HAMLET at the Globe - "To hold the mirror up to nature..."

Last week I found myself back in the dangerous corridors of Elsinore, this time via the bare stage of The Globe Theatre.  Yes folks, another week, another Globe visit...

So here I am again, seeing an actor taking on the challenge of Hamlet for the eleventh time - and who was following in the steps of Kenneth Branagh, Jeremy Northam, Ian Charleson,  Simon Russell Beale, Dan McSherry (indeed, who?), Jude Law, Rory Kinnear, Michael Sheen, Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott?  Michelle Terry, my first female Hamlet - apart from seeing Frances de la Tour doing a scene at a charity event - and a major challenge for The Globe's new Artistic Director.

HAMLET is presented by the same 12 actors who also appeared in AS YOU LIKE IT and I think the comedy succeeded more than the tragedy.  The same two directors are credited but there is no sense of direction during the play: people come, people go, with no sense of escalating tension for either Hamlet or Claudius.  Hamlet goes to England, he comes back from England...  people drop like nine pins in the final scene but with no real sense of mortality or that this is the climax of the actual play.

The directors' blocking and positioning of the actors on the stage, as with AS YOU LIKE IT, suggested it was possibly all worked out in the rehearsal room and just dropped onto the stage as is; there was a lot of traffic on the stage but none of it seemed to make any sense or helped with the dodgy acoustics in the round auditorium.  It was all a bit infuriating.

As I said, this Elsinore had gone minimalist and appeared to have no furniture to speak of at all.. and don't start me on the costumes or lack of them.  I was not totally surprised to read in the programme that they have brought their own stuff in to act in.  That might explain the light blue floaty dressing gown that Gertrude - the Queen of Denmark remember - wears in the closet scene:  they were obviously having a sale on at Primark.

There actually was one concept that worked: the scene with the players and Hamlet's staging of "The Mousetrap" - that never fails to get a laugh - is usually a problematic one because you have to see the play twice: once in mime, then the players act it out.  It can really try one's patience when you just want to get on with the plot, and also it's a bugger to focus on because you are too busy concentrating on watching Hamlet watch Claudius watch the play to see his reaction to the player king being murdered.  Here the players did the dumb show to set up what they were going to act but then vanished into the audience and the play was not shown, just the reactions front and centre of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet; loud and ominous percussion was played behind our first-level back-row to suggest the play.- which was effective but a bit-heart-attack inducing.

The casting, as with AS YOU LIKE IT, was ethnic and gender blind and created as many problems as with the comedy.  Surely an idea behind gender-mix-up casting is to possibly give a new slant on the role in question but here that was not in evidence apart from possibly within Terry's performance.  There were some seriously under-powered performances: James Garnon as Claudius made no impression at all as Claudius - he seemed to just point his elaborate hair-style at people (think Cameron Diaz in THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY) while Catrin Aaron was colourless as Horatio and Helen Schlesinger played Gertrude as if she had come into a room and forgotten what she was looking for.

The main problem was with the tipsy-tarty casting of Bettrys Jones and Shubham Saraf as Laertes and Ophelia respectively - if they had switched roles it might have proved more interesting and allowed them to give better performances, but no: Saraf brought no insights to Ophelia - just a man in a dress - and James was as lightweight and as vaguely irritating as she was in AS YOU LIKE IT in yet another male role.  I have enjoyed her performances in previous productions but in these two plays she has proved that she is a lousy man.  Shubham Saraf did redeem himself briefly as a very characterful Osric.

The fine Jack Laskey was reduced to playing Fortenbras and the player who recites the Priam speech - but even he was defeated with being placed over at one side of the stage in that scene and his speech went for nothing.  But credit where credit is due: Colin Hurley was a dull Ghost but seized his laughs as the Gravedigger, Richard Katz was a suitably irritating Polonius - while missing any suggestion of threat in his relationship with Ophelia - while the indispensable Pearce Quigley and Nadia Nadarajah made a good Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Above all else, it was Michelle Terry's show; she played with a solid authority and spoke the lines with great intelligence - oh, and that speech?  She played it kneeling at the front of the stage, holding an audience member's hand and asking him "To be or not to be?" which was a very nice touch, it somehow personalized it, as if Hamlet was asking his opinion.  Sadly she was given no help with the absurdly ugly costumes she had to wear and ultimately, a lot of the production was not up to her level.

