Mark Rylance's Hamlet in Giles Block's stolidly unexciting production, which offers an Elsinore court no more decadent or devious than a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, left me nostalgic.
I kept remembering the excitement of a 1989 Hamlet when the role was magnificently taken by a promising young actor called Mark Rylance. That first Hamlet of his, attired in pyjamas, deep in the dejection, craziness and rages of an alarming breakdown, suggested the Prince's "antic disposition" was involuntary rather than a Revenger's pose. Rylance adopts this interpretative line again, though in grosser, less illuminating terms.
Now his father-fixated, black-cloaked Prince, skulking in grief's lower depths and weeping copiously for his dear, dead daddy, commands the theatre in brooding soliloquy.
Rylance hugs and holds Tim Preece's vehement, lifelike ghost as if he cannot bear to say goodbye. The Prince is so over-whelmed by the encounter he has to be helped to walk away. But Rylance now seems rather mature to be playing the Prince, let alone presenting him as a little-boy lost. And for all his heartfelt sadness, his delivery becomes too tremulously monotonic. Hamlet's madness, manifest when he appears in a night-smock, which looks as if it is heavily stained with excrement, veers towards the grotesque rather than fearful or disturbing.
Rylance hurls fruit about the stage, sprawls flat upon a table and thrusts his buttocks at James Hayes's vacuous rather than cunning Polonius, whose corpse Hamlet will later treat as a bloody joke. In the graveyard scene Rylance's coarse ventriloquist's act with Yorick's skull indicates this Hamlet never truly recovers from breakdown. So this Prince cuts a bizarre and humorously knockabout figure, whose relations with Penny Layden's affecting Ophelia, last seen whirling around in a mad dance, lack vehemence. No wonder, though, that Joanna McCallum's sexless, stentorian Gertrude, who resembles a younger Lady Bracknell rising haughtily to the challenge of an unseemly incident in her closet, leaves Hamlet untouched.
Director Block cuts the text, melts or drips one scene into another and sensibly uses the balcony as a spying vantage point. But there's little of Revenge Drama's hurtling speed, while Tim Woodward's authoritative but undangerous Claudius plots Hamlet's downfall.
Geoffrey Beevers's preposterous, elderly Horatio, potters blandly around, like some desiccated university professor rather than Hamlet's devoted fellow student. And Mark Lockyer ridiculously serves up Laertes's grief as a ham actor's banquet.
It's an oddly disappointing experience.
Hamlet
