Stephen Dillane in Hamlet

Stephen Dillane

Midweek

Friday November 11, 1994

Hamlet

by Martin Spence

Stephen Dillane's sensational Hamlet (Gielgud) is a wimp with attitude. If Branagh's Hamlet was a commuter prince for the eighties, Dillane is a redundant royal for the nineties, as indecisive and unromantic as Charles himself.

Directionless, he prowls about, head like a marionette, hand superglued to hip, looking for a job. In Peter Hall's incisive and powerful production, this Hamlet loved his dad, his grief is real. But the only job on offer - killing Claudius - is not for him. He's not a toughie like his dad. He prefers to piss about on the comedy circuit, cracking jokes and cracking up.

A kind of Spike Milligan with mesmeric eyes, Dillane is the strangest mix of vulnerability, distinction and depression. His voice is so rusty it needs oiling. He is the coolest Hamlet you will ever see, also the kindest. Even his chaos is cool.

Nothing fazes him: a whingeing Ghost (Michael Pennington), a Polonius who hates him (Donald Sinden), an Ophelia who looks like she's been raped before curtain-up. Not even having to lug out two ludicrous oversize pictures for his mum to look at. How do you shout "Yuck!" in a crowded theatre?

He hangs loose with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, chills out with the Ghost and wears his shirt outside, way cool. But his mockery masks disenchantment, and his delivery, like his life, is throwaway. What has he got to lose?

If you only see one Hamlet this decade, see this. Stephen Dillane's idiosyncratic performance is the real thing and the soliloquies are stunning. Just try to look away.

Above photo by Alistair Muir, Evening Standard, Friday, August 12, 1994

Gina Bellman and Stephen Dillane in Hamlet: 'a significant event in the British theatre'.

Photo by Tristram Kenton, Sunday Times, December 4, 1994

Daily Mail

Friday November 11, 1994

A Prince among Hamlets for naked Stephen Dillane

At the theatre so justly renamed after perhaps the greatest Shakespearean actor of our age, a hitherto unknown player emerges with a fascinating and potentially great new Hamlet.

Stephen Dillane may not have the mellifluous speech patterns of Gielgud, nor is it likely that Sir John would have consented to strip naked, but there is no denying that Mr. Dillane justifies Sir Peter Hall's faith in casting him as the lynchpin of this impressive four-hour reading. He is a Hamlet full of darting ironies and laconic self-mockery with the taut, lugubrious looks which can turn from clowning to deep tragedy on the flick of a fivepenny piece.

Beginning a touch tentatively, the performance grows from offbeat idiosyncrasy to an entirely convincing and gripping grandeur. Yet it contains more comedy than I can ever remember in the role. Sir Peter has cannily surrounded this new star with some veteran scene-stealers. A cruelly cunning Michael Pennington and the voluptuous Gwen Taylor preside over a court which, given the crimson velvet opulence of Lucy Hall's setting, fully deserves Hamlet's contemptuous description of 'a couch of luxury and damned incest'.

The seal of excellence is set by Donald Sinden's garrulous, self-satisfied Polonius, whose distinctive mutton-chopped vowels gives Mr. Dillane a glorious opportunity for wicked parody.

The Guardian

Monday November 7, 1994

The clown prince

Peter Hall breaks with tradition in his new Hamlet at the re-christened Gielgud Theatre

by Michael Billington

Peter Hall's third production of Hamlet is very much in his late-classical mode; visually simple, texturally full, very fast. No director alive brings out more clearly the architectural shape of a play. But the supreme irony is that Hall's chosen Hamlet, Stephen Dillane, opens the re-christened Gielgud Theatre (formerly the Globe) with a performance that owes nothing whatsoever to the romantic Gielgudian tradition.

At first, Dillane looks conventional enough: a black-robed, scholarly figure forced to sit beside Claudius in a pompous court full of top hats and velvet breeches. But, left to himself, Dillane instantly establishes his credentials: this Hamlet is a sardonic, hawk-featured joker - doubtless editor of Wittenberg's local satiric rag - who uses a protective irony to keep accidie at bay. He's quick-witted, sharp-thinking, sexually somewhat ambiguous: he despatches Ophelia with a cold cruelty that implies he never had that much feeling for her in the first place and even his trust in male friendship is shattered when he discovers that Rosencranz and Guildenstern are spies. The sudden disillusion on "You were sent for" is one of the most haunting moments of the performance.

Dynastic skulduggery... Stephen Dillane offers up an unusual interpretation of Hamlet

Photo by Tom Jenkins

Mockery as a mask for disillusion is the key to Dillane's performance: one minute he's a merciless mimic sending up Polonius something rotten, the next a paralysed Left Bankish intellectual who arrives at the conclusion that "conscience doth make cowards of us all" with a weary shrug of resignation. Dillane is eccentric, quirky, fascinating to watch: a petrified soul adopting a protective clownishness. If any aspect of the character gets lost, it is that of physical threat: I never felt for a moment that Claudius's safety was seriously imperilled and even Hamlet's occasional acts of rashness, such as the stabbing of Polonius, are followed by a lapse into jocular indifference. "I have in me something dangerous," Hamlet tells Laertes: I couldn't see it in this prince who even goes to his death with a wry smile.

