HAMLET
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1
Opened 15 June, 2017
*****

I have been privileged to see several first-class Hamlets this century: Simon Russell Beale, Samuel West, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, arguably Lars Eidinger. Andrew Scott is at least as outstanding as any of those, and right now I’m inclined to rank him in front.

His Prince is almost always self-aware, but not self-understanding; on the contrary, his keynote is a kind of bemused wonder at goings-on both within and beyond his skin. The great soliloquies seem new-minted, every word a separate question. The playfulness at which Scott so excels (most notably as Moriarty in BBC-TV’s Sherlock) is here kept under a rigorously tight rein. I did not see this production when it opened at the Almeida a few months ago, but my impression is that neither Scott’s nor anyone else’s performance has been ramped up for a venue two and half times the size; the consequent occasional intelligibility problems are far outweighed by the sense of human scale.

For this is the glory of Robert Icke’s production. It does not consist of a superlative Prince Hamlet, a clutch of fine supporting performances and a number of sharp directorial ideas stitched together into a plausible fabric; rather, it is whole and entire of itself. Angus Wright’s cool, disciplined Claudius, Juliet Stevenson’s besotted-then-horrified Gertrude, Jessica Brown Findlay’s Ophelia (at first at sea like Hamlet, finally psychologically shattered in a wheelchair), David Rintoul’s doubling of the Ghost and the Player King... all are as integral to the piece as Scott’s Prince. The modern media/surveillance society consists not just of CCTV screens on which the Ghost first appears and Danish news reports on the Fortinbras subplot; Polonius wears a wire when trying to draw Hamlet out, and even a passing line such as “But look where he comes” is delivered with a glance at a video monitor.

Time is a major, though discreet, theme of the production, whether it is the time that is out of joint, the time whose readiness is all or that which is limited for each one of us. Several characters have business with wristwatches, and the affecting final scene draws the threads together. This may also permeate the use of Bob Dylan recordings as incidental music: that sense in his lyrics that so much of reality is plastic, yet certain factors are ineluctable. And a prediction to close: following David Lan’s announcement of his retirement from the artistic helm of the Young Vic, I’d say the job is Icke’s for the asking.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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