Review Hamlet

Peter Barker finds wit and passion in a production where the gulf between the generations looms large.

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare 

Catching The Conscience Of A Nation
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/hamlet/harold-pinter-theatre/

The transfer of the Almeida Theatre’s Hamlet into the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre is an unadulterated success, with Andrew Scott leading an accomplished cast in a memorable production.

Scott achieved global fame for his Moriarty to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, but where Moriarty is an evil genius, Scott’s Hamlet is an angry and very human young man.

It's a cliché, but it's still worth repeating, Hamlet is so multi-faceted it’s always possible to draw insights from it into the human condition and also for it to be a thermometer reading of contemporary times.

And so it is with this production. Scott’s temperature is hot -- he is at fever pitch, but the prince’s antic disposition reflects the passionate anger of a young person betrayed, confused, numbed and then outraged by the actions of his parents’ generation.

He knows the marriage of his mother Gertrude (Juliet Stevenson) to her brother-in-law Claudius (Angus Wright) is wrong. The transfer of this production comes after a series of terrible, wrong real-life events.

The  numb shock, the realisation, the profound anger suddenly takes on new resonance as the famous lines and the play-within-a-play within Hamlet speak afresh.

The ghost of Hamlet's father brings clarity to and hones Hamlet's intentions and, many would say, reflects a generation gap between older and younger citizens where global warming, career insecurity, lifelong debt and the breaking of social contracts is descending on us in wave after wave.

Scott’s  Irish accented Hamlet chops at his words which jump out at the audience with the driest of humour and, above all, a burning, angry, raw intelligence. His rhythms and intonations are pure 21st century.

Obviously with the worldwide fan base and celebrity, many of the audience around me were under 35 and possibly not there solely to see a Shakespeare play. Yet this is visceral production that may have taken many of them unawares and given them arguments to follow and grasp in a gripping plot during febrile times.  

Director Robert Icke’s production, with set and costume by Hildegard Bechtler, is also pure 21st century.

There are video screens, dodgy Internet connections (Claudius cannot even get his computer to start, he has to be helped by IT), and live video streaming.

Even the supernatural is inextricably associated with CCTV broadcast and a bank of video screens manned by castle security guards with events reported as if they were breaking news.

Stevenson’s Gertrude also goes through her own revelation and re-evaluation of what is going on, the turning point coming when she is watching the play-within-a-play as she is needled into, "The lady doth protest too much" and her own realization.

Peter Wight’s Polonius, the well-upholstered old-guard courtier has the manner of a local freemasonry lodge stalwart, eminently believable in his verbal pomposity as an out-of-touch palace politician.

Icke’s production overall has wit: when Hamlet appears he has a worn leather suitcase, his baggage is dragged around  as if he is always prepared to be a traveller to "the undiscovered country",

And, aside from the monologues, ths intimate production breaks the fourth wall, with Claudius and Hamlet invoking the audience and the royal family literally taking front row seats. .

It’s nearly 35 years since I saw my first Hamlet followed by several since then. Scott’s Hamlet is the wittiest, most intelligent, and most humane of them all and it is a performance that will long stay with me. A green light for a production which achieves greatness.  .

Review Hamlet

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

Theories of Relativity
 https://almeida.co.uk/

Yes, it's all about relatives in the eagerly-awaited Hamlet directed by Robert Icke and with Andrew Scott taking on the role of the sweet prince. That's not just because the Danish court is pretty incestuous but because the corruption within is all - well - relative. 

T-shirt-clad Hamlet (Scott) creeps back to Elsinore  with battered suitcase during the wedding party where his Mum Gertrude (Juliet Stevenson) and his paternal uncle cum step-father, the childless Claudius (Angus Wright) do a smoochy nuptial dance. 

But if he had not been displaced in natural hierarchy by his father's brother, would Hamlet have joined in the usual court shenanigins? In some ways, he is a curiously unsympathetic, sometimes even sneering  Hamlet, his mother's son but without the coolness of age. 

For there's something also a little off kilter about Gertrude which culminated in us even wondering if she had a nefarious hand in an off-stage death. 

We're in a 21st century Denmark as regards the video technology and a laptop - but otherwise letters on parchment show its business as usual for paper records. 

The rooms are wide screen backed by sliding glass doors with Scandinavian-style furniture. Security guards control CCTV cameras. Gertrude slips from a backless, chiffon Princess Diana-like fashion creation to Jackie O chic (set and costume design Hildegarde Bechtler).

If Hamlet keeps Horatio (a rather lacklustre Elliot Barnes-Worrell) close to him, maybe there is a double agency at work or is there a family tree entanglement? 

Even Polonius's (Peter Wight) lumpen efforts could, with a different turn of events, be underestimated. After all the line between political success and failure is a hair's breadth. He has a son Laertes (Luke Thompson) to rival Hamlet and a possibly ambitious and certainly knowingly seductive daughter in Orphelia (Jessica Brown Findlay).