But Dillane plays to his strengths and the production as a whole has extraordinary coherence. I've seen versions that have picked out more strongly individual aspects of the play - filial love, political corruption, the insistence on theatrical metaphors: few recently that have given the play such narrative verve or variation of tempo. Hall is the play's invisible conductor as well as director and Lucy Hall's design - a tilted disc framed by a Svoboda-like string curtain - ensures that nothing impedes the propulsive flow of the action.

Two outstanding performances also testify to a genuine exploration of character. Michael Pennington doubles as Claudius and the Ghost, making the former a figure of palpable managerial competence flawed by indecision: clearly a family trait. Until Pennington's performance, I had never noticed how much the king and Hamlet actually have in common: this Claudius dithers over the release of Laertes, is unsure at what point to terminate the play-scene and, at prayer ("like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin") becomes a mirror-image of his potential assassin. Having once played Hamlet, Pennington illuminatingly invests his uncle with a similar irresolution.

Donald Sinden is also a perfect Polonius: a gruff and wily politician obsessed with espionage and arguably the most decisive man in Elsinore. Sinden, in anatomising Hamlet, hits the word "mad" with the grating insistence of the woman who keeps reiterating "knife" in Hitchcock's Blackmail and it is wonderfully in character that it is he who first shifts uneasily in his seat at the disruptiveness of the play scene. And even if Gina Bellman's Ophelia and Gwen Taylor's Gertrude are straightforwardly conventional, there's a striking triple from Alan Dobie as Marcellus, First Player and a briskly businesslike Gravedigger. The great achievement, however, is that the most exciting of poetic tragedies has been brought back into the West End with an idiosyncratic central performance that strikes out its own ground and rightly refuses simply to echo the great tradition.

At the Gielgud (071-494-5065) for the next 12 weeks.

The Evening Standard

Friday November 18, 1994

Doner did it (an excerpt)

Shakespeare

HAMLET

Gielgud Theatre

by Peter Porter

If Macbeth, which seldom works on the stage, is a symphonic poem rather than a play, then Hamlet, which never fails in the theatre, is really a drama, the grandest ever dreamt. The structure of Hamlet is certainly not tight: outwardly it resembles a straggling Jacobethan chronicle play, Henry VI or Perkin Warbreck. Inwardly it has all the characteristics of a dream - seeming realism, repetition, confused loyalties, sudden wrenchings of plot, and most important of all, a sense that everything and everyone is a refraction of the control character. The play is Hamlet's dream, and, as happens in dreams, the Prince is one of the dramatis personae of his own internal dreams. He is the skewer - everyone else is kebab.

Independent, November 11, 1994

Dreams are built up in modular fashion, so the fuller the text the more convincing the resolution. This fits in with the current predilection of the director of this production, Sir Peter Hall, for giving us lots of words served up fast and unfussily. Hall's text is compiled from Quartos and Folio together, and theatregoers accustomed to the general run of productions will encounter great soliloquies included, you can appreciate how Hamlet matures - largely through his burgeoning awareness of other people. Mourning his father, he is the very epicentre of dreaming; by the time he encounters Fortinbras's army when setting out for England, he recognizes that twenty thousand soldiers dying for a worthless scrap of land marks off reality from morbid conjecture. It is one of Stephen Dillane's strengths as Hamlet that he delivers the speech "How all occasions do inform against me" with a freshminted eloquence which contrasts illuminatingly with his more trance-like account of the earlier soliloquies. Hamlet's progress from privileged introspection to harsher activity is offered by Dillane as a pilgramage towards enlightenment. Among the litter of corpses at the end, this Hamlet is almost elated by his pyrrhic victory. He wakes at last, but by then it is a waking into death.

Hall's production is ragged in many ways, and some of the acting is hardly more than competent, but everything is suborned to Dillane's sardonic self-examination. Claudius's courtiers are treated by Hamlet as so many shrinks labouring far behind their witty analysand. Dillane reminds you how many one-liners Hamlet is given, and what possibilities for irony at the expense of Renaissance sententiousness he discovers with Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and even Ophelia. Dillane's voice is a ventriloquistic instrument. To observe his Hamlet in a theatre recently re-named in honour of England's most-loved tragedian is to undergo a rite of passage into modern acting. Nothing more remote from Gielgud's golden sounds than Dillane's quicksilver demotic could be imagined. But Dillane can match up to Shakespeare's high moments; he thinks the poetry first, then lets himself overhear it.

There are inequalities in his performance, perhaps bred of television acting style. He mugs the dithering Establishment voice behind Polonius's back and pulls Rowan Atkinson faces which need the intimacy of camera close-ups to be effective. He is given a couple of large framed paintings to confront Gertrude with in the bedroom comparison, a literalism which is strangely pedantic. But more than most Hamlets, he makes the notion of practising his rapier while Laertes is away from court a feasible proposition. He is not so much athletic as coiled in suppressed energy. The British stage has been particularly rich in Hamlets recently. Dillane's is one of the best...

