Evening Standard  

Friday August 12, 1994

To bare or not to bare?  (an excerpt)

by Michael Owen

Financial Times  

Saturday June 23, 2001

ARTS: What a piece of work is the great Dane: Alastair Macaulay reflects on the 23 Hamlets he has seen, and wonders whether any of these actors did justice to the role

by Alistair Macauley

Though Hamlet comes round more often than any other Shakespeare play, it is by no means the best-known. And Hamlet himself, though all of us can quote him without even thinking it, is among the most elusive of roles.

This is not the general perception. Most literate young men think they can recognise themselves in Hamlet, and most talented classical actors feel that they can play him. At least once a year English critics and audiences hail some new Hamlet like a new comet in the heavens, and the critics - who see just about every Hamlet and ought to be choosy by now - seem to notice nothing strange in the frequency with which they hail several great Hamlets per decade. Of course, nobody sane could think that Derek Jacobi, Adrian Lesser, Jonathan Pryce, Michael Pennington, Mark Rylance, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Northam, Ian Charlson, Kenneth Branagh, Alan Cummings, Alan Rickman, Stephen Dillane, Ralph Fiennes, Alex Jennings, Paul Rhys, and Samuel West were all great Hamlets. But were any of them great enough?

The difficulty of the role is not that Shakespeare supplied the actor with too few pointers; the difficulty is that he supplied too many. Grief; royalty; wit; intensity; fantasy; philosophy; brilliance; refinement; sarcasm; love; hysteria; generosity: these are just the most easily recognisable notes that the actor must sound.

I have now seen at least 17 different actors play the role in English, and six in five other languages; I chide myself for having missed at least five other English-speaking Hamlets of note. Of all the above, there are only four I have ever seriously wished that I'd seen more than once in the role - the young Rylance, Branagh, Cummings, and Dillane - and even they did not strike me as complete or even adequate: they simply shed some thrilling new light that made some important addition to my understanding of the role. (When Rylance did return to the role at Shakespeare's Globe last year, the result was much slighter than his first attempt. But the Branagh film repays rewatching. And I still hope that Dillane plays the role again.)

Simon Russell Beale first played Hamlet at the National Theatre last summer; and, though most people agree that the production in which he appears is no big deal, he received even more admiration than any other recent Hamlet. He has won a Best Actor Award for it, and the production has toured Britain and the US. Now he and it are back at the National (in the Olivier, rather than the Lyttelton). Best Theatre awards make little sense to me, but certainly Simon Russell Beale has been one of Britain's Best for years now, and many another actor would be greatly better if only they could attain the level that is Russell Beale's Worst. There are good features of the production, and the only two terrible features - Ophelia and the elimination of Fortinbras - are, alas, widespread.

His Hamlet now is yet better than it was last year. What everyone should surely admire in it is merely Russell Beale's starting point: namely, the exceptional naturalness with which he handles Shakespeare's language. Not a single phrase sounds affected, phoney, or high-falutin; many of even the most familiar lines hit you as if never before. He is exemplary in his responsiveness to his colleagues; this is never one of those Hamlets that just seems to be longing for the next soliloquy, and yet Hamlet's most defining characteristic - constant thought - is an essential element of Russell Beale's very being. Fresh ideas, perceptions, jokes occur irrepressibly to him at the oddest moments. Several other different aspects of Hamlet belong effortlessly - it would seem - to him: stinging melancholy; baleful wit; febrile excitement; sweetness with friends; calmness before the end. I am newly struck by how keenly he catches the note of paranoia in Hamlet's first awareness of Claudius's machinations, and the steady, spreading, aching, corrosive bleakness with which, in "What a piece of work is a man", he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of his own disenchantment with humanity is very fine indeed.

But for all his excellence, who can really recognise Hamlet in Russell Beale? Ophelia calls Hamlet "The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,/ Th'expectancy and rose of the fair state,/ The glass of fashion and the mould of form,/ Th' observed of all observers", and one can hardly believe that any of this was true of this Hamlet even months before the play begins. Has Russell Beale ever had a waist? Or a neck? What courtly distinction does he have? Russell Beale's very naturalness with Shakespearian language is not quite that of the noble scholar's: he is effortless in many flights of language where Hamlet should seem to be consciously inventive, a brilliant intellectual performer.

