfixingly ambiguous, collapsing definitions of gender. With her close-shaved hair and rangy physique, she proves the charismatic quintessence of “nonbinary”. The identifying pronouns remain masculine, and Jumbo proves her athletic mettle – especially in the climactic duel with Laertes, conducted with daggers not swords. Gertrude’s line about Hamlet being fat and scant of breath – issued by a husky Tara Fitzgerald – seems inapposite: Jumbo’s a lean, mean fighting machine.
At the same time, her street-smart bearing, with lots of tough sceptical looks, is offset by genial smiles, an ethereal aura and telltale tics of vulnerability – she runs her fingers over her scalp, clamps her hand to her heart and can tip rapidly between a solid stance of sanity and a crumpling and distraught demeanour, the bubbling forth of grief for her slain father.
It’s not a groundbreaking interpretation. She handles the soliloquies and speeches with a tripping articulacy but, saving surprising restraint during the lambasting of Norah Lopez Holden’s increasingly impressive Ophelia (“Get thee to a nunnery”), few revolutionary readings.
No matter, she confirms her promise as a classical actress and holds you riveted. The issue is more with what happens when she’s not on stage.
Jumbo’s sexual indeterminacy fits with a hero who takes an age to make his mind up, but the sometimes ponderously paced production feels imprecisely located; designer Anna Fleischle depicts Elsinore using three large, rotatable, rectangular columns, with dulled mirror elements.
A goonish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take selfies and vape, the gravedigger sings Bob Marley and a shifty, restrained Adrian Dunbar as Claudius almost looks like he’s wandered in from the set of Line of
Duty. Conceptually, then, it’s a bit mumbo-jumbo-ish. But what matters of course is Jumbo herself, a major, forceful talent, yielding a Hamlet who easily stands comparison with the best of her male peers.