I will have to ponder where Michelle Terry sits in my pantheon of Hamlets, but I know that her interpretation did not move me as others have; it is possible for this to happen even within a shonky production - Andrew Scott is a good example - but here I suspect Terry was unwilling to out-shine the ensemble - she didn't even get a solo bow!  This strikes me as a rather false humility, after all, as the Globe's artistic director she nabbed the role for herself.  Despite all the failings of the production, I have to admit that I was pleased to have seen it and I still have high hopes for Michelle Terry's tenure.

LOVE IN IDLENESS at the Menier - Rattigan Reimagined

Just when it looked like the revivals of plays by Terence Rattigan were over, up pops another one at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a highly unlikely home for this writer.

It turns out that LOVE IN IDLENESS is a bit of a cut-and-shunt job.  In 1944 Terence Rattigan wanted to write a play which reflected the conflicts of the time - when confidence in winning the war was tempered by worries of what the country would do next - as well as write a typical Shaftesbury Avenue comedy star vehicle.  Gertrude Lawrence turned it down unread but the acting (and married) partnership of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne picked it up.

The title was LESS THAN KIND which hints at the play's riffing on HAMLET but Lunt felt it's plot - young man burning with Socialist idealism returns from wartime evacuation to Canada to discover that his widowed mother has moved in with an industrialist currently serving in Churchill's wartime cabinet - was not humorous enough for him so Rattigan rewrote it, dropping most of the confrontations over politics.  Later on he recanted saying that he wished he had kept the play as it was and not bowed to star power.

Fast forward to 2016: Trevor Nunn was looking for another Rattigan project after his successful revival of FLARE PATH in 2011 and discovered the two similar projects and after urging from the Rattigan estate to meld the two scripts - reinstating some of the political debate but also keeping it light and amusing - we now have LOVE IN IDLENESS.  Incidentally the unperformed LESS THAN KIND was given a belated debut in 2011 too at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre (home of the hags, don't get me started).

I must admit to some trepidation at the thought of Trevor Nunn imposing his love of playing length on what sounded like a frothy comedy (and it does come down after nearly three hours) but remarkably his production delighted in it's brio and in the winning performances.  True, Rattigan weights the plot in favour of the industrialist Sir John Fletcher but when he is played so delightfully by Anthony Head it's a point one is willing to concede.

I was also hugely surprised by Eve Best as the high society-loving Olivia Brown.  Best is *ahem* best at roles which usually find her mournful and constantly wiping away tears or blowing her nose on a hankie secreted up the arm of her dowdy dress but here she blossoms as a gushingly over-indulgent mother but whose sense of fun is nicely balanced with a sense of fair play.  There were several times during the play that I thought what a nice part this would have been for Emma Thompson to have played had she not seemingly turned her back on theatre (SWEENEY TODD withstanding).

As I said Anthony Head is utterly charming as Sir John, possibly the best I have seen him on stage.  He captures the combination of a believable powerful man of influence while also being totally thrown by the emotional devastation that Olivia's truculent son brings with his arrival back from Canada.  As Michael, Olivia's son determined to break up his mother from a man who represents everything he despises, Edward Bluemel starts a bit wobbly but gained in strength during the evening, eventually playing Michael's selfish side well.

Another performance which really surprised me was Helen George as the society girl Diana.  Nicely introduced as what you expect to be a girl that Michael has picked up, the reveal that she is in fact Sir John's estranged wife is nicely done and she plays Diana's ruthless determination very well.  She more than holds her own against her more illustrious co-stars. Sadly the other supporting cast members are all a bit weak but the four leads carry them well.

Stephen Brimson Lewis has designed a pleasing Mayfair apartment for the primary action to take place which converts nicely into a low-rent Baron's Court flat for the final scene and it's a nice touch to have the time and place so well established with old Pathe News clips projected onto the wraparound scrim curtain.

Yes it's lightweight and throwaway, and not really Rattigan's best work, but it entertains and proves that sometimes experience does count for everything.  I was somewhat surprised to hear that it will transfer to the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue in May but wish it well as it is a play written to be seen on the Avenue.  I hope it finds it's audience.

Remembering Ian...

I was going through some programmes from the early 1990s a few weeks back and found something that soon had my jaw hanging open...

