Shakespeare
HAMLET
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

The most arresting moment in Gregory Doran’s RSC Hamlet? Not a soliloquy, although David Tennant makes a remarkable job of his first one, foetal in private agony. Not the ghost, who, despite an edgy opening scene with powerful searchlights probing the darkened audience and stage, fails to convince. Not Hamlet’s death in the arms of a Horatio whose lines, like those of Fortinbras, are cut to focus on the tragic spectacle. Perhaps surprisingly, the moment when the production seems most confident and inventive is the dumbshow before “The Mousetrap”. The Player King and Queen are a grotesque pair, he dwarfish with monkey ears, shuffling on boots attached to his knees, she fleshily transvestite with bare breasts and whitened face. Lucianus snakes down from the flies, muscular and bare-torsoed, sporting a heart-shaped spangled codpiece he later unzips to reveal a flopping spring. The murdered King is covered with a white sheet and winched into the air, hovering like a cartoon ghost.

This play brought by the travelling troupe to Elsinore is designedly retro, with haughty rhymed verse preceded by a dumbshow in the style of Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc, already two generations old by the time of Hamlet’s first performances. As such, it is key to the play’s sustained nostalgia – familial, political, religious and theatrical. Rather than being purely instrumental, here it offers a real insight into why Hamlet is so preoccupied by theatre and by acting. In a beautifully executed vignette, Tennant, atop a wicker costume hamper, falteringly recalls the speech on “rugged Pyrrhus”, prompted by the players. The words return haltingly from his memory: “coagulate gore” is an old favourite. This Hamlet, who seems, as we do, quickly to lose sight of his father’s commands to “remember” and “revenge”, instead unpacks his mind of much-loved theatrical speeches, in an affection for theatre both sincere and without condescension.

What is so compelling about the dumbshow’s freakish depiction is the ways in which only its plot – not its characters – mimics what the Ghost has told us. This production has no truck with the oversexed Gertrude of Hamlet’s fevered imagination – no “reechy kisses” pass between her and Claudius, although numerous well-observed details suggest that theirs is a mutual and loving relationship. Penny Downie’s Gertrude steps in to supply “Wittenberg” to prompt the new stepfather addressing the student prince in Act One, scene two, and she greets the news that Fortinbras has been brought to diplomatic terms with real relief and pride in her husband’s political abilities. Her counterpart in “Gonzago” is her pantomimic obverse, just as the Player King confounds the noble opinion in which old Hamlet is held. The play’s Lucianus is both Claudius – the murderer of the King – and Hamlet – “nephew to the King” – but in his priapic lusts resembles neither explicitly. The text of the “Murder of Gonzago” is largely cut – Gertrude’s observation that the Player Queen “doth protest too much” refers to her gestures rather than her speech – and Claudius’s exit is less guilt-stricken than calmly disappointed in the flippant prince. The idea, however, that the players’ welcome intervention in the Danish court has been irreversibly catalytic is firmly established. After the rout of the performance, Hamlet lolls on the throne wearing the abandoned play-crown at a rakish angle, before heading to his mother’s closet and to the murder of Polonius. Everything has changed.

That an old play might be electrified in a new context is, of course, an appropriate conceit for this much-hyped production of Hamlet. Tennant’s television role as the Time Lord Doctor Who and as Hamlet has dominated media coverage – and ticket sales – as an irresistibly unlikely coupling of high and low culture. In fact Tennant’s Hamlet is rather like his Doctor – sardonic, clever, verbally facile, isolated – but less mordantly intellectual and more febrile. Doctor Who’s superciliousness as he bests circumstances and challengers in episode after episode here gives way to a radical susceptibility. Hamlet’s loneliness is not that of superior understanding but of submission to events. His belated realization that “the readiness is all” seems here less an intellectually achieved stoicism, more a visceral understanding that he is the object rather than agent of events. Skinny and exophthalmic, he evinces an inner torture which we observe rather than fully understand: as the production matures, it will be more possible to judge whether this opacity is its weakness or its signal insight. Barefoot, in red T-shirt and Levis much of the time, his youth is always prominent. He is largely likeable – flustered and inarticulately unable to respond to Ophelia, rather than violent, a teenage puritan rather than would-be Nero in his mother’s closet. The Ghost’s presence in this scene draws out a poignant family portrait: parents sit on the bed, with husband tenderly touching wife’s hair, and the child kneeling at their feet in an idealized lost innocence strikingly devoid of that psychosexual knowingness with which the scene seems often to be freighted.

This Hamlet can be funny, too: whistling with concentrated sobriety an off-key “Three Blind Mice” as a national anthem plays at court; guying Osric or Polonius (Oliver Ford Davies) with nervy, restless verbal facility; upstaging the King with a joyous “wheeeeee” as he scoots away, after his arrest for Polonius’s murder, strapped with duct tape into an office chair. This makes for a more extended comic strain in the play, into which Polonius’s laboured rhetoric and senior moments fall happily, as does the northern Gravedigger (Mark Hadfield), wheezing with mordant mirth as he shovels skulls from beneath the stage.

Robert Jones’s design has a high-sheen, reflective floor and backdrop, emphasizing the play’s theme of surveillance, although the direction makes relatively little use of the possibilities of reflection, refraction and duplication. Only the splintered spider’s web in this modern arras, dominating the second half as a marker of Polonius’s murder, makes real visual capital from its setting. Music at points of high tension has a quaint horror-film quality which is sometimes bathetic. The Ghost’s electronically amplified voice is in stark contrast to his unassuming presence: the dry ice which wafts around him, echoed in the final silent entrance of Fortinbras, seems unimaginative. Sometimes those long diagonal jetties from which actors exit the Courtyard stage slow scenes down. Neither Laertes’s transformation from callow preppy student to hard man with thuggish leather jacket and pistol, nor Ophelia’s maniacal dancing dispensing misidentified foliage is truly convincing, despite the production’s particular sympathy for their father.

All eyes in this production are on Tennant – and his energetic and fresh performance deserves the attention. But there is also a quiet, controlled counter to his narrative of filial and regal dispossession: Claudius. In Patrick Stewart’s stilly, bespectacled King, we get not the silkily smiling villain but something infinitely more troubling to the story we have believed from the two Hamlets: an essentially decent man, whose offence is like bile in his throat. He accepts the poisoned cup from Hamlet with equable grace, knowing his time is up, and his final movements as he lies dying on the floor are to reach out to his queen. In its thoughtful depiction of Claudius, Doran’s production actually gestures towards that play in which the son of the murdered king is marginalized and the murderer himself takes centre stage: Macbeth.

Emma Smith is Fellow and Tutor in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, published last year.

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