Theatre
Bright revivals
Bryan Robertson
Hamlet (Young Vic) Relatively Speaking (Greenwich)
There is a good deal to be said for a well spoken, carefully reasoned and paced Production of Hamlet, especially when the
Play is likely to be watched by a young au- dience experiencing it for the first time, which is what you get at the Young Vic. It's
useful to have the orthodox hang of it clear- IY In mind, visual images of plot as well as text, before confronting the excitements or the exasperations of an epileptic or transvestite or necrophiliac Hamlet. v The conventional production at the ' °ung Vic under the direction of Terry Palmer deploys an unusually complete text with a bustling pace, fast enough for the very real excitements of the play to establish themselves — waiting for the ghost to ap- t pear, the arrival of the players and the set: ting .. uP of the play within a play, the Momentum leading up to Hamlet's duel with Laertes — but with enough space to clarify the great speeches, the more momen- tous exchanges, and just enough time for reflection. Palmer's direction is both lively and scrupulous and the company is well served by a simple but useful set designed Y Keith Grant which allows action at dif- ferent levels.
As You might expect, Edward Fox's por- trayal of Hamlet doesn't suffer from gabbl- ed or hesitant diction and less expectedly
for some, I imagine, he brings to the role 41-Me touching reserves of gentleness, sen- sltivitY, courtliness and an imaginative ap- prehension of the great forces of choice and c,°, nscience beating against the confines of Ms domestic trap. Mr Fox is a rum one. He conies on in so many productions, stage or r Ihri, like some vacuously smiling, well- mannered Bertie Wooster in an elegant suit and an old-fashioned upper-class accent — hut .a Wooster whose smile might freeze at a. nY moment as he pulls a gun on you. But to a revival of Eliot's Family Reunion three Years ago, Fox gave an authentically haunted performance as the son, and last Year in Simon Gray's play about schoolteachers we were offered a complex Portrait of a decent, lonely and quite empty man who had never begun to live. Born perhaps to play the great Jacobean roles, Fox is also an exceptional Shakespearian actor, whose intelligent and marvellously
clear delivery of Hamlet's lines offers us many fresh insights into the character and, not least, an extra measure of awareness in the character: this Hamlet is in the main very much in control of himself, his madness slight and quickly passing.
John Boswall is an excellent Polonius, relishing his hollow sagacity and in all ways the wily superannuated courtier. Maxine Audley makes a commanding figure of the Queen and does all she can with what is fundamentally an unwritten role: you believe in her uncomprehending dependence on Claudius and her need for a consort. Terence Hillyer is a fine Horatio with a commanding presence: decent, perplexed, and an intelligent listener. Gareth Forwood and Terence Harvey make suitably charming and meretricious figures as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the rest of the company is inadequate or bad. Too many actors playing Claudius in re- cent productions come on like an irate senior manager of Safeways: Claudius is touched by vulgarity as well as duplicity but he is also the King's brother. The best Claudius I ever saw was played by that splendid actor, Brewster Mason, in the David Warner version of Hamlet. Mason was royal, powerful but coarse-grained: he clutched a glass all through the play, gently tippling and — nice touch — perched it on the altar as if it were a drinks trolley when falling to his knees in prayer.
Laertes here is wrongly cast. After wat- ching the present Ophelia and recalling other recent essays, I feel there should now be a strict rule that no young actress should be allowed to play the part if she has ever heard of Grotowski, Peter Brook or the Marat/Sade or has even so much as glanced at a textbook of psychotic female types. Im- possible, I know, but ranting and raving Ophelias with bellowing lungs are becoming as much a cliche as simperingly distrait debutantes with well-bred accents. There has to be a balance, and the answer as always is in the language, where pathos should keep soaring derangement at bay.
Ayckbourn is nearly always a delight and the bright revival at the Greenwich Theatre gives us one of his earliest and very best plays. It's the one about the pair of young lovers with the girl hiding from the boy her guilty secret of an affair with her boss and the older couple with the husband conceal- ing from his wife his affair with his secretary who is really the girl and all four meet up with the boy believing the girl to be the daughter of the older couple and the husband imagining the boy to be his wife's non-existent young lover and ... No bare outline of an Ayckbourn plot bears inspec- tion: he just happens to be a dazzling comic writer who uses language with the precision, freshness and economy of Wodehouse or Pinter.
Arnold Bennet's early reference to Coward as 'our modern Congreve' could more fairly be applied to Ayckbourn for his lovingly detailed sense of character and fastidious use of haunting verbal cliches to help build the very structure of a situation. Relatively Speaking is a faultless mechanism for four players, replete with the usual distorting mirror transversals and delicately tense crescendos of uncom- prehending, lunatically cross-purposed ex- changes of which Beckett, with his famous love for Vaudeville routines, could well be envious.
One of many signs of Ayckbourn's special grace as a writer is the way in which the true nastiness of his domestic tyrants or hypocrites is screened from us, until we are going home, by the sheer humour and bar- miness of those verbal exchanges on stage, which seem as brightly lit as the set itself. Our delighted sympathy is engaged by such sharp and cunning use of simple language with all its hesitancies, pauses and flurries of sound. Only later does the contour of a domestic monster become apparent. At Greenwich, Colin Baker and Prunella Gee are charming and funny as the youngsters; Gerald Flood and Eleanor Summerfield are quite brilliant as the older couple, with Ms Summerfield trailing a nice line in briskly cheerful, well-mannered and practical in- comprehension.
It's a mystery. One of the most successful art collectors in the world and he goes and hangs himself.'
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