The programme notes comment on the possibility that Shakespeare may have written more than one Hamlet play, the confusion of texts being due to continuous revision and expansion. Playgoers should take the hint. Their dream is constantly being added to - there is always something new to discover, and Stephen Dillane's Prince is one manifestation of Hamlet well worth retrieving.

Sunday Times

Sunday November 13, 1994

This play's the thing (an excerpt)

Peter Hall's intelligent, exciting new production gives us one of the great
Hamlets in Stephen Dillane, writes John Peter

This is an unforgettable event, a historic occasion, thrilling and moving and majestical: a classical tragedy and a modern whodunit, a philosophical tournament, a psychological mystery, and a cunning and purposeful drama of helpless self-destruction.

Peter Hall's tense, nervy production of Hamlet at the newly named Gielgud Theatre is superbly detailed, but also athletic and agile. Hall knows, as Shakespeare knew, that you must seize your audience's attention at once. This searching, quicksilver production reminds you that 400 years ago this play was what we now solemnly call New Writing, and that it had to pay its way in a large commercial theatre engaged in cut-throat competition with other large commercial theatres...

Behind Hamlet, the play of grief, darkness, self-searching and dreams, there is Hamlet the political thriller and commercial crowd-puller flexing its muscles.

Hall begins as Shakespeare would have wanted him to: he grabs the play by the throat. The guards on the Elsinore battlements are tense and wary. In the very first few lines you learn that the place is haunted, and that the tension is one of fear and apprehension. But there are no solemn atmospherics, no hanging about. The exchanges are swift and to the point. In any case, everybody is cold. Almost at once, in the misty, silvery light, Michael Pennington's grizzled Ghost appears.

That thinking feeling: Dillane in a tense, edgy, thrilling performance.

Photo by Tristram Kenton

Time and familiarity may have blunted the superb effectiveness and economy of Shakespeare's opening scenes: here they come across fresh and newly minted, with all the energy of an utterly original playwright at the peak of his powers.

Hall keeps a watchful eye on the play's politics. In the first Council scene, Hamlet usually stands apart, a solitary brooder. Here, however unwillingly, he is at the centre of the scene, sitting with Claudius and Gertrude, which is precisely as it should be. This is a prearranged, formal meeting. The deal over the succession and the royal marriage has already been stitched up behind closed doors. Hamlet is declared heir apparent, which both puts him on the sidelines and keeps him within the fold. His desire to go back to university is swiftly disposed of: Claudius does not want a disapproving presence lurking abroad. Hamlet's political entrapment seems complete.

Polonius, too, is a key figure in the statecraft of the play. Donald Sinden presents a massive, powerful operator full of habitual authority which is beginning to fray and frazzle at the edges. His short, white beard, curling up into a point, gives his face an air of ruthless but unsubtle pugnacity. And yet it is clearly too soon to write him off. Sinden shows that, politically, Polonius is still completely alert: observe his swift and warily disapproving reaction when the ambassadors confirm that Fortinbras will march across Danish territory with his Norwegian army.

This is a shrewd, elegant and magisterial performance. Sinden knows that Polonius is a politician to his fingertips; and one of his and Hall's most subtle touches is to show how Polonius's authority is slowly whittled away as the play goes on. He clearly dislikes Hamlet, for the prince is discontented, subversive and unpredictable. These are dangerous qualities in a close-knit autocratic political establishment. What is even worse, Hamlet has a sense of humour which to Polonius is entirely incomprehensible and therefore deeply sinister. He wants Ophelia to have nothing to do with Hamlet, partly because he does not want to seem ambitious, but also, and more importantly, because the prince is a loose cannon, a disruptive element, and to be associated with him could undermine Polonius's position...

Another important thing about Polonius: he loves his daughter. He, Ophelia and Tom Beard's open, manly Laertes are clearly bound together by a deep-rooted family affection; and Hall's production shows how Hamlet's progress, both hesitant and headlong, through the play, destroys first these loving relationships and then the people themselves. Yet Polonius himself is to blame, too. Gina Bellman's Ophelia is a simple, thoughtful, generous girl, retiring and a little prim; it is not her fault that Polonius uses her, with all the insensitivity of a loving, but bigoted, father, as a political bait. First she is forbidden to see Hamlet, then she is virtually blamed for his madness, then he kills her father: Ophelia's fate is sealed. Bellman's voice needs a little more strength and colour; but this is a strong and moving Shakespearian debut.

Pennington, who also plays the king, is simply the best, the most subtly corrupt, the most consummately political Claudius I have ever seen. His sensuality is understated, but strongly felt: for him, Gertrude is both a political and a sexual prize. Like Hamlet, he is precariously balanced between guilt, terror and self-control. It is the tension between these that makes him dangerous. Gwen Taylor is his Gertrude: a sensuous, generous woman who adores her new husband, glories and basks in everything he says and does, and is entirely innocent of dark motives, her own or anyone else's. As the play progresses, she loses her glow and even her relaxed sensuality. She becomes a troubled matron, fretted and fearful. Pennington's face, too, takes on a battered look, with deeper pouches under the eyes, a furtive, desperate glance, and a body which makes visible efforts to remain resilient. His reactions to the play scene are brilliantly played. When his end looms, he knows it before anyone else, and does not give Hamlet the pleasure of resistance.