The 24 hour rolling news - some in Danish - on the screens which are periodically lowered and raised during the performance put us in mind that Royal massacres are not unknown even in our times. And of course very recently there are allegations swirling around the death of another member of a ruling family.

This was a Hamlet which grew on us rather than sweeping us away from the first. Maybe the aim was to introduce Hamlet as a slightly irritating outsider with a propensity to claw the air, speak in soliloquys and, curiously, a Southern Irish accent (admittedly Scott is a Dubliner), setting him apart from even his own parents like a cuckoo in the nest. 

Hamlet's fault,  and appearance to others as confused, seems to be to try and work out in what the rot in Denmark consists. Or maybe not to take a leading role in a court enclosed in a TV studio bubble. Also to assume that childhood pal Rosencrantz (Calum Finlay) and his former flame, the female Guildenstern (Amaka Okafor) are automatically of his party. 

Hamlet is almost in a Truman Show position. Those around him perceive the court's dangerous limbo now Hamlet's father is dead in dubious circumstances and where the son, a possible heir, is in jeopardy. Or in the words of Sir John Harington,  "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason". In short, Hamlet may in fact be a politician but the wrong sort of politician for the times. 

Does this work? At the start we have to say it did feel rather grating and slow. But we also wonder whether this is once again a production also trying to strike a balance between stage and broadcast where the pregnant pauses might be far more meaningful. In other ways, it's very much an intimate Scandi-noir TV Hamlet with a distinct psychological take, some of which may be taking place in Hamlet's fevered brain.

We also found the Bob Dylan soundtracks a bit - hmmmm. OK, we confess this review has been our own to-like-or-not-to-like Hamlet soliloquy because at some points it is a spy/surveillance drama more akin to the 2010 Rory Kinnear Hamlet directed by Nick Hytner.  At other points, it feels as if we are being sucked into the hesitating Hamlet's addled mental landscape until ultimately the two merge.

This is a Hamlet which disturbs the equilibrium. While the rolling news is almost cliché, there was something very disturbing seeing Norwegian  troops. in modern uniform, in Poland in a newsflash.

The shade of the lunatic asylum - or prison or is it a TV studio? - hangs over Hamlet as much as Orphelia who may have chosen to take refuge in an asylum once her father is wiped out.

Meanwhile it is Hamlet's mother  who takes the action and proves something more than the usual Gertrude but she and Claudius finally seem forced to follow a script not of their own making. There's even something of a video editor's ending with a deliberate continuity gaffe. An upper range amber light for a strange but magnetic sliding doors, button-pushing filmic production.

Review Mary Stuart

Mary Stuart
by Friedrich Schiller
A New Adaptation by Robert Icke

A Matter of Speculation
https://almeida.co.uk/

It starts with the spin of a coin. The same trick as the matches in the RSC's Dr Faustus but this time cast in female mode with a coin - the decision of who gets to play victor Queen and who gets to play victim Queen. Except in its sober suited arena, a modern political court, in all senses of the word, the role of the coin, of currency adds a contemporary sense of the precarious.

We must confess (it's not a beheading offence!), we'd heard but never read or seen Friedrich Schiller's 1800 verse play, so we bring an eye unversed in other versions. On press night, the resonant "Heads" meant that Juliet Stevenson undertook the role of unwed Elizabeth I and Lia Williams that of the thrice-married and widowed doomed Catholic Scottish Royal, both with short hair, mirroring each other in matching silk shirts and trouser suits.

This is a deft production - a male cabinet government led by a woman, who knows exactly when to glance into the mirror of her compact, takes measured and then increasingly agitated steps across the round wooden stage to spindly metal benches at its edge (set and costumes Hildegard Bechtler).

The curved brick walls of the Almeida both serve as the prison of Mary and enclose the machinations of Elizabeth's court.  Screens chart the compressed time line with a rumbling soundscape in the background (sound Paul Arditti). Director Robert Icke's verse adaptation has an admirable clarity and the modern references are sparse and judicious.

Elfin Mary has been incarcerated with her maid Hanna (Carmen Munroe) for nearly 20 years, having enchanted one jailor (Alan Williams with an old Labourite "This House" vibe) , she must start once again with his more rigid, worried replacement (Sule Rimi).

Her calculations in the world of flux, where she ended up by accident not design on Britain's shores, mean  she claims the legal status of modern international victim rather than nationalist political power player. Nonethless, unlike Elizabeth, she was recognized as legitimate and a Queen from her birth.

Schiller, a Protestant republican in a then patchwork of royal and ducal German states, had lived through the age of the American Independence and the hope, then terror of  revolution in neighbouring France, providing a power vacuum for Napoleon's rise.

