David Bowie’s haunting 1973 ballad “Lady Grinning Soul” also haunts Sarah Frankcom’s revival of Hamlet. It is played as pre-show scene-setting music, chanted as an induction to the play-within-a-play and whimpered by the mad Ophelia. Everyone seems captivated by this female figure of mystery, allure and power. It sets the tone beautifully for a production cast like this one, with Marcellus, Rosencrantz, the Player King, the Gravediggers and Polonius turned into female characters. There are problems here, but all are piffling cavils (who cares about the scansion of rewrites? Well, I do, but far too much), apart from an awkwardness surrounding Polonia’s verbosity. We are used to the male Polonius wittering away like, as we might say, an old woman; but when it is a middle-aged woman dressed like a Labour shadow minister of the 1990s doing the wittering, it introduces sexism rather than countering it.

So much for the supporting cast – what about the central role? Maxine Peake is really rather special, and that is a tremendous understatement. She strikes all the notes of intelligence, intensity and especially range displayed by the best Hamlets: he may claim that he is only shamming insanity, but he is clearly not in full control, and surprises and betrays himself repeatedly. But Peake adds a tenderness that induces shivers of luxuriant unfamiliarity. When adjuring Ophelia to get her to a nunnery, when part-confessing to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even when soliloquising about being a rogue and peasant slave, this Hamlet is irradiated with a compassion for those he interacts with and, almost uniquely, for himself, without being self-pitying.

I say “he”: Peake’s Hamlet is referred to throughout as male, and the actress sports a gamine haircut and baggy, figure-obscuring suits, but it is possible that her performance is influenced by the long-standing theory that Hamlet is a woman in disguise, perhaps brought up as a prince but gropingly in touch with her own gender identity. I would prefer to disbelieve this, because it seems to me that Frankcom’s production is about not merely introducing character dimensions generally considered female but also resisting labelling them reductively as such. It is quite fascinating: the living end, as Bowie would say. One final nit-pick, however: colour-blind and gender-blind casting, fine, but tattoo-blind… hmmm. Rosencrantz might plausibly have that tat between her shoulder blades, but Ophelia, just beneath her navel?
    
Written for the Financial Times.