In this sense, Hamlet's victory is bleak. The reason why his character appeals so endlessly to the post-classical imagination is that he is justified in his existence by his very failures, his shortcomings, his catastrophic misjudgments. He is a fool partly because he is fooled by others to the top of his bent. He thinks too precisely on the event, but events are beyond his control. Nothing is, or feels, preordained. Man's will is free, but action is undermined by circumstance. This is the modern predicament. There are no rules or dispensations. Is there special providence in the fall of a sparrow? Whose providence? Shakespeare has given the play a hauntingly Christian framework, but the presence of God is mostly felt through references to His most shocking invention, the threat of everlasting Hell.

Hence, Hamlet is thrown on to his own inner resources. Self-knowledge becomes less a moral virtue than an aid to survival. Stephen Dillane makes utterly clear that Hamlet knows he is teetering at the edge of breakdown. His "madness'' is both sublimation and pretence: it uses up the energy of his grief and stokes it up again, and it gives him time to breathe, observe and despair.

I think Dillane is one of the great Hamlets, but not for the usual sense of lonely Romantic agony. No, it is the private and public politics of the play that shape this tense, edgy, thrilling performance. He is ironically and bitterly self-critical, as well as intensely alert to others, and his quicksilver reactions suggest a restless intelligence. You can almost see him think. His intelligence sets him apart, but it also traps him among people whom he needs to watch and forestall. Thinking and private feeling are the natural mode of being for Dillane's Hamlet: life disrupts this and destroys him.

Usually, when Hamlet returns to Denmark, he is played as sombrely calm, facing his fate. Why should he be? He was shaken and shamed by his encounter with Fortinbras's army; he discovered that he had been being sent to his death; he saw Ophelia being buried; and Denmark is still the same prison as before. No, Dillane's Hamlet has learnt nothing because there is nothing more to learn.

To say that "the readiness is all'' is a sign of confidence bordering on despair, or of sanity bordering on madness; and Hamlet goes to an elaborately planned accidental death, while offstage you can hear the waves of the sea, and a slow, intermittent sound effect like the unforgiving music of the spheres.

Times

Monday November 7, 1994

A Prince for the Nineties (an excerpt)

Benedict Nightingale on Peter Hall's latest Hamlet

The globe may have a new name, and it may be marking its rechristening with a revival of a play that 64 years ago John Gielgud came close to making his own; but don't go to the theatre in too nostalgic a mood. Don't expect to find a sweet if troubled prince mellifluously incanting his pain from inside a tousled doublet. Prepare yourself for a mad, mugging Hamlet with a voice like a small meatgrinder and, when he is not streaking, clothes that might most charitably be called Godot chic. Could anyone be more unGielgudy than Stephen Dillane?

Stephen Dillane as Hamlet grapples with Tom Beard as Laertes, in Peter Hall's inaugural production at the renamed Gielgud Theatre

Well, yes and no. The young Gielgud struck his peers as epitomising 1930s disillusion. In equally topical style, Dillane spends his time not merely cracking up but wisecracking asunder. His Hamlet is wry, insecure and, if you try to ignore the references to pride, ambition and "proving most royally", rather good.

Peter Hall's production has its strengths too, among them clarity, vigour and, happily since it lasts four hours, fluency and pace. In this he is helped by Lucy Hall's set, a simple O surrounded by blue into which giant red tassles intermittently descend, but not by the distracting costumes. Claudius's courtiers appear to have got their frock-coats from the red velvet left over after the palace chairs have been re-covered and their headgear from Mad Hatter Industries. They resemble Dickensian coachman redesigned for Alice's Adventures in Elsinore.

One effect is to make Donald Sinden's Polonius look fatuous, which is a pity, for his reading of the role is not just comical. He exudes earnest self-importance and officious energy, and (a nice original touch) he dislikes and mistrusts Hamlet more than Hamlet does him. He is the pick of a good supporting cast, matched only by Michael Pennington as a formidably self-pitying ghost and an even more distraught king. Imagine an epic battle between super-stress and superglue, and you have this Claudius in extremis, almost but not quite falling apart.

But it is Dillane whose unglueing is the more bizarre. That is surprising, for his voice is casual and downbeat, sometimes to the point of slovenliness, and the first impression he makes is meek. Perched blinking beside a confident Pennington, he looks like the thin half of Laurel and Hardy. You can see why he didn't accede to the throne on his father's death. Judging by his self-deprecating shrug when he compares himself to Hercules, he half-accepts his status as failure, wimp and court worm.

