The Other Hamlet

Hamlet
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

To get good notices it helps to be dead; when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s studio Hamlet was first shown to the critics at Stratford’s Other Place, its director, Buzz Goodbody, was already the late; and within a week she and the production were almost legend. This coincidence offered great cause for suspicion; so fit the reiterated claim that this was ‘a Hamlet for our time,’ which usually means that the actor is not up to the role. The production has now transferred to the cellarage beneath the Roundhouse, and I made my way warily downstairs. 

I was tired, apart from anything else, of director’s Shakespeare; the current National Theatre production had found me willing to forgive much crudity for the sake of plainness, speed, and an exhilarating central performance. I still think that for the moment that is the way to act Shakespeare in a large theatre; not to worry the text, but to let the text worry us. But a small room imposes different rules; it shows up any kind of sloppiness. The present version, for example, done in modern costume, closes with a military take-over by a sinister Fortinbras who has come to Denmark dressed for Vietnam. Offstage the boots of his soldiers mechanically crunch. We end in fact with a rampaging cliché: which I mention at the start in order to dispose of it quickly, since it is the only blemish on what, to my surprise, I found a fascinating evening.

This is a conversational Hamlet which discovers meaning from moment to moment without (as tends to happen at the Aldwych, even in a superior product like the Henries) vaingloriously brandishing it in our faces. It exhibits, not merely intelligence, but common sense. White screens slide apart for entrances and make a superbly penetrable arras. The stage, at one end of the room, puts out arms along its sides: ledges which also serve for approaches and retreats as does the centre aisle which divides the audience. We are in the middle of the action though this is a point of strategic rather than interpretative interest. George Baker’s Claudius does tend to address us, in the quietly ingraining tones of a modern royal, as if we were his privy council, but this must be because there are no actors to spare for that function onstage. There is no consistent effort to involve the audience as participants or accomplices; Ben Kingsley’s Hamlet makes far less use of us in soliloquy than does Albert Finney at the Old Vic.

Mr. Baker presents a Claudius outwardly bland, really troubled by Ophelia’s madness, more than willing to stop at one murder. His avowal of enmity to Hamlet (‘like the hectic in my blood he rages’) is a frantic admission, long pent-up. Gertrude is immature and Ophelia is a baby; but age triumphs. Griffith Jones, whose Ghost haunts the play as well as the castle, and Andre Van Gyseghem,a silky Polonius, are notably more impressive here than in the histories. Mr. Van Gyseghem is particularly fine when briefing Reynaldo, whom Charles Dance makes a respectfully supercilious diplomatic cadet; for once this scene fulfills its text-book function of indicating a climate of suspicion and intrigue, one which duly infects the whole play.

The colouring stops short at the central character, who here, as always, seems unaware of what kind of story he is caught up in. Ben Kingsley, compact and swarthy, looks like an uncooperative, defendant at a show trial, but except when matching wits with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who are excellently differentiated, R being the brain and G the heavy) shows little interest in politics on any scale. If the Finney Hamlet is questioning, his is quizzical; he is continually catching himself out in histrionic gestures and shamefacedly withdrawing. This is a Hamlet who thinks he knows about acting: his advice to the layers (as an amateur suddenly granted the right to instruct professionals he should appeal to all critics) is delightful in its rapt assurance, but no less warning is the respectfully dismissive response of Bob Peck’s tragedian-in-chief.

Earlier his subdued treatment of the Hecuba speech has taught Hamlet a valuable lesson which, Mr. Kingsley suggests, he is willing but not quite able to learn. He cannot take the simple way out; faced with the golden opportunity to kill Claudius he hurls himself against the nearest wall, desperately arguing himself (‘that would be scanned’) out of any easy solution. When, a moment later, he stabs Polonius the discovery that he has got the wrong man hardly seems to surprise him; we may suspect that he would have been slower on the draw had it been the right one. For once the Ghost seems right in referring to his purpose as ‘almost blunted’. Mr. Kingsley does his incisive best to sharpen it in the meeting with the Norwegian army;  but he seems too intelligent to be taken in by so obviously thuggish a Fortinbras. 

He suffers, like all Hamlets, from having the crucial shift in his character take place offstage, but he compensates better than most with ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ delivered not as rant but as quiet assertion. And the end, the duel becoming a fevered punch-up when he realises Laertes’s treachery, is excellent. Mr. Kingsley has been tagged as an unromantic Hamlet; I wouldn’t know about that, but he must be the most sympathetic in years. Performance and production come; as always, separately wrapped but they do not clash; and each is generous.