HAMLET
Olivier Theatre, London SE1
Opened 7 October, 2010
***
Rory Kinnear has for a little while now been known to theatre
aficionados as the finest actor of his generation. All that was needed
was a formal coronation, such as his taking on the role of Prince
Hamlet. This production has been keenly anticipated for the better part
of a year, and Kinnear does not disappoint. The 32-year-old has
inherited his late father Roy’s comic talent (in particular that
priceless ever-so-slightly-distracted look), but combines it with a
thoughtfulness and clarity which give him a much greater range. As
Hamlet he can give full rein to his skills – can “sound me from my
lowest note to the top of my compass”, as he accuses Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern of attempting to do.
This is a Hamlet who can play his antic disposition masterfully, yet
who is at times genuinely frantic. His first encounter with the ghost
leaves him gibbering, inanely drawing a smiley face with the caption
“VILLAIN” on the wall (to set it down that one may smile and smile
and...), then later he parodies himself by producing a batch of
T-shirts with the same image and caption, as merchandise for the
players’ performance before the royal court. He can play both registers
at once, cursing Claudius in soliloquy as being “no more like my father
than I to Hercules” whilst showing his un-Herculeanness by rubbing the
hand he has just hurt thumping the king’s desk. He can weigh each word
as scrupulously as Simon Russell Beale, but can also be silly with an
unselfconsciousness which Beale cannot manage. This is a pearl of a
performance.
It is, however, a pearl in an imperfect setting. One thinks, perhaps a
little unfairly, of modern militarism as being Nicholas Hytner’s
standard Shakespearean mode, but it is the case here, more or less.
Much of the brooding armed presence is not strictly military, but
rather a phalanx of black-suited, ear-pieced bodyguards-cum-secret
policemen. They tone in well beneath Patrick Malahide’s Putinesque
Claudius, and shockingly even seem to murder Ophelia, but their
ubiquity makes little or no sense. So they’re all over the place yet
don’t report all these private remarks that they obviously hear? Or,
just as stupidly, they’re always present for protection but then have
to leave so that a soliloquy can be plausibly delivered?
Clare Higgins suggests a troubled hinterland to Gertrude: certainly she
and Kinnear’s Hamlet are continents away from the standard loving
mother/son relationship portrayed in those roles, and she may even have
been complicit in the old king’s murder. Ruth Negga’s Ophelia is
credible when sane but her madness is badly over the top, especially
burdened as she is by Hytner with a wire shopping trolley. David
Calder’s Polonius, on press night, was less bumbling than rasping due
to a sudden onset of laryngitis. Kinnear’s is one of the finest handful
of Hamlets I have seen, but at the risk of sounding superannuated and
reactionary, the production is simply too gimmicky.