This one’s a screamer. Jonathan Slinger
is one of the RSC’s major acting assets at the moment. He has worked
his way up to playing a range of main parts, from Richards II and III
to Prospero and Malvolio, and now he quite deservedly gets a shot at
the biggest of them all. But this is where his ascent plateaus. For
what he fills this role with, principally, is volume. Slinger doesn’t
shout all the time, it is an occasional choice, but the occasions are
too numerous. Nor is it a matter of bare shoutiness; he continues to
deploy a variety of cadence and timbre… but they tend to lose out to
the volume. Sometimes, in contrast, he opts for an infrabass vocal
register, so low in pitch that it seems to be emerging from the bowels
of a much larger man. His performance is far from being intellectually
or emotionally lightweight, but it is not compelling enough to avoid
our being distracted by matters such as his vocal tactics.
He is hampered by director David Farr’s staging concept. (It seems to
work a similar charisma drain on the normally magnetic Greg Hicks as
Claudius, who is left to signal his villainy by wearing a
double-breasted suit.) Farr sets the action in the hall/gymnasium of a
public school: foils and fencing masks hang from the walls, along with
the Danish national flag furled in a corner of the stage-onstage.
Horatio (the now consistently worthwhile Alex Waldmann) is the kind of
affable, bespectacled housemaster who wears Scandinavian sweaters;
Pippa Nixon’s Ophelia is a shy English mistress whose first encounter
with Hamlet causes her to drop a pile of marking. Farr may be using the
school as an emblem for the nation, or at least the national
establishment, as Lindsay Anderson did in
if…., but in practice it feels like
little more than an extreme solution to the problem of combining
fencing foils with modern dress. And when the setting’s capabilities
run out, as they do during the crucial “closet” scene between Hamlet
and Gertrude (Charlotte Cornwell in matronly bad-taste couture), they
do so with inescapable force. All in all, Ophelia (left lying downstage
in a shallow grave throughout Act V) may have had a lucky escape:
imagine how earsplitting their wedding night could have sounded.
Written for the Financial
Times.