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Showing posts with label Hamlet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hamlet. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
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Hooray! Good Shakespeare!
There are few things more painful than watching the Bard being mangled, so I approach fringe interpretations with wariness. You can tell in the first couple of minutes whether the night's going to be a hit or a hash: whether the dialogue is delivered as a clumsy word salad or with rhythm, grace and emotion?
The Ronseal-titled Hamlet Peckham quickly establishes itself as the latter. Staged in the CLF Theatre, tucked away deep in the bowels of the labyrinthine Bussey Building, this is a sleekly minimalist Elsinore. Performed on a largely bare stage in monochromatic costumes, the design accentuates Hamlet's totemic elements: a bed, a dagger, a set of rapier, a cup of poison and poor Yorick's skull.
The show's USP is that you get three Hamlets for the price of one, divided (as per the programme) into "the problem, the plan and the solution". It's an eyebrow-raising decision - casting one effective Hamlet is a tricky proposition, let alone three of them. Impressively, Hamlet Peckham manages it with the trio Sharon Singh, Max Calandrew and Izabella Urbanowicz.
The rest of the cast are uniformly excellent, with particular praise going to Gil Sutherland's amusingly blithe Polonius. Sutherland pitches Polonius' oblivious analysis of Hamlet 's madness perfectly, successfully being both funny and touchingly paternal towards Ophelia.
Diana Gómez's intensely vulnerable Ophelia also impresses. She crumbles almost before our eyes, inexorably heading before suicide. I've seen a whole bunch of other Hamlets where, in less-talented hands, Ophelia simply looks pathetic. Gómez captures the pathos in her misery, particularly when Hamlet psychologically steamrolls over her his "get thee to a nunnery!" routine.
But the big question behind this production is whether the triple Hamlet gambit pays off. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, the thinking behind it is sound: "it is a metaphor that we can perhaps all relate to. Maybe we all have something that we need to do that something keeps us from doing". Also, it's interesting to contrast the three different approaches to the role. Common to them all is a simmering violence, but each has their own take on his mania, ranging from a realistic teenage tetchiness right through to a grim death-wish.
Thing is, by the end I found myself wishing I'd been able to see one of these actors perform the part in full. My favourite of the three was final Hamlet Izabella Urbanowicz; she had this wild fire in her eyes and whipcrack tensile tautness to her body language. She spat out the dialogue with machine-gun anger, that collapsed into remorse. I know this tale inside and out, yet her final moments really hit me in a way that few Hamlets (or any other Shakespearian characters for that matter) ever have.
On top of this, Hamlet Peckham is, to it's detriment, obsessed with audience participation. Hamlet asks the front row "To be?" and waits for someone to respond "Or not to be.", the grave digger Shanghais someone in the audience into helping shift scenery and a volunteer even gets a minor part (with lines!). It's a brave choice from the company (especially the last one), but they're essentially gimmicks. Distracting gimmicks at that.
As this production is concerned with democratising Hamlet the audience participation bumph theoretically makes sense. Yet the entire reason the play is considered Shakespeare's masterpiece is because it's already completely, thoroughly and totally relatable and accessible to audiences. We don't need to literally become involved in the action to get it.
It's frustrating: 90% of Hamlet Peckham is the best Hamlet I've seen in years. If they'd played things a bit straighter and toned down the gimmickry it'd have been a rare five star review. As it is, it falls tantalisingly short of excellence.
It's still really really really good though.
★★★★
Hamlet Peckham is at the Bussey Building until 27 February. Tickets here.
The Ronseal-titled Hamlet Peckham quickly establishes itself as the latter. Staged in the CLF Theatre, tucked away deep in the bowels of the labyrinthine Bussey Building, this is a sleekly minimalist Elsinore. Performed on a largely bare stage in monochromatic costumes, the design accentuates Hamlet's totemic elements: a bed, a dagger, a set of rapier, a cup of poison and poor Yorick's skull.
The show's USP is that you get three Hamlets for the price of one, divided (as per the programme) into "the problem, the plan and the solution". It's an eyebrow-raising decision - casting one effective Hamlet is a tricky proposition, let alone three of them. Impressively, Hamlet Peckham manages it with the trio Sharon Singh, Max Calandrew and Izabella Urbanowicz.
