Is Rory Kinnear as good as the National Theatre thinks he is? After starring in The Man of Mode and half a dozen other plays, he's now tackling the big one. Though not everyone will agree, I found his Hamlet not just technically good but emotionally and psychologically coherent. I preferred his reading of the part to that of David Tennant for the RSC, who over-emphasised the joky, sardonic elements of the part.
Kinnear is certainly good at Hamlet's savage humour but also conveys the character's deep pain at his mother's betrayal. This is evident from the first court scene, where Hamlet sits hunched in a chair, unable to look at Gertrude and Claudius sitting together. When Claudius put his feet on his desk, his formal televised speech over, and seems approachable, Hamlet seizes the moment and places a letter in front of him (presumably his request for permission to return to Wittenberg), Claudius pointedly ignores it and speaks to Laertes instead. Hytner's production illuminates what is going on with lots of these insightful touches. The last time we see Ophelia, she is being bundled away by Claudius's security goons, a hint that her suicide may not be entirely voluntary.
Denmark is a modern police state, a surveillance society with everyone spying on everyone else. As Hytner and Kinnear explain in the programme, this was the reality of Elizabethan England, and it's a reading that flows naturally from Shakespeare's text. Although I've seen excellent productions of the play that whittled it down to a family drama, I generally prefer to see Hamlet with the politics left in. A decade or so ago, when Samuel West played it in modern dress for the RSC, Elsinore had a whiff of New Labour and the court of Blair. Here, it's several degrees more sinister. Claudius (Patrick Malahide) is genuinely evil, and so to some degree is Gertrude. Claire Higgins plays her very convincingly as a woman trying in vain to bridge the gap between her son and her husband, but failing.
One of this production's other great assets is David Calder as a pompous and rather chilling Polonius, whose murder is genuinely shocking. I also liked Ruth Negga's Ophelia, though I couldn't quite believe in her descent into madness. Horatio (Giles Terera) I found sometimes inaudible at the back of the circle in the big Olivier auditorium. Kinnear, by contrast, has the knack of projecting his lines with great clarity. In this performance he shows himself to be a much more physically gifted actor than I previously suspected, especially in the scenes of feigned madness and the final duel.
This is a long production, which relies heavily on the quarto version of the play, and includes some scenes that are normally left out. I'm no expert on the text of the play, but I happily discovered some new aspects of Hamlet which hadn't struck me before. Even the Fortinbras scenes are worth watching. Vicki Mortimer's set includes moving walls with windows that deliver some brilliant visual moments. Nicholas Hytner's modern-dress versions of classic comedies such as The Alchemist and The Man of Mode in the National have always been a joy to watch. So was his modern-dress Henry V in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and now he's pulled off the same trick with a Shakespeare tragedy.
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