But the worm turns, retaining a certain vulnerability throughout but disconcerting both friends and foes with its erratic aggro. His Hamlet is an unpredictable mix of clear-mindedness (the "to be" speech is finely reasoned) and chaos. He does spoof imitations of everything from the crab that walks backwards to Sinden's fruity gurgles, but parody often slips into pottiness. To watch him blundering around in crown, morning coat, dangling shirt-tails, grubby trousers and pink socks, or stripping naked and trotting offstage, is to know he isn't just "mad in craft".

It is riveting stuff, but is there an overall interpretatoin here? Well, grief for his father counts for much - Dillane is the only Hamlet I've seen as upset as Claudius by the murder-scene in The Mousetrap - and so does his realisation that he lacks his father's strength. The result is helplessness, ennui and black humour, an anger turned outward in mockery and inward in self-contempt. He wanted to be a Renaissance revenger - and was doomed to become a modern alternative comedian.

Telegraph

Monday November 7 1994

Glimpses of a great Hamlet (an excerpt)

by Charles Spencer

This is a night that makes no concessions to the allegedly short attention span of West End audiences, lasting more than four hours. I can honestly report, however, that attention rarely flags. This is the third time Hall has directed Hamlet (with David Warner in 1965 and Albert Finney in 1975) and the production is blessed with clarity, pace and many moments of piercing insight. Stephen Dillane, scarcely a name to conjure with until now, unmistakably announces himself as a fascinating new Hamlet. He isn't a heroic Dane, and for the moment at least greatness just eludes him; but this is performance that compels enthralled compassion from the audience.

Dillane's Hamlet is a sensitive and fiercely intelligent man who has been plunged not into madness but clinical depression. And I have never seen a Hamlet who so harrowingly conveyed the character's sexual confusion and disgust. The nunnery scene, in which he rubs off Ophelia's make-up with his hands before spitting at her breasts, seems almost unbearably painful. But it is as nothing to the anguish of his confrontation with Gertrude (Gwen Taylor), in which he actually makes her smell "the rank sweat of an enseamed bed" and feigns violent sex with her. The seeds of this Hamlet's destruction clearly lie in his fixation with his mother.

What makes the performance so moving, though, is that you keep getting glimpses of how he once was: the warmth with which he greets old friends, the constant play of wit. Even in the intimate, conversational soliloquies, Dillane's Hamlet uses irony as a shield against his pain, and though you never forget his suffering, he is often terrifically funny, especially during his cruelly accurate impersonations of Polonius (a vintage performance from Donald Sinden, offering a wondrous mix of harrumphing humour and terrifying paternal bullying)...

And I quarrel violently with Hall's and Dillane's bleak interpretation of the last act. There is only weary despair here, no sense of a character who has changed and grown. Such facile pessimism seems to me to be entirely untrue to the spirit of this dark, tortured but great-hearted play.

Sir Peter Hall instructs Stephen Dillane for his Hamlet.

The Observer Review, November 13, 1994

Standard

Monday November 7, 1994

Prince of pathos in this cynical world

Hamlet

The Gielgud

by Nicholas de Jongh

He burns a slow fuse, but oh how brightly Stephen Dillane's rare Prince of Denmark comes to illuminate the role for our own cynical times. This Hamlet is full of surprises and shock-tactics - and I do not just refer to the lingering flashes of a nude, mad-seeming Hamlet after the closet scene. Dillane modifies the familiar, romantic conception of a Prince swayed by high emotions and nagging melancholia.

Sardonic, black comedy: Stephen Dillane is a becalmed Hamlet to Gina Bellman's stricken Ophelia.

The key to this interpretation lies in sardonic calm and black comedy. Dillane's sexually withdrawn Hamlet is a serious and ruminative joker, an ironist whose favourite gesture is the shrugging shoulders and raised eyebrows. It is as if he half intuits revenge will prove too much for him, and Elsinore too corrupt to be saved from decline and fall.

This may sound a recipe for serving up dullness, particularly in Peter Hall's lengthy production which runs for a formidable four hours.

But although there's too little of Hamlet's volatile, impetuous temperament, Dillane's performance is the making of the night.

The production is set in a late Victorian or Edwardian world of stifling conformity, where hypocrisy and hierarchy reign supreme. The Prince here stands as a quiet rebel against smooth show and corrupt substance. But the stylised, non-realistic design and costumes by Sir Peter's daughter, Lucy Hall, severely weaken the conception.

Elsinore's court is represented by a tilted disc, backed by semi-circular strips of curtain and a grey photographic montage of water and hills.

The bare, ugly scene gives little sense of Elsinore's claustrophobic and dangerous environment. King, Queen and courtiers in livid red, with top hats, frock coats and pantaloons, look like grotesque refugees from Alice in Wonderland.

The symbolism of their clothes is unclear. Hamlet in black modern garb, and then dishevelled in dinner shirt, may stand for stressed, modern man caught in an antiquated society. But why are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern similarly attired?

The court society also lacks the right dramatic weight. Michael Pennington revels melodramatically in extreme guilt as an undangerous Claudius and Gwen Taylor's prim, miscast Gertrude, even when almost assaulted in the closet scene, behaves like a country-hotel manageress confronted by something nasty in the snug bar.

