Hamlet

Hamlet at the National opens like a John Lewis Christmas advert. Elegant celebrations are in progress. The stage is full of dining tables draped in white linen and adorned with flowers and beautiful glassware sparkling in the candlelight. Elsinore is reimagined as the home of a multicultural royal family. Claudius, resplendent in a dark dinner jacket, toasts his Asian bride, Gertrude, who wears a banana-yellow sari. Enter Hamlet, hunched and mutinous, in a snaky black suit like a moody star at a film première. He cheers up when he reaches his first soliloquy which he delivers to the crowd like a larky routine at a comedy club. Hiran Abeysekera (Hamlet) is a talented and hyperactive clown who gets big laughs from unpromising material. But he lacks the substance for the role.

‘There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,’ said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot of things. I adore Chabrier – who couldn’t love the man who wrote España and turned Tristan und Isolde into a jaunty quadrille? – but it doesn’t do to take him too literally. Thomas ended his career as a notoriously crusty director of the Paris Conservatoire, and when the French musical establishment puts you on a pedestal younger composers invariably start hurling the merde. Scraps of Thomas’s music survive in all sorts of odd corners (a snippet from his opera Mignon crops up in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). I’ve always found it rather appealing.

Every Hamlet is a failure. It always feels that way because playgoers tend to compare what they’re seeing with a superior version that exists only in their heads. And since disappointment is inevitable, it’s worth celebrating the successful novelties in Eddie Izzard’s solo version. He makes some valuable breakthroughs, especially in the comedic sections. Izzard makes some valuable breakthroughs. His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s rare His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s pretty rare. He plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as sock-puppets whose robotic yapping he imitates with his hands. Brilliant stuff. Well worth copying. His Osric is a greasy, cocktail-party flatterer with a faint Mexican accent. Osric, the Hispanic immigrant. That works too.

A puzzle at Hampstead Theatre. Literally, a brain teaser. Its new production, Re-member Me, is a one-man show written and performed by Dickie Beau, whose name is a punning allusion to a bow tie. The oddly spelled word, ‘re-member’ refers to the process of reassembling the separated limbs of a dramatic character during the rehearsal process. The poster for the production centres on Mr Beau dressed in 1980s sports gear and wearing a T-shirt blazoned with the logo of ‘Wittenberg University’, written in German. Enfolding his skull is a rainbow headband. These details tell us that the play examines the character of Hamlet with a particular focus on the travails of gay actors performing the role during the 1980s Aids epidemic.

On a Saturday in August, stuck in Manhattan  and growing less enamored of the thought, I holed up at the Park Avenue Armory to catch English director Robert Icke’s Hamlet (2015) and Oresteia (2017), playing in repertory. Icke is a darling young thing on the British theater scene, “acclaimed,” as the program informs us, “for his intelligent and accessible productions” of classic texts. Hamlet runs for three hours and forty minutes, Oresteia for three fifteen, which gives you some idea of what is meant (or not) by “accessible.” These are big, bold productions. But for what it’s worth, the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall proved accessible to a packed crowd.

Ian McKellen’s Hamlet is the highlight of Edinburgh’s opening week. In this experimental ballet, Sir Ian speaks roughly 5 per cent of the lines, accompanied by a hunky blond dancer, Johan Christensen, who offers a physical interpretation of the Dane’s melancholy. The other roles are played by a ballet troupe in olde worlde costumes. The performing area is a black thrust stage, gleaming like patent leather, surrounded by low spotlights and swirling dry ice. It looks like Elsinore recreated by a cruise-ship designer. Newcomers will find the story mystifying. Hamlet smoulders longingly at Horatio and they dance like a hot couple at a gay night spot.

Never Not Once has a cold and forbidding title but it starts as an amusing tale set in an LA apartment. We meet Allison, a happily married lesbian, whose grown-up daughter, Eleanor, arrives with a hunky new boyfriend to show off. This set-up has the makings of a flatshare sitcom. You combine a straight younger couple with an older pair of lesbians and you throw in the mother/daughter relationship for extra instability. It could be a laugh. But a new wrinkle appears. Eleanor learns that she was conceived during a one-night stand and she decides to track down her absentee father. But he’s extremely reluctant to discuss what happened that evening. Too much booze, he shrugs, and the major details escape him. Flora disagrees with this version. Eleanor’s father raped her, she claims.

Here goes. The Young Vic’s Hamlet, directed by Greg Hersov, is a triumph. This is a pared-back, plain-speaking version done with captivating simplicity and perfect trust in the text. The star is Shakespeare and the production merely opens up an aperture to his dazzling account of human greatness and frailty. The action takes place on a small, level stage that could be covered by two bedspreads. Designer Anna Fleischle adds an oblong arch of distressed stone along with three tall blocks that rotate to create internal hiding places, corridors and cubby-holes. That’s all she needs to suggest a house of horrors, a court of nightmares, a royal palace beset by plots and whispers of secret killings.

Ian McKellen in his early eighties plays the Dane in his mid-twenties. A production with such a strange innovation should be conventional in all other details so that the virtues and demerits of the experiment can be judged in the right context. But Sean Mathias’s show adds extra puzzles. Elsinore is a modern palace ruled by Claudius, in a charcoal suit, and Gertrude in a chic emerald dress, pinched at the waist. Nice togs. But the audience knows how a constitutional monarchy works and that a rightful heir succeeds automatically and peacefully. So why are these murderous nutcases roaming the corridors plotting to slit each other’s throats? That contradiction goes unexplained.

Regime change at the Globe. The new boss, Michelle Terry, wants a 50/50 ratio of males to females in each production. Rather eccentric. Why cast a drama to reflect the distribution of sexual organs across the general populace? Imagine hiring an orchestra to represent the ratio of citizens who can play an instrument. And didn’t the process of examining actor’s genitals at auditions land Harvey Weinstein in a spot of bother? Ms Terry’s gender fixation is called, curiously enough, ‘gender-blind casting’. She inaugurates her reign at the Globe by offering us a production of Hamlet in which, perhaps with a nod to gender-blind casting, she plays the lead. No one but Ms Terry would have hired Ms Terry for this role.