To beanie, or not to beanie, that is the question
SIR Ian McKellen is back playing Hamlet, following his audacious turn as Shakespeare’s great Dane in Windsor last year.
But it’s a play in which he hasn’t always prospered. The 83-yearold’s performance in the title role at the Edinburgh Festival back in 1971 was not considered a success, even by him.
And now, 51 years later, in the same city, I fear that alongside the usual madness . . . there is ballet in it.
The show is an outre, dancebased interpretation of the tragedy featuring hippie choreography by Peter Schaufuss, staged at Stockbridge’s impressively restored Ashton Hall (a stern Protestant kirk which features a picturesque rocket of a clock that is said to boast the longest pendulum in Europe).
Sadly, it only succeeds in putting the ham into Hamlet. A shiny black promontory stage, backed by an austere chain-mail curtain, is the setting for the perennially
sprightly McKellen and a company of eager young dancers.
The venerable thesp voices the thoughts of Hamlet, while dancer Johan Christensen brings them to life, accompanied by Ethan Lewis Maltby’s histrionic score. It’s a soundtrack which may evoke the cinematic panoramas of Middle Earth and The Hobbit movies, but the dreamy strings, pounding drums and primal chants (‘ooh ooh ooh’, and ‘aah aah aah’) also threaten to drown out the great man’s diction.
Thankfully, McKellen’s famously sibilant whistle, with notes of his native Lancashire, just about holds up. After all, nobody hits those final ‘t’s quite like Gandalf. The bad news for the dancers is that it’s McKellen who’s the big draw and inevitably pulls the eye. The youthful corps de ballet may leap about like salmon, but Schaufuss’s choreography is not just a form of flower- power interpretive dance. There are toecurling illustrations of fighting, drinking, and dying, too.
For the mad scenes, black, bottom-hugging costumes yield to a ghastly tangerine dream. The spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hop their way onto the stage, by way of ‘comedy’; and our two Hamlets (the speaking and the dancing versions) are both outfitted with orange harlequin shirts and matching beanies.
After 75 minutes, it climaxes in an actorly wrestling match and a reprise of that Old Spice chanting. Personally, this is not how I hope to remember the Prince of Burnley. We must pray for a more dignified end to a grand career.