Hamlet – Olivier, National Theatre ***

Elsinore, in Nicholas Hytner’s production, is a foreboding modern dystopia and a surveillance state. The cast are dressed in dark suits and efficiently move around Claudius’ court in a businesslike manner, haunting the corridors of power. Ophelia is driven mad as much by the behaviour of a distracted Hamlet towards her, as by the guards who follow her everywhere and are, at one point, seen to back her screaming into a corner. This idea of persecution creates a potent atmosphere on stage but is problematic in that it detracts from the real rot at the centre of Elsinore, the fratricide visited on old Hamlet by Claudius and his subsequent incestuous marriage to Gertrude. Disappointingly, Patrick Malahide is a very weak Claudius; he sits quite comfortably as his murderous action is recreated by the players before his eyes and his outburst is unbelievably muted when it does come. A much more energetic performance is given by Ruth Negga as a young and vulnerable Ophelia whose madness is convincingly swift-acting and all-consuming. She drags her shopping trolley around the stage in an unhinged frenzy – it is a modern madness where her flower tokens are replaced by childhood toys, her Barbie doll and a stuffed toy.

Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet alone makes this show a must see despite the disappointing supporting cast. A more lacklustre Laertes I haven’t before had the misfortune to witness and Clare Higgins, usually such a pleasure to watch, makes for a hysterical Gertrude who scuttles about the stage in her high heels, working herself up into a high-pitched wail at Hamlet’s murder of Polonius and never managing to convey the powerful nuances of her character. But Kinnear redeems this production from the charge of being just another mediocre modern interpretation. His eloquence transforms the blank verse into something so much more natural than any of the other actors achieve with Shakespeare’s words in their mouths. His language isn’t fraught with the manifold interpretations which precede his, so the big speeches seem fresh – there is no bombastic emphasis or peculiar locution which marks Kinnear’s delivery out from any other. ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ are delivered quietly and thoughtfully like a philosophical man contemplating his place in the universe, not like a bawling actor self-consciously delivering his lines with all the rhetorical flourishes he can muster. Perhaps it is right that those surrounding him are mere shadows in comparison to this Hamlet’s luminescence – it is Hamlet after all who has been received through the ages as ‘real’ in all his doubt and self-loathing and this realness is only intensified in this production which surrounds him with insubstantial puppets.

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