And both Donald Sinden's enjoyably doddering Polonius and Tom Beard's Laertes could do with a touch of steel. Dillane's becalmed Hamlet, only roused to tremendous fury by the ghost, surveys Elsinore like some rueful, mocking satirist. Self-absorption and detachment are his weapons to ward off Gina Bellman's stricken Ophelia, and he slips into madness as if it were protective clothing. Dillane makes Hamlet's thoroughly modern dilemma that of a misplaced intellectual, valiantly struggling to keep hope and purpose alive in a society beyond his control.

When he emerges from his mother's closet, shirt smeared with Polonius's blood, he proceeds calmly to remove all his soiled clothes until he sits in his nakedness, unruffled and crazy before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The effect is poignantly right and typical. Dillane finds new ways of presenting Hamlet's tragedy and his response to it.

This is a Prince of inextinguishable pathos.

The ultimate X-ray of the actor's own soul ... Stephen Dillane plays Hamlet in Peter Hall's new production

Photo by Ivan Kyncl, The Guardian, November 2, 1994

Independent

Monday November 7, 1994

Hamlet meets Prufrock

by Paul Taylor

When twitting Polonius, Peter Hall's new (and third) Hamlet, Stephen Dillane, breaks into a brisk, wacky Donald Sinden impersonation, waggling his jowls and burbling fruitily. It's a neat piece of insolence, since the performer playing Polonius is none other than Donald Sinden. Dillane forbears to give us his John Gielgud, though such a gesture would not have gone amiss, given that this is the first production in the newly-named Gielgud Theatre. Instead of slyly alluding to that legendary Hamlet, Dillane honours the occasion by firmly stamping his own identity on the role.

The reflex gesture of the young intellectual he presents us with is the ironic, self-deprecating shrug, eyebrow raised in a pained smile. This is a Hamlet who must, you feel, have read and identified with Eliot's Prufrock, Hamlet-like in a tragi-comic awareness of not being up to the job, though, in his case, distraughtly aware that there's no getting out of it.

When the play-within-the-play breaks up here, Dillane appropriates the ermine-trimmed prop crown, plonking it on his head where it sits in ludicrous contrast to the swampingly ill-fitting and worn-out tail suit he sports as MC to the theatricals. It looks even more incongruous when, after murdering Polonius, he stalks off starkers, save for the crown, in a wonderful parody of a purposeful, businesslike walk, as though this were Hamlet off to the office to make important deals.

Dillane transmits a piercing sense of an anguished intelligence that's being driven to the subterfuge of elaborate, increasingly compuslive gamesmanship. Whether his Hamlet justifies Fortinbras's encomium "For he was likely, had he been put on / to have proved most royal" is debatable, though, leadership-potential not being the most striking feature of Dillane's interpretation.

The production has some weak links (Gina Bellman's overly external Ophelia above all) but Michael Pennington interestingly doubles as Claudius and the ghost, Donald Sinden delivers a very funny Polonius without neglecting his darker aspects and the story is handled with a gripping clarity that makes the four hours feel a lot less. The Gielgud's first hit?

Midweek, January 12/16, 1995

Financial Times

Monday November 7, 1994

Dillane gets to the heartbeat of Hall's Hamlet (an excerpt)

by Alastair Macaulay

Not only is Stephen Dillane's Hamlet the freshest, most interesting, and most peculiar ingredient of Peter Hall's new staging of Hamlet, he is also the most modern. The production is curious in containing several dissimilar acting styles, and Dillane's performance makes most of the other key characters - Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius - seem somewhat artificial. We, watching, may not feel that we are in their world, yet we never doubt we are in his. His performance is close to the one he gave as Prior, the Aids patient in Angels in America, and yet here it is with no Romantic beauty about his alienation. He is ironic, self-critical, witty, passive, but incisive.

I have never heard a Hamlet less concerned with vocal beauty or technique. Fascinating to be hearing him alongside Michael Pennington, who here plays both Claudius and Ghost, and who, 14 years ago, was an exceptionally intelligent Hamlet whose gorgeous vocal virtuosity was geared to showing the vast range of Hamlet's thought. Dillane is altogether smaller-scale, less energetic, less varied, but immensely more spontaneous. Very simply, he uses the rhythm of the verse to reveal its heartbeat. The most important thing about him is that we hang easily on his every word. And yet the most striking oddity about him is his voice - dry, unlovely. The dryness is itself expressive; it tells us of Hamlet's detached, sardonic, attitude.

And the voice is the man. This is hands-on-hip Hamlet, who shrugs, and rolls his eyes in disbelief. (The latter is overdone.) We see the deliberate lack of manly assertiveness, and we see how absurd he often finds his society. Though it helps Hamlet if Hamlet is more visibly a prince, and more evidently capable of virile ardour, these limitations scarcely troubled me while I was in the theatre.

I did miss the bounding scale of Hamlet's thought; Dillane's Hamlet is scarcely a philosopher at all. As for his wit, I wanted yet more; the energy of Hamlet's mind should coruscate. But everything Dillane does is spontaneous. When it comes to self, and family, and court, he reveals, wonderfully, many things in Hamlet - not least his self-loathing. Then towards the end, he finds the right inner calm...

