Exit Mr. Miller?

Hamlet
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Jonathan Miller may believe in quitting while he’s ahead. That could explain his announcement that after Hamlet at the Warehouse he will direct plays no more. But I'll believe that when I don’t see it. We’ve been here before. 

In the meantime this studio Hamlet is a fine production in which all the characters are human beings. Iain Mitchell’s Laertes, for example, comes on as a school bully, dragging his sister unceremoniously across the stage with what he must take to be affection. Indeed there is affection—this Laertes is far from being a scoundrel—but what he really enjoy is lecturing her. 

Kathryn Pogson’s Ophelia is just the right target for him, a long, slender, obedient girl with a nervous smile. She is apparently religious—she wears a crucifix—and she wants to please. She wants to please her family, though she is hurt and appalled when she has to stand by (a touching innovation) and hear Hamlet’s letters to her read to the king and queen; nevertheless she figures daddy must know best. 

She wants to please Hamlet, an endeavour that would drive anyone crazy. Most Ophelias turn in good mad scenes, but Miss Pogson’s—with, I imagine, much clinical help from the director—is one of the best. The bawdy songs are done with a giggly desire to shock, and all the antics seem native to the character we have seen; we have actually watched her crack in the nunnery scene. 

Most Hamlets, having read the footnotes, say ‘nunnery’ as if they meant ‘brothel.’ Anton Lesser’s, who seems to have a highly developed moral sense, is telling her for her own good to get into a convent. He loves her, as one would love the girl in the next castle. Only when he scents eavesdroppers does he go in violently for double meanings, accompanied by physical molestation. 

Mr. Lesser’s Hamlet has been slighted in the press, perhaps because, hewing so closely to the text, it leaves few gaps (known politely as ‘interpretation’) to be written about. He offers a small, intelligent and desperately young trouble-maker, who does much to re-activate the play as sheer stagecraft. Technically it is by far his best Shakespeare performance; he misfires in attempting to play the closet-scene as a continuous sob, but he is very acute, for example, in the ‘rogue and peasant slave’ soliloquy, trying to force himself into the postures of a theatrical avenger and giving up with an embarrassed shrug. What a Hamlet most needs is nervous energy judiciously disposed; and with this Mr. Lesser is loaded. 

One of his best foils is Philip Locke, doubling a quietly agonised Ghost with a long-suffering First Player, professionally painted both by Polonius’s inattention and Hamlet’s ill-timed notes. Then there is a honeyed politician of a king from John Shrapnel, charming everyone by phrasing blunt statements as tactful questions, moving into tragic gear not only at prayer, but when confronting Laertes’s rebellion. 

I tip my hat to Alan MacNaughtan’s Polonius, Paul Curran’s Glasgow gravedigger, Ian McNiece’s omnipresent Osric and Susan Engel’s Gertrud, who is not helped by a monstrously hooped gown, which makes her look as if she’s sitting down even when moving about. (Kandis Cook’s other subfusc costumes are admirable as is his subfusc set.)

There is unusual prominence for Ken Stott’s Rosencrantz, a bungler, and David Firth’s Guildenstern, a smoothie; someone should write a play about them. John Grillo rewardingly adopts the mature scholar approach to Horatio (pioneered by Mr. Locke); he is notably polite to the Ghost, and impressively careful when he sums up the bloodshed at the end. Here my one doubt arises. When he speaks of ‘accidental judgements, cause slaughters,’ he seems to be referring to carnage on a grander scale than anything we have witnessed. Studio-production does, in the end, reduce the play. But it also spotlights it, and rarely more illuminatingly than here.