So we were interested to see Schiller's take on a turbulent piece of British history. or rather English and Scottish history. As a whole, the Almeida Mary Stuart is lucid and gripping, but in an arc where the faults, foibles and humanity in the two women are kept mostly binary.

There are flashes of anger, unruly emotions rising up in the two women, which feel dangerous and reckless. The reluctance of the more dry Elizabeth to be directly connected through paperwork and action to Mary's death slices through the centuries to current times.The reminders that Mary is a younger, more attractive model.

But we are looking in on life and death issues turned into a political thriller where the parliamentary career politics of our time somewhat overwhelms the differences between the women.

So it is the fictitious character of unstable Mortimer (Rudi Dharmalingam), introduced by Schiller as the nephew of Mary's jailor, who injects a rush of passion into this version. And it is because of him that we feel most keenly the manic flipside, focussed on the female body, of the cool conspiring male court.  His character also felt to us the most successful nexus of age old and modern concerns.

The subtle choreographed movement, the exaggerated courtly bows, the increasing theatricality to mask political manoevres and executions are visceral and resonant. And reticence and accuracy are no protection  as courtier Davison (David Jonsson) discovers.

Visually the move from the illusion of rational cabinet government to a masque dictatorship, where the familiar trappings of the Virgin Queen nevertheless indicate powerlessness rather than power, is another nimble piece of staging, even if we weren't convinced by the accompanying song.

We, of course, only saw one configuration of the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth. And our appetite is now whetted to see other interpretations of the same play. We give an amber/green light for a modern dress Schiller thriller which proved thought-provoking and multi-faceted for our first encounter with the German playwright.

Review Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

A New Adaptation by Robert Icke

Here's Johnny

www.almeida.co.uk

Uncle Vanya gets a meandering updated filmic treatment in Robert Icke's new adaptation which he has both adapted and directed. While this is a British accented production, this struck TLT and her little gas guzzler as having an American setting.

Icke translates Uncle Vanya into Uncle Johnny, as apparently Vanya is a diminutive of Ivan, the Russian enquivalent of Russian equivalent of John. 

Paul Rhys's Johnny almost appears to have stepped out of a celibate Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. The same simmering frustrations of academic and sexual jealousy directed against the returning widower  Alexander (Hilton McRae) of Johnny's late sister, a professor of the Arts, now remarried to the much younger beautiful disenchanted Elena (Vanessa Kirby), reminiscent of a Hollywood starlet in sunshine yellow later turned to bohemian black.

This could almost be an artists' or academic or, dare one say it, actors' commune in its final days with Johnny and his niece Sonya (Jessica Brown Findlay), the daughter of the first marriage managing the day-to-day running and financial affairs against the overwrought backdrop.  

Set on a stage revolving (creakily like cracking branches) by increments, the wooden pillars at each corner enclose the space designed by Hildegard Bechtler with multiple resonances of time and place.   

Michael (Tobias Menzies), a doctor, tends but despairs of his patients, his heart in conserving the forest and future vistas ending the play with a Chaplinesque touch, balancing a globe. Impoverished Telegin is transformed into Cartwright (Richard Lumsden), the Bob Dylan emulating neighbouring landowner.  

These are baby boomer characters all left cut adrift, as the elderly professor proposes to sell the estate, not in his gift to sell, along with the old Nanny (Annie Queensberry) with her knitting and offers of tea, bringing the farmyard into the house in the shape of a (well-trained!) red rooster.

It is an adaptation with a neat turn in humorous bathos as the awkward group bring their fragile egos to the farmhouse surrounded by animals and woods. Chekhov's play itself was adapted by the original playwright from an earlier version, "The Wood Demon" and Johnny's increasing dishevelment and the characters' Caliban-like animal positioning pinpoint the forest magic.

Almost all the roles carry equal weight until the final scenes with characters jumping down from the revolve to reveal their inner thoughts in monologues under spotlight. It is an adaptation and sometimes it feels that Chekhov's irony is lost and the hurt distanced in favour of a new story.

But the growing anguish of Rhys in the title role from measured administrator to maddened holy idiot as if wrongly accused of failing in life is finely judged.  And his mother Maria (Susan Woodridge), acolyte of the professor, with her androgynous short combed back white hair and glasses could equally be a party apparatchik of the 1970s as well as the protector of an academic or even acting theory.

It comes in at nearly three and a half hours so plan your journey home carefully. Still, it's divided into acts broken up by 10 minute intervals, although  it felt as if the farmyard herd was being orchestrated outside the play within the crowded confines of the Almeida as we all rushed out for drinks and a comfort break and then back!

Intriguing and reflective, this production held us just on the right side of languor as it weaved its spell. It doesn't replace other versions but it's a green light for an ensemble rumination on the strangeness of modern life.