And his voice is not Hamlet's either. It slides downward on sustained syllables ("thaw", "dew", "rank") and downward through phrases ("married with my uncle", "My father's brother", "but no more like my father", "Than I to Hercules") so constantly that it pins Hamlet's spirit to the earth. Surely Hamlet's iambs are more buoyant, have a keener pulse, than Russell Beale can make them? He can speak with wonderful speed, but not "trippingly, on the tongue". The strong nasal resonance with which he focuses his chest voice is stingingly expressive, but it bottles up Hamlet's dancing mind.

English Shakespeares  

Cambridge University Press, 1997

Chapter 8 - 1994-1995: two by two  (an excerpt)

A Pair of Hamlets

by Peter Holland

The year's two productions of Hamlet came with such hype that they provoked the postponement of a third, Sam Mendes's planned production with Simon Russell Beale.  Both expunged the disappointing memories of Noble's 1992 production.  Each was sharply defined by its choice of theatre.  To mark the renaming of the Globe in Shaftestbury Avenue as the Gielgud Theatre in honour of Gielgud's ninetieth birthday, Peter Hall directed Hamlet in the West End with his own company, starring Stephen Dillane, Horatio to Mel Gibson's Hamlet in Zeffirelli's film.  It was a tribute to Gielgud as the greatest Hamlet of his generation but also a way of defining a distance from the poetic Prince Gielgud had made so emphatically his own between the wars.  Jonathan Kent's production for the Almeida company starring Ralph Fiennes, which must have been originally planned for the small scale of the Almeida, needed, in the aftermath of Fiennes' huge success in Schindler's List, to find a larger space.  This Hamlet moved east, using the Hackney Empire, an enormous, once splendid theatre designed by Frank Matcham, now more commonly used for musichall.

Dillane's performance negotiated brilliantly with the ghost of Gielgud.  While his Hamlet foregrounded its modernity, it did so only after emphasising Dillane's ability to offer a lyrical Hamlet in the Gielgud mould.  Indeed, initially, in the first court scene (1.2), Dillane surprised by his attention to old-fashioned virtues of eloquent verse-speaking, as if Hall's long-standing obsession with the beat of the verse and the force of line-endings had created a new Gielgud.  But the trauma of the encounter with the ghost of his father generated in this Hamlet a bitter jokiness and a harsh modernity that, immediately and irrevocably, made him disjunct from the rest of the characters.  Dillane, unlike many recent Hamlets, was consistently funny but the humour had an edge that was defined by the reactions of those at whom it was directed:  the accuracy of Dillane's mimicry of Sinden's rich and fruity pronouncements and sotto voce mutterings as Polonius did not, as usual, pass Polonious by;  instead the audience was made insistently and disturbingly aware of the anger the mimicry caused its object...

The ease with which Dillane's Hamlet could discard Ophelia suggested that Hamlet found sexuality unimportant by comparison with the isolation in which he found himself.  The isolation was marked in a question to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 'what make you at Elsinore?' (2.2.271), asked in the full knowledge of the inevitability of yet one more betrayal to add to the world's stock.

Reviews of the production drew attention to the moment at which Hamlet stripped naked on the stage but there was nothing remotely sexual about it.  In 4.2, as a direct consequence of lugging out Polonius's corpse, Hamlet was covered in blood.  Calmly and neatly, he took off his clothes and stuffed them in a laundry-bag until,as he was led off to Claudius, his naked body became a comic robot in his mocking walk.  For the confrontation with Claudius Hamlet was now dressed in a nightgown, his nakedness clothed but in such a way as to ridicule Claudius, especially as he tried to hop off to England like a pantomime fairy waiting for the flying wire to work.  The act of stripping was comic but also a rational response to the bloodstains, rendered absurd and humorous by its transposition to an inappropriate place and moment, a climactic moment in Dillane's presentation of the character as a figure who, in the aftermath of the encounter with the Ghost, now found himself consistently in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Hamlet's response to this displacement was to use all his powers of thought, but without ever finding in thought a solution or a resolution.  The isolation produced in him actions that were entirely logical for him but, equally completely, bound to appear madly illogical to everyone else, as the rest of the cast stayed in the social world Hamlet had been forced to abandon.