The rest of the cast are uniformly excellent, with particular praise going to Gil Sutherland's amusingly blithe Polonius. Sutherland pitches Polonius' oblivious analysis of Hamlet 's madness perfectly, successfully being both funny and touchingly paternal towards Ophelia.
Diana Gómez's intensely vulnerable Ophelia also impresses. She crumbles almost before our eyes, inexorably heading before suicide. I've seen a whole bunch of other Hamlets where, in less-talented hands, Ophelia simply looks pathetic. Gómez captures the pathos in her misery, particularly when Hamlet psychologically steamrolls over her his "get thee to a nunnery!" routine.
But the big question behind this production is whether the triple Hamlet gambit pays off. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, the thinking behind it is sound: "it is a metaphor that we can perhaps all relate to. Maybe we all have something that we need to do that something keeps us from doing". Also, it's interesting to contrast the three different approaches to the role. Common to them all is a simmering violence, but each has their own take on his mania, ranging from a realistic teenage tetchiness right through to a grim death-wish.
Thing is, by the end I found myself wishing I'd been able to see one of these actors perform the part in full. My favourite of the three was final Hamlet Izabella Urbanowicz; she had this wild fire in her eyes and whipcrack tensile tautness to her body language. She spat out the dialogue with machine-gun anger, that collapsed into remorse. I know this tale inside and out, yet her final moments really hit me in a way that few Hamlets (or any other Shakespearian characters for that matter) ever have.
On top of this, Hamlet Peckham is, to it's detriment, obsessed with audience participation. Hamlet asks the front row "To be?" and waits for someone to respond "Or not to be.", the grave digger Shanghais someone in the audience into helping shift scenery and a volunteer even gets a minor part (with lines!). It's a brave choice from the company (especially the last one), but they're essentially gimmicks. Distracting gimmicks at that.
As this production is concerned with democratising Hamlet the audience participation bumph theoretically makes sense. Yet the entire reason the play is considered Shakespeare's masterpiece is because it's already completely, thoroughly and totally relatable and accessible to audiences. We don't need to literally become involved in the action to get it.
It's frustrating: 90% of Hamlet Peckham is the best Hamlet I've seen in years. If they'd played things a bit straighter and toned down the gimmickry it'd have been a rare five star review. As it is, it falls tantalisingly short of excellence.
It's still really really really good though.
★★★★
Hamlet Peckham is at the Bussey Building until 27 February. Tickets here.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
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It's unanimously agreed that Bill Shakespeare knew how to put a play together. You don't climb to the top of the English literary canon without a few hits under your belt, and who can argue with crackers like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and King Lear? And at the tip-toppermost of the pile the downright delightful Hamlet, a badass revenge thriller with ghosts, stabbings, skeletons, poisonings and multiple counts of regicide. It contains all the ingredients of a seat-of-your-pants grindhouse stunner, only to be let down by a butt-numbing unabridged four hour run time.
English Repertory Theatre obviously recognise that shortcoming, and have gone at Hamlet with pruning shears, taming it into a lean 90 minute thriller that condenses the play down to its fundamentals. Their tagline: "There is no ghost. There is no equivocation. Only revenge." Or, as I prefer to put it: "Less talky talky, more stabby stabby".
Ditching the 'been there, done that' medieval trappings of the traditional staging, director Gavin Davis reimagines Elsinore is an exclusive boarding school. Our action centres around Horatio's (David Alwyn) "modern Danish history" study group, attended by the young Laertes (Alexander Neal), his sister Ophelia (Nina Bright), goody goody Rosencrantz (Charlotte Ellen) and moody eyeliner aficionado Hamlet (Rachel Waring).
Hamlet isn't happy. A letter from his dead Dad explains that Uncle Claudius (Jon House) bumped him off, and to rub salt into the wound he's only gone and married Hamlet's Mum Gertrude (Helen Bang). This injustice will not stand, and a murderous Hamlet sets out on a roaring rampage of revenge. No gut will go unpunctured! No poison undrunk! No blade unbloodied! You might say... DEATH COMES TO ELSINORE!
Reducing Hamlet into a fast-paced, action-packed extravaganza is dramatic blasphemy, but I've always enjoyed shows that go out of their way to tweak stuffy purist's noses. But is it actually any good? Well, in this condensed form a whole bunch goes out of the window: the militaristic background hum beyond the walls of Elsinore is relegated to a history lesson, the travelling players and their play-within-a-play is now a ropey school production courtesy of the four pupils and even poor Guildenstern is subsumed into the expanded role of Rosencrantz.
