Freddie the Fox cub and a very vain Dane
Hamlet (Holy Trinity Church, Guildford)
Verdict: Narcissistic Mr Fox
The House On Cold Hill (The Mill at Sonning)
Verdict: Homely hokum
FREDDIE Fox playing troubled Prince Hamlet? Why did no one think of it before? Just imagine the Fox family stepping into Shakespeare’s Elsinore. Actor uncle James could assume the mantle of Claudius, who kills Hamlet’s father (already voiced here by Freddie’s old man Edward) — and his mum, Joanna David, could play Gertrude.
Even in the absence of such a dream team, Freddie has generated a definite buzz about Guildford, sprinkling showbiz stardust on Holy Trinity Church in the shadow of the town’s Norman castle, where the Guildford Shakespeare Company are staging his show-jumping turn as the Prince of Denmark.
Fox employs every trick in his stable: the depths of his voice carry a whisper of Richard Burton, but he also leaps to a startling treble in moments of alarm. At the start, he seizes on his encounter with his father’s ghost as a solution to his grief — giving him a reason to get out of bed.
But Fox’s Hamlet is a vain Dane: a 24-carat narcissist who sometimes reduces the rest of the cast to props and spectators. He has the logic and meaning of the verse off pat, but if he could just inject a little more humility, he might wring more sympathy from his audience.
Still, Freddie has an undeniable, boyish magnetism and deserves credit just for getting to the end of what is, for an actor, the equivalent of running a marathon every night. Tom Littler’s production is nicely conceived in the church setting, making full use of religious iconography and regimental bunting.
Mercifully, backsides are spared the rigours of wooden pews for the threehour show — instead, we have comfortably upholstered conference chairs, in line with today’s more forgiving church doctrine. organ music adds an ecclesiastical throb, and Bach cello suites are moving, though the wistful piano music by Arvo Part at the end is a bit mawkish. Littler’s casting is a good fit for modern liberal sensibilities, with Stefan Bednarczyk’s wittering vicar, Polonius, switching between family moralist and obsequious court adviser. Rosalind Ford makes her ophelia an intelligent young woman betrayed, rather than the childlike victim she is sometimes portrayed as. Noel White, as uncle Claudius, is every inch the modern political bureaucrat; while Karen Ascoe’s Gertrude is a solid, Home Counties, Waitrose-shopping mum. But this is very much Freddie’s big night out — and I enjoyed his turn . . . almost as much as he did. n ANoTHER character from Hamlet, Fortinbras, strays into Shaun McKenna’s adaptation of Peter James’s ghost story The House on Cold Hill at the always charming Mill at Sonning.
He’s not the warlike prince of Norway, but a nervy vicar who shows up at the isolated haunted house recently bought by a yuppie couple with a teenage daughter. But no one told them about the ‘grey lady’ who stalks what used to be a monastery.
This is a very gentle chiller (think the adventures of ScoobyDoo) that will not require you to adjust your pacemaker. There’s a lot of laboured exposition in the first half, as our ad man husband and solicitor wife admire the ambition of their move, fuss over bills and set up a dysfunctional Alexa base station. Matt Milburn’s dishy ollie and Madeleine Knight, his doting wife, make a loving, problem-free couple. only Hannah Boyce, as their daughter with a mind configured by social media, shows much vim. And Debbie McGee makes an eccentric appearance as Annie, a highly strung spirit medium who runs the village shop. I’d have preferred to have seen less and imagined more in Keith Myers’s Hammer Horror production, but there is a little frisson in the second half of this pleasantly distracting two hours.