A tale of two Hamlets
Patrick Camegy
Hamlet Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between the Ben WhishawrTrevor Nunn Hamlet which finishes its run at the Old Vic this weekend and the Toby Stephens/Michael Boyd version that has just opened at Stratford and will be at the Albery in London from November.
If you missed the Nunn version, you shouldn't have too many regrets. It was absurdly over-hyped — the Daily Telegraph put it on the front page and wrote a leader opining that 'Great Hamlets blaze across the theatrical firmament about as often as Halley's comet' and that the 23-year-old Whishaw was one such comet. 'Words, words, words,' as Shakespeare's Hamlet might have put it. All very curious, for unless the Telegraph's reader-profile had changed overnight, Whishaw's was a prince calculated to make anyone over 25 feel distinctly uncomfortable. The assertively awful clothes — whether black tracksuit, kneeles', jeans or woolly cap tugged down over his ears. When you first saw him at the court, he was the massively put-out teenager, snivelling with such upset and rage that pendules of snot drooled from his nostrils. A disgusting blight on the white-suited new deal of Claudius's Denmark.
The production went all out to show a Hamlet whose miseries were those of the youth of today. It has to be said that this was magic at the box office, for Hamlet and the giggly Ophelia in her bottle-green tights were not just on the stage but right alongside you, beating you to the Coke (of whatever) in the interval. Had this audience found its way to Stratford, it could well have discovered as much to enjoy as it evidently did in London. And in this breath, one must applaud the RSC's London initiative at the Albery, which is to make available 50 seats at £5 for 16-25-year-olds every night in a winter season for the four tragedies now playing at Stratford. OK, Boyd's production fails to offer the roar of off-stage helicopters whenever invaders are at hand, but it is actually more enthralling than Nunn's.
The instant blood-chiller at Stratford is the cadaverous Ghost, bent double as he painfully drags himself and his mighty sword, horribly scraping the grated surface of the walkway from which he appears. He is a soul in purgatorial torment, straight out of Dante. Boyd's idea is that a sizeable
part of Hamlet's problem is that he's caught between the need to avenge and fear that the sin of killing Claudius could further imperil the chances of his father's escape from purgatory. Of course this may be a touch too theological for some, but Boyd demonstrates that it's far more pertinent to the play than you might have imagined.
And whether or no you want to tune into late Elizabethan eschatology, the bleached muscularity of Greg Hicks's naked torso is no mean exhibit. Boyd, however, has work to do in persuading Barnardo and the other watchers to be at least as disconcerted by the apparition as the audience is. Hicks resurrects as the Player King, and his sepulchral watching brief over Hamlet also extends to taking the part of the Gravedigger.
Where Wishaw was the classless rebel, outraged by the hypocrisy of his elders, Toby Stephens's princely prince has been to all the best schools. He's a palpably dangerous presence and you never doubt he could kill. He has all the confidence that Wishaw's Hamlet lacked — to a fault in that he's a tad short on introspection. Stephens is arrogant, but also funny with it, and indeed it's his instinctive flair for the many moods of Hamlet's humour that carries him through the play, and you irresistably with him. It's used to devastating effect against Claudius and Gertrude who can never work out whether he's mad or just joking. This is as compelling a study as you could find of a Hamlet who really wants to be king and knows he would prove most royal, which is one thing that Wishaw's fidgety misfit would never have managed.
In London, Tom Mannion's Claudius was either blandly avuncular or excessively vicious, while Imogen Stubbs's clueless blonde of a sex-kitten Queen was only interesting in her freezing off Claudius after the blazing row she's had with her son, At Stratford, Clive Wood's Claudius is a stronger presence, though less than ideally matched to Sian Thomas, whose Queen suffers merely from aristocratic confusion about her feelings and pretty well everything else. More arresting is Meg Fraser's Ophelia, a strong-willed, buttoned-up girl who imagines she has it all under control. She's learnt how to deal with an overbearing father (Richard Cordety's Polonius gets the laughs but appals in equal measure), but when Hamlet's passion turns against her is at a loss to know why the same tactics should fail her here. Nothing remotely sweet about this Ophelia — in the mad scene she rages quite frighteningly around the stage. It is a very Boydian touch that, momentarily disguised as Hicks's assistant, she should be discovered helping to dig her own grave. Inspirations like this help to sustain a richly allusive and far more satisfying reading of the play than Nunn managed at the Old Vic.
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