In a US Playbill I found a full page appreciation of one of the greatest performances I will ever see - Ian Charleson's heroic HAMLET at the National Theatre in October, 1989, less than three months before his death from an AIDS-related illness.  I had not noticed it before but as I read it I was amazed to see that it matched exactly my thoughts on Ian's acting - and it has laid quietly in a storage box all this time for me to finally discover it.

Ian was only 40 when he died and we were all robbed of the performances he never gave; he is so frozen in time it is strange to think that he would have been 68 this year but one has only to look at his contemporaries Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow and Robert Lindsay to know he might still have been delivering great performances.  Just thinking of Shakespeare alone, we lost his Prospero, Lear, Claudius, Titus Andronicus, Leontes, Malvolio, Oberon, Macbeth and Richard II.

So thank you Richard Allan Davison, wherever you are...  and of course, thank you Ian.  Goodnight Sweet Prince...

HAMLET at the Almeida - something old, something new...

It is now with a regular sense of trepidation that I take my seat to see any play from The Repertoire - it used to be plays pre-20th Century but now even Tennessee Williams has fallen victim to the sweep of Director Theatre - and as the lights go down I ask myself "Am I going to see a version of a classic play that will illuminate while showing why it has stood the test of time - or am I going to see a production by a director who is jamming a classic text into their pre-conceived ideas of audience alienation and quirk-for-quirk's sake gender-blind casting or post-modern tropes?"

It was with the above feelings that I sat down to watch Robert Icke's production of HAMLET at the Almeida and, for most of it's 3 + 3/4 hours running time, I was surprised at the clarity of vision despite the odd anachronistic elbow-in-the-eye.  But then as the climax of the play careered out of control it felt almost like Robert Icke just vomited out all the Director Theatre tricks he had managed to keep down up until then.

Of course nowadays a director feels the urge to give us a HAMLET at about the same time as a name actor edges into the spotlight to play it.  Andrew Scott, this is your 5 minute call... 5 minutes Mr Scott.  I have seen Andrew Scott only once before onstage - DESIGN FOR LIVING at the Old Vic in 2010 - so it was interesting to see him step up to have a go at the gloomy Dane.

For the most part he succeeded but his performance was let down by Icke having him burst into loud tears at the drop of a hat - yes we get it, he's still grieving for his father - and an annoying tendency to over-do the bellowing when Hamlet is riled up.  It's all the more absurd as he has only just told the Players: 

Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings...

But for the most part Scott was very good at speaking the verse - the great soliloquies were not sung out like arias but delivered quietly, as if coming to him for the first time. Where he sits in my league of Hamlets will have to be seen, at the moment I suspect somewhere below Rory Kinnear and my all-time number one Ian Charleson.

That he ultimately did not move me is more the fault of Icke's production than Scott's actual performance.  As I said I enjoyed the first two acts much more than I was expecting and indeed was on board for most of the last act, but as I said above, Icke's botched handling of the climax seemed to almost undercut any chance for the actors to shine.

We had been forewarned to the elements of the botched ending - just as Ivo van Hove's over-reliance on Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' irked during his HEDDA GABLER so Icke's seemingly inexhaustible Bob Dylan collection here very quickly bored, Icke shared Nicholas Hytner's 2010 NT vision of Elsinore as a closed circuit surveillance state and occasionally a large screen dropped down to give us updates on Fortinbrass's progress, to show the security cameras picking up the ghostly presence of the dead King (which actually was very effective) and then to show the reactions of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet to "The Mousetrap" while they sat in the front row of the stalls.

This last bit of business was gimmicky and cumbersome (despite the fact that the handheld cameras showing the royal family also picked up the truly regal Vanessa Redgrave sitting behind them!) but it was distracting from the very fine performances of David Rintoul as the Player King and Marty Cruickshank as the Player Queen.  So the final scene... again the screen appeared to show the onstage duel (which we could see anyway) as Angus Wright and Juliet Stevenson as Claudius and Gertrude sat again in the front row - why??  With the duellists' faces covered up with fencing masks we really needed to concentrate on the King and Queen to get the undertow of emotions but this was totally lost.