The Times

Sunday January 1, 1995

How to recast the past in the present tense (an excerpt)

by John Peter

The classical play, like the classical actor, has always a double task: it needs to speak two languages at the same time. It speaks to us both as a messenger of the past and as a participant of the present. If it does not participate in the present it might as well be dead and usually is: the classic as a museum piece. But you must never forget that all classical drama was once New Writing. What we need to resurrect is the sense of tension, recognition and surprise which gripped its first audience and which is characteristic of all the new writing destined to last.

The modern opening night is not the best time to judge such a play. The tension of the occasion is partly artificial, created by the presence of too many people who are in the know: friends and relations, agents, critics and theatre professionals. The air is heavy with hope and expectation; the quality of attention is refined, knowledgeable and biased. Everybody is on their best and worst behaviour.

No, the true judgment comes when you visit a play during the run, when the hype has stopped, the superlatives and the insults have been delivered, and the actors face a paying audience. When I saw Peter Hall's production of Hamlet at the Gielgud for the second time, the house was only half full. It was the Friday before Christmas Eve: a bad night for box offices everywhere. Outside, the people of London were marking the season wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated by stripping bare the city's department stores. Inside, there was a different world. The tension was palpable. The silence was the kind which tells you that on the most basic and essential level the play is working. There was no coughing, rustling or fidgeting: everybody was gripped by the action of Hamlet, one of the greatest thrillers in English drama.

But what is classical in such a play and what is modern bearing in mind that "classical" is often simply "modern" in the past tense? First, there is the question of style. If a classical play is a messenger of a past age, it needs to get its message right. Hamlet takes place almost entirely in a royal palace; most of its characters are royalty, aristocrats and courtiers. Hall's production makes it clear that Elsinore revolves entirely around King Claudius. He is more than a chief executive, a union boss or a prime minister: his rule is absolute, guaranteed by the belief that his power was bestowed on him by God. Laertes's armed attack on him would have seemed, to contemporaries, utterly shocking. On the other hand, it looks bizarre when, sitting in council, he is surrounded by courtiers wearing vast top hats. This would have been unthinkable. The producers display my entire original review outside, which is gratifying; but bless their little cotton socks if they haven't neatly edited out the one uncomplimentary paragraph about the hats.

Observing a play's style, in this sense, is more than the mere archeology of manners and costumes. Manners and costumes can express and explain essential qualities of a society...

The conflict between classical and modern in Hamlet is much more complex. Partly, it is to do with its literary style. To the Elizabethans and their successors, theatre was an event: it sprang from a sense of excitement and was meant to inspire it in others. This, mostly, is why their plays were written in verse. TS Eliot and Christopher Fry, by contrast, wrote in an age which lacked excitement: that is why their poetic dramas so often lack a sense of motivation and life. Stephen Dillane and his fellow actors at the Gielgud know that what they are playing is both poetry and drama, and that the poetry is more than just decoration of an otherwise functional text. It has to be spoken with complete intellectual and emotional commitment. Hamlet is not an archaic play: it was, in its time, a brilliantly colloquial dramatic-poetic text. In the great Shakespearian soliloquies, poetry is a function of thought: try and do a prose precis of one of them and you will find that it becomes imprecise, evasive, inconsequential. This classical form in Hamlet is an integral part of a deeply modern content. Shakespeare is the first English dramatist, and for a long time the last, whose plays have a psychological subtext. Observe Dillane's Hamlet with Donald Sinden's superb Polonius. "Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?" Polonius: "By th' mass, and 'tis: like a camel, indeed." "Methinks it is like a weasel." Polonius: "It is backed like a weasel." "Or like a whale." Polonius: "Very like a whale." Sinden's acting shows you that Polonius is no fool: he knows perfectly well that he is being twitted, and resents it. Under the heavy dignity of the polite old courtier, the subtext is: "I detest this bookish, self-admiring royal nincompoop; he treats me like a servile fool; but I'd better play along or the Queen'll be impatient."

The richness and brilliance of Dillane's own performance comes from the constant rippling interplay between his words and their subtext. His Hamlet is an emotional sufferer because, like a lot of men who feel strongly but do not trust their feelings, his feelings ambush him and overpower him when he least expects it. Dillane brings out, with breathtaking skill, that Hamlet's self-deprecation is that of the mistrustful observer. The great "O what a rogue" soliloquy becomes both an expression of anguish and a mockery of that anguish. This is Hamlet's fatal problem. He, who is the observ'd of all observers, constantly observes himself. And just as in science, once a thing is observed it becomes something else: it is no longer a pure event. When Dillane's Hamlet talks about his craven scruples and about thinking too precisely on the event, he is both enacting his experience and evaluating it.