The most obvious consequence of this reduction of the text is that Waring's Hamlet has no time for procrastination. Given that fannying about and looking for ways to put off avenging his Dad is an enormous part of the traditional Hamlet, this is a pretty big shift in personality. This makes some plot elements a bit confusing. For example, when Hamlet hovers over the praying Claudius it's all too easy to understand Shakespeare's vacillating Prince putting off the deed for fear of sending Claudius to heaven, but somewhat less believable for English Rep's bloody-minded revenge seeker.
Throughout there's the sense that the play has been forcefully crowbarred into too small a space; soliloquys becoming performances to others and characters condensed to slightly confusing effect. The upshot is that were this anyone's first Hamlet they'd be pretty damn confused. As we rocket through the text at breakneck speed we zip through immortal lines, iconic lines and character development, the production feeling in danger of tripping over its own feet.
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| Horatio (David Alywn) catches Hamlet (Rachel Waring) and Ophelia (Nina Bright) drinking rum and cokes in a pub. |
It never does, largely thanks to the excellent cast, neat staging and a careful eye for physical theatre. Played in the round, the centre of the aptly named Cockpit becomes a classroom, the set composed of a series of white tables, chairs and a model skeleton with two rapiers perched in its chest. This malleable set is constantly being reconfigured by the cast, becoming variously a classroom, a stage or graveyard. It's most effective moment comes during Claudius' soliliquy. With the tables arranged into one block, a terrified Hamlet hides underneath as Claudius furiously tosses table after table away. The prince scurries into the ever-decreasing hiding spaces, the tension palpable.
There's no weak spots in the cast but my standouts were: Oliver Hume's waffly, puffed up Polonius, appropriately played as man who's not half as intelligent and quick-thinking as he thinks he is; Charlotte Ellen's Rosencrantz, a goody two-shoes who drastically underestimates the seriousness of the situation; and Nina Bright's Ophelia, her believable adolescence making her suicide that much more tragic.
But let's face it, all eyes are on Rachel Waring's Hamlet. Somewhat overshadowed in the 'female Hamlet' stakes by Maxine Peake, the programme quickly reminds us that Waring is the "youngest woman ever to play Hamlet". In practice its her youthful looks rather than her gender that proves more crucial. Waring's Hamlet is more punk-rock-fuck-you than reserved regal dignity. Full of energy, we hear her the lead other characters on a manic backstage chase, muffled yells of "VENGEANCE!" heard from the direction of the bar. Fun as she is to watch, her Hamlet is also layered with faintly disturbing sadism. Rarely have I seen someone take so much pleasure in dispatching Polonius, the obvious glee making the line "I'll lug his guts into the next room" quite disturbing.
The sheer energy of the cast, guided by Gavin Davis' steady direction, make this Hamlet a successful piece of theatre. It's arguable whether this is good Shakespeare; so much is peeled away that we're left with the skeleton of the text, chewy fat and emotional texture discarded in favour of streamlined sinew and muscularity. If this were the only Hamlet in town I'd be disappointed, but among umpteen other adaptations it stands out by virtue of its boldness. Messy, chaotic and hot-blooded, but fun as hell.
★★★★
Hamlet is at the Cockpit Theatre until 15th March. Tickets here.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
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For a play about an indecisive loser whose half-baked plans get everyone killed, William Shakespeare's Hamlet is actually pretty good. It's my favourite Shakespeare - which is perhaps a bit of a cliched choice - but I've always felt Hamlet is as incisive in 2014 as it was in 1614. Jealousy, anger, lust and guilt are part of the universal human condition, all fully realised in the sympathetic character of Hamlet. Who can't sympathise with putting off an important project as long as feasibly possible, hurting people you care about with casual lies or just straight-up being a bit dippy, morose and self obsessed?
It's this relatable psychology that makes Hamlet so malleable. From slight tweaks like Kenneth Branagh's 19th century imperial splendour in his 1996 adaptation, to wholesale modernisations like Michael Almereyda's 2000 contemporary reworking with Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, CEO of The Denmark Corporation (also featuring Bill Murray as Polonius!) to the most popular modern take on the material: Disney's The Lion King. Here, in Zoé Ford's adaptation, Elsinore becomes Her Majesty's Prison Liverpool. Claudius is the warden, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are snitches and Hamlet himself is an inmate, the show opening with his graphic strip-search.
Oftentimes a Shakespeare production can become unstuck when it tries to crowbar the material into a particular setting, and I had my doubts that Hamlet would even make sense within a prison. After all, Hamlet is a Prince and much of the narrative is predicated on him being able to move through the castle as he wishes. His position also allows his increasingly bizarre behaviour to be tolerated by those around him. How can this work when he's confined to a cell at the lowest rung of the social ladder?
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| When Hamlet gets really angry his hair goes a bit 1990s. |
Ford's clever solution is just to hand wave most of these problems away. The prison setting thus becomes more about tone than location; the adaptation underlining the play's pent-up masculinity, homoeroticism and authoritarian misery. This is conveyed by an impressively minimalist set. The stage at the Riverside Theatre is wide and shallow, the stage walls painted in institutional two-tone with exposed electrical transformers powering the lighting rig. Locations are delineated by three barred walls on wheels, moved around to create cells, corridors and offices. This, combined with the high contrast lighting that throws chiaroscuro shadows over the actor's faces makes for a pressure cooker environment; a place where the bloody violence of Hamlet's final scenes feels even more inevitable than usual.
And boy oh boy is this a violent Hamlet. In place of mannered, balletic rapiers duels these characters have brawny, visceral shiv fights. When Hamlet duels with Laertes it's a bare-knuckle boxing match where elbows smash teeth from gums, blood streams from swollen cuts and bones are brutally shattered. There's a protracted beating dished out by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that's painfully drawn out, a symphony of thumping body blows and cries of pain. In less capable hands this might all feel a bit gratuitous - a way to make Shakespeare 'cool' for the kids - but within the prison setting it feels appropriate, the caveman barbarism contrasting neatly with the flowery language.
Another weapon in Ford's arsenal is the frequent slippage of the Shakespearian 'mask'. Characters frequently switch in tone between Shakespearian iambic pentameter and a casual, Alan Clarkish naturalism. For example, during the 'play-within-a-play', the actors bicker at each other like teenagers stuck in a GCSE English lesson ,squabbling about whether kissing each other is 'gay' or not. Similarly, the actors often slip out of the prose to make asides to each other "don't fuckin' look at me like that mate" or "I'll fuckin' av' you". This, coupled with the nasal Scouser accent, gives Shakespeare's wordy tangled prose a vaguely Brechtian artificiality (something highlighted when the fire exit is thrown open and Hamlet briefly walks out onto a humid Hammersmith street).
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| You have to fight the urge to shout out "Get 'im Hamlet!" |
Adam Lawrence's Hamlet is a sweatily intense nutter, muscles bulging from within a wifebeater and hair loosely slicked back over his head. Lawrence's approach is to play up the weird discontinuity between the depressive/suicidal soliloquys and the hyper-masculine alpha posturing. The sense that Hamlet is playing a role is a vital component of the play, Lawrence's disconnect between his actions and his internal monologue making him seem vulnerable and sympathetic even as he puts his knee through a someone's jaw. Textually Hamlet is pretending to be mad, but Lawrence's Hamlet plays up actual madness - the actor maniacally pacing about the stage with bulging eyes, compulsively slicking back his hair and, at one point, bursting randomly into a snatch of Joy Division's Transmission.
Any Shakespeare adaptation that manages to sneak in Joy Division is okay in my book, but Ford's Hamlet impresses throughout. It's not perfect mind you, Gertrude is relegated to staring in mild consternation and I was never quite sure what Ophelia was supposed to be doing in the prison, but then the focus of this Hamlet is masculinity and violence. So, while unfortunate, it's at least understandable why femininity has been sidelined here.
This could so easily have been an enormous embarrassment: a bunch of high-falutin' public school boys playing at proletariat aggression, but Ford's production emanates an oppressive sense of menace that succeeds in not only breathing life into dusty prose but actually making it feel unpredictable. Considering that Hamlet is a play everyone knows inside and out that's no small achievement - well worth checking out.
Hamlet is at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith:
Wednesday 28 May to Saturday 21 June at 7.30pm
Sunday 22 June at 5.00pm
TICKETS: £16 (£14 concs.)
Sunday 22 June at 5.00pm
TICKETS: £16 (£14 concs.)
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