But if this stage blocking ruined the personal dynamic between the characters at the climax of the show, the text was drowned out by the BLARING final Bob Dylan song - do you love Gertrude's "He’s fat, and scant of breath...the queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet" or her defiant retort to Claudius' command for her not to drink from the poisoned cup "I will, my lord. I pray you, pardon me"?  Well you won't hear them here as the bloody song blares out while Stevenson mouths the words.  At least her violent convulsions after being poisoned were more convincing than Gertrude's usual drop and die.

And it didn't end there - Hildegard Bechtler's stage design featured sliding glass panels with a hidden room beyond shrouded by curtains.  It immediately reminded me of Tom Scutt's low-fi set for the NT's MEDEA and with Bechtler's low-level leather couches, easy chairs and arty standard lamps, this is an Elsinore designed around 1981 Sunday supplement advertisements.  But at the end, rather than have Horatio (a short-changed Elliot Barnes-Worrall) and Hamlet exchange the famous last words as he dies, we had a musical fugue where the room beyond was revealed to show Polonious and Ophelia slow-dancing together as one by one the Ghost beckoned those recently dead - Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude - to stand up and join the party within...  all of which vanished to show that we had just been watching what was going on in Hamlet's mind as he died.  I am sure if Shakespeare had wanted a parade across the stage at this point he would have done it as in MACBETH and RICHARD III... so Icke, don't bloody make a long night longer just to be fucking contrary!

As I said, this awful version of the play's climax was all the more frustrating as up until then there had been much to enjoy, albeit in a production which seemed to be made up of moments and not a through line of dramatic tension - Scott's delicate handling of the speeches (when not ranting during Ophelia's funeral), the genuinely spooky glimpses of the Ghost on the security cameras as well as well-rounded performances from the always-dependable Peter Wight as a Polonius seemingly beset by early dementia, Barry Aird's sarcastic Gravedigger, Jessica Brown-Findlay's o'erthrown Ophelia, the earlier-mentioned Rintoul and Cruickshank and a suitably volatile Luke Thompson as Laertes.

Juliet Stevenson was a very good Gertrude, slowly coming to realize the truth behind Hamlet's rages; she proved again what a good actress can find within the otherwise frustratingly-thin role - in particular she delivered the drowning of Ophelia speech wonderfully.  Stevenson also provided the unexpected laugh of the evening when she ran out after the raving Ophelia only to go WHONGGG into the closed glass screen door.  However, in keeping with this unpredictable production, as good as Stevenson was, she only showed up how disastrously low-rent Angus Wright was as Claudius; he played it like it was a tech rehearsal.

So another stage HAMLET to add to the pile, my tenth in all.  I would be surprised if I see another production this year, but it is a play that I find endlessly facinating and profoundly moving when done right, alack not here however - Mr Scott, your director done rained on your parade.

. 

HAMLET at the Barbican - When Cumberbatch Met Shakespeare...

After all the hype, the year-long wait for tickets, the brouhaha over director Lynsey Turner moving "To be or not to be" to the start of the play, press reviewing the first previews... after all that, how exactly did HAMLET at the Barbican pan out?

As I said I've had a year to build up to the production with only the poster art to whet one's appetite.  The design of a troubled younger Hamlet, with trademark Cumberbatch hair, staring out while other unhappy kids - maybe Laertes, Ophelia, Horatio and Fortinbras? - mope about in the background at a miserable party, is really not reflected in the final production, who knows if it ever did?

To be honest, after all the press and social media jabber about Benedict Cumberbatch stepping up to the plate to play the melancholy prince, I actually wasn't looking forward to seeing the production.  It all seemed whipped up and over-blown, and more importantly, we had seen Lynsey Turner's dire over-conceptualised production of LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE at the National which made me fear the most.  But there I was last Monday, taking my place in the front row - THE FRONT ROW - with my over-sized £10 programme.  I resisted the tshirts and mugs on sale in the foyer.

At first my heart sank as Hamlet was revealed listening to a Dansette playing Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy" but I didn't dare grind my teeth as Cumberbatch was only a stone's throw away - and we all know how distracted he can get by his audience!  Turner has dropped the opening scene on the ramparts and gallops straight into the first court scene, all the quicker to get her star on the stage as quickly as possible.

The subsequent action all takes place on Es Devlin's extraordinary, angled set which suggests a low ceilinged Middle-European palatial hunting lodge, almost CinemaScope in aspect as it reaches across the large Barbican stage.  It's painstakingly detailed with mounted stags-heads