This is something profoundly modern. It is drama with its own commentary as its subtext. Hamlet's commentary shows up his own feelings as being inadequate; but at the same time this same commentary itself becomes a part of the drama. Dillane's Hamlet constantly listens to himself speaking; he sees himself, almost, as a character in a play who is mentally reviewing his own performance. The glimpses of wistful self-mockery, the brief self-deprecating smiles are part of a constant self-observation; they signal a psychological instability that undermines Hamlet's sense of purpose and so makes it all the more urgent. Part of the playwright's and the actor's art becomes a comment on itself, and yet it remains part of the play, too.

This is quintessentially modern, the way modern painting and architecture are modern: paint is used to show you that it is paint, or a patch of canvas is left bare, and yet both are part of the painting; external staircases, lifts, struts and beams draw attention to themselves, yet are still stress-bearing, functional elements of the building.

And so, at the end of Hamlet, the prince dies; but just seconds before, he laughs briefly, bitterly, as if to tell himself and us that he knows he has succeeded in death but failed in life. As in the greatest paintings of Matisse, technical mastery goes hand in hand with the most intense feeling. This, in the modern play called Hamlet, is the source of classical pity and terror.

Austin American Statesman

Monday December 19, 1994

London comes alive at Christmas (an excerpt)

review by Carlos Fuentes

Perhaps the genius of English representation consists in making the works of the past, present - without sacrificing their historical context, but rather, making them relevant to our present-day existence.

Nothing achieves this better than the jewel of London's theater season, the new version of Hamlet, directed by Peter Hall for the Gielgud Theatre.

Hamlet is the biggest icon in the history of the theater. T.S. Eliot called it "the Mona Lisa of literature." You can paint moustaches on its face, the way Dali did with Leonardo's imagery. No matter.

In his great essay on the contemporaneity of Shakespeare, the Polish critic Jan Kott said: "Hamlet is like a sponge." Unless produced in an "antiquarian fashion," "it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time."

I have seen some more or less traditional Hamlets.

On the stage, Richard Burton's Welsh, earthy and passionate version, and Peter O'Toole's mannered, Freudian one; on screen, Olivier's mature, poetic and sometimes surprising interpretation; and in records, the remnants of John Barrymore's celebrated and declamatory voice.

In all of them, the common denominator was the prince's brooding, melancholy doubt.

Hall reminds us that Hamlet is 30 years old, but lacks a vital project. His profession, like that of many heirs, consists in patiently waiting for his parents to die.

But in this case, the father's death robs Hamlet of his inheritance. The murderous uncle and incestuous mother sit on the throne. The prince, at their feet, has no rebellion except mourning, until the father's ghost speaks: "Remember me, revenge me."

Hamlet's memory and vengeance connect him to the world of change - political, religious and sexual - outside the court of Denmark.

Everything in Renaissance Europe changes. Nothing inside the court of Denmark changes at all. Nor does it want to change. It is a ritualistic, impregnable, closed circle. As pompous and blind as Polonius, as cruel and unscrupulous as Claudius.

Once Hamlet realizes his own eccentricity, he becomes the cog that does not fit into the machine, the living ghost that brings bad conscience to the closed system. Therefore, he must be expelled.

Hamlet's madness, in Hall's version, is Hamlet's reason. His nonconformity, savage humor and lack of respect for convention can only be seen as "madness" by the corrupt puritans in power.

Stephen Dillane is a marvelous Hamlet, the best I have yet seen. A 30-year-old rebel - a rebel revealed by death - caught between the capacity to change and mature, and a political order that does not permit him to manifest change and subjects him to a pre-established fate.

Change that is so captured between the walls of formality may try to free itself by breaking the bricks of reason and politics. Yet Hamlet's only achievement is to kill all those who surround him, sink the state and deliver Denmark to enemy occupation.

Hall, Dillane and all those who have given so much to this magnificent Hamlet restore the tragic sense to a world given over to crime - our world.

We forget that everything has a price. There are no actions without consequences. Political reason and emotional reason rarely coincide. Even less so do history and happiness.

Yet men and women have no better hope than to free their personal potential, even if it clashes with official truth.

Utopia is the hope that personal and historical life can coincide. But the name of the struggle to reach such a meeting is freedom.

This is Hamlet's drama for our own times: a lamb of the counterculture, hounded down by wolves in wolves' clothing.

Fuentes, one of Latin America's most acclaimed writers, has also been Mexico's ambassador to France and a United Nations representative. His column appears monthly.

The Times

Sunday December 4, 1994

Theatre check (an excerpt)

Hamlet

by John Peter

Peter Hall's magnificent production is led by Stephen Dillane, but it is not dominated by him. He gives a star performance, but this is not a star vehicle: it is a company show in which everybody is important. Dillane creates an unforgettable portrait of a man brooding passionately at the edge of action: a man of private pain and intellectual scruple undermined and finally felled by the demands of a public world. But this subtle, haunting and haunted performance is surrounded and made meaningful by others. Observe Donald Sinden's grizzled, monumental Polonius: ruthless father and meddling courtier, politically astute but ebbing in wisdom, statesman and buffoon. Observe his treatment of Ophelia: how his love for her is criss-crossed by opportunism and lack of scruple. This production is a significant event in the British theatre. It is also the only Shakespeare in London until the end of January. Do not miss it on any account.

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