The different facets of Dillane's performance came together magnificently on Hamlet's return to Denmark.  His encounter with Alan Dobie's wry and precisely real Gravedigger was a game of two equal wits, enjoyed by both of them, both outsiders at Claudius's court.  The wit was not here an act of hurtful patronising, as it had been and would be again when he forced Laertes at dagger-point face-down into Ophelia's grave so that he could sweep the mound of earth on all three of them.  His entry into the funeral scene (5.1.250-4) allowed the re-emergence of the full-throated lyrical and heroic style, the Gielgud voice, unheard for hours in this long production, but in its new context, so completely changed from its earlier resonances, this too came over as only another mockery, a vicious reaction to Laertes' grief.

By this stage, Hamlet was in remarkable control, almost able, it seemed, to prevent the play's continuation.  His response to the proposed duel, 'How if I answer no?' (5.2.131), completely floored Osric who took a long pause as he tried to find an answer.  In the final scene, Hamlet thrust Claudius through the leg to render him immobile before killing him with a lunge vertically down through his back, an act of extreme brutality, leaving Claudius slumped like a drunk in the gutter as the wine poured down from a very large goblet.  Only death now left Hamlet surprised.

Throughout, the production modestly stated its brilliant insights.  In the closet scene, for instance, Hamlet set up two large court portraits as if to give his mother a lesson in art history, before he slashed at Claudius's portrait, turning the picture into a thing 'of shreds and patches' (3.4.93).  Most satisfying was a double so obvious I wonder why it is not more often explored:  Michael Pennington played both Claudius and his brother.  The latter's torments were explored in an eloquent lyrical voice, the huge verse paragraphs effortlessly placed.  The degeneration from old Hamlet to Claudius, the move form the heroic to the cruel and bloat king, was all the sharper as it played across the actor's own appearance. 

As Claudius stormed out of the play scene, Dillane's Hamlet grabbed a prop crown and seated himself in Claudius's place, neatly suggesting an ambition that Hamlet could perform but never feel.  He was still holding the crown as he saw Claudius at prayer and put it down, stopping only to consider the murder on his way out.  The crown was an unemphatic touch.  At the parallel moment at the Hackney Empire, Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet played with various pieces from the players' costume skip, trying on an orange robe and a mask, experimenting with heroic postures and strange walks.  Hamlet the performer is a familiar trope but here, with the prayer scene played in front of a drop like a front-cloth scene in a nineteenth century melodrama, the costume became Hamlet's way of freeing himself by experimenting with the role of an active avenger.  But when, in the closet scene, Hamlet's orange robe was echoed by Gertrude's dressing-gown, the effect lost meaning, the logic of the disguise no longer followed through.

Jonathan Kent's production was full of such inconsequentialities.  But what marked it above all was it sheer pace.  An emphasis on speed was a strong feature of a number of productions in 1994-5.  Here it made lines and scenes rattle by as if the determinant on the production were a three-hour time-limit.  As Matt Wolf suggested (Herald Tribune), Kent's was an 'impetuous yet uninflected staging' in which Fiennes' was a Hamlet 'for whom events cannot happen fast enough'.  There could be no pause here for reflection.  The soliloquies were gone through at a speed which left the audience marvelling at Fiennes' technique but never engaging with Hamlet's processes of thought:  for John Peter in the Sunday Times, 'To be or not to be' 'sounds, not like thought moulding itself into speech, a subtle intelligence grappling with a problem, but like an obsession that has already been rehearsed more than once' and, while he was prepared to read this as the character's 'spiritual equivalent of probing and probing an open wound', I found it only a demonstration of an actor's skills, a superficial effect that damagingly disengaged actor from character...