This is a Hamlet designed to court the young so it’s shallowly populist in places. It is punctuated, for example with inappropriate Smiths songs although I liked the occasional “profane” interjection into the text.
The use-your-own accent policy grated at the beginning, but once I got used to George Fouracres as Hamlet speaking in a strong West Midlands accent I found his performance mesmerizingly natural. He makes the great soliloquies sound like slow, jerky thinking aloud – sometimes almost too much so. He is at times deliciously sardonic and that sits well.
The chandeliers swinging tensely like pendula in the closet scene are a fine touch as Polly Frame as Gertrude slogs it out with Fouracres below – and the death of Polonius is imaginatively done.
Ed Gaughan is on-stage musician and MD – sometimes on floor level and at others on the balcony. He plays filmic guitar music and creates evocative sound effects. But he really comes into his own as the gravedigger – the funniest I’ve ever seen and at this stage of the play, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s cramped conditions you need that, although its artistic merits are questionable.
I have problems too with the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia in this eccentric production. We surely need to understand that there is, or has been, some chemistry between them. Here we don’t – we just see a rather stiff, troubled girl with a bullying boyfriend. Even when late in the play he declares in anguish “I loved Ophelia” he isn’t believable.
Review by Susan Elkin