Last night I think I saw the most exciting Hamlet production of my life.
On the Antiques Roadshow they show you three teapots and ask you to judge between Good, Better and Best. That's easy when the teapots are lined up together, but judging one theatrical performance against another is complicated by the passage of time and the quirks of memory. Ian Rickson's Young Vic production with Michael Sheen is the fourth top-drawer Hamlet production in London in the past three years after Gregory Doran's RSC version with David Tennant, Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre production with Rory Kinnear and Michael Grandage's Donmar West End showcase for Jude Law (which I didn't see). I've seen many other excellent Hamlets over the years, including Peter Brook's stripped-down family drama with Adrian Lester, and an RSC production by Steven Pimlott about 10 years ago with Sam West at the centre of a New Labour-style political court. But I can't remember any production of the play that had me on the edge of my seat like this one. It's breathtaking in its audacity and it's the first time I have ever seen a Hamlet that really satisfied me. It's worth taking apart in detail, so anyone who's going to see it and doesn't want to know about its many surprises in advance should stop reading now. Just take my word for the fact that this is a superb piece of theatre, and click on something else.
Where Hytner saw Hamlet as the victim of a nasty police state, Rickson (the former Royal Court boss who directed the award-winning Jerusalem) gives us Hamlet the inmate of a secure mental unit. The audience is led into the theatre promenade-style through cold institutional corridors and signs marked 'chapel', 'gymnasium' and 'library' and a front desk controlling access. The setting is mid-20th century, with grim grey filing cabinets and paper files instead of computers. The psychiatric landscape in this Rampton/Broadmoor establishment is that of R.D. Laing. The design by Jeremy Herbert puts the play in a grey carpet-tiled space, with the front desk and access room at the back, behind aluminium glass doors. At times the upstage space is closed off by a pair of heavy metal security doors, driven by noisy motors, increasing the impression of a prison with flashing red lights and buzzers. Six institutional chairs are arranged in a circle for much of the play, as if for a therapy session. Anonymous blue-uniformed workers in this sinister Elsinore asylum flit around, opening and closing doors and making newcomers like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern swap their lace-up shoes for standard white footwear with velcro fasteners. This is not a place to which you would choose to stay voluntarily, and it's no surprise that Hamlet would prefer to escape back to Wittenberg. Claudius, clad in the over-stylish three-piece suit of a sleazy consultant, rules over this establishment and has Hamlet's medical notes. No Wittenberg for him. Claudius's suit is typical of Nicky Gillibrand's careful costume design; all the characters wear things which at first glance look like normal modern dress. Only when studied more closely do they reveal an underlying strangeness, an extra fastening or belt where none is needed.
Sheen begins the play watching his father's funeral, grabbing his giant coat from the coffin and sniffing it. He's subdued, shrunken, shabby, almost deferential, a suitable case for treatment with his battered suitcase and rucksack. This basket case of a man shows none of the cockiness of a Tennant or a Kinnear. Then in the ghost scene he suddenly seems two feet taller, transforming himself into his own father. The target of the ghost's verbal onslaught is now Horatio, the slight blonde figure of Hayley Carmichael, and Hamlet's alter ego. When the ghost vanishes, Hamlet writhes on the floor as if coming out of a fit. From now on, he has the conviction and purpose of a bipolar patient on a high. Superficially, he seems quite sane and it's the other characters who are on the verge of cracking up. This is a quite terrifying piece of acting, but comes as no surprise to anyone who watched Sheen play Caligula at the Donmar eight years ago. He's an actor with a quite astonishing range, including comedy, as he demonstrated a few years ago at the National Theatre in David Farr's updated version of Gogol, The UN Inspector. He's also played David Frost, Brian Clough and Tony Blair on screen. Normally Hamlet is a sane man pretending to be mad; here he's a seriously disturbed man with a thin facade of sanity.
Often I complain about directors who are so determined to follow their own concept that the actors get swamped; that's not the case here. Rickson's production in many respects turns the play inside out, but it's wholly coherent, and it allows the rest of the cast to produce some blistering performances. Vinette Robinson is without a doubt the best Ophelia I have seen; she is crushed between the verbal violence of Hamlet and the callous indifference of her father, emerging in a wheelchair, red-eyed, her hair drawn back in a bun and her body wrapped in a drab hospital shift. This wreck of a pretty young woman sings her songs to music composed by P J Harvey in heartbreaking style. Michael Gould as Polonius is no elderly dodderer, but a man who clearly has some kind of psychiatric problem. He's unable to empathise, obsessive in his manner and occasionally loses the thread of what he's saying. His weapon is not a sword but a dictaphone. James Clyde brings to the part of Claudius something indefinable that I haven't seen before. He's suave and commanding, like an NHS consultant psychiatrist ruling a hospital fiefdom, but is always close to cracking up. Before delivering his soliloquy he overturns a filing cabinet and scatters files around in wordless desperation. The soliloquy contains his confession to the murder of his brother, but in this version the speech has been trimmed to make his guilt more ambiguous and leave open the possibility that the murder of Hamlet's father is just a figment of the prince's imagination.
It is this creative ambiguity that is the golden thread of the production. Characters morph into other characters, the dead morph into the living. Nothing is quite real. The director manages to use scenic effects to raise the tension in the second half of the play. I've seen productions where the fifth act sags, but not here. From the moment half the grey-carpeted floor is hoisted aloft to reveal a large sand-filled square in which the gravedigger prepares Ophelia's burial, the action gets more and more exciting. Most productions make the grave-digging a perfunctory affair, with a bucket or two of earth and a small cavity on stage. This big sandy pit and the things that happen in and around it as the play draws to a close create a metaphor for the narrow barrier between life and death that clearly fascinated Shakespeare when he wrote the play.
There are other startling and original scenes in the play, including the stage performance by the players. Some of the text is cut, but Rickson uses physical movement and props to make Hamlet not just a spectator but a performer in a scene of extraordinary physical and sexual intensity that recalls the Marat/Sade. When Claudius breaks it up, it's not an admission of guilt, just a way of preventing the patients taking over the asylum.
I haven't mentioned the use of female actors to play Rosencrantz and Horatio. Eileen Walsh, paired with the excellent Adeel Akhtar as Guildenstern, is androgynous, reserved, strangely costumed and asexual but she is deeply affected by what she sees. Hayley Carmichael has a tricky task as Horatio, also creating an androgynous presence, but principally becoming Hamlet's double. These casting decisions strengthen the ambiguity of the play.
I suppose that when you judge teapots, the best one is always the one you saw most recently. All I can say is that this show has had the same impact on me as Jerusalem two years ago. Mark Rylance inhabited the role of Johnny Byron so completely that it became impossible to imagine anyone else playing it. While Shakespeare is infinitely malleable and there will never be a definitive performance of such a protean play as Hamlet, I can only say that for me that Michael Sheen delivers one of the great Shakespearean performances, not just of the year, but of the decade and perhaps longer.
Couldn't agree more. I found it breathtaking and the final scene will stay with me forever! Shocking in its starkness, I finally feel as though I can understand what Shakespeare was getting at.
Posted by: Rebecca | November 10, 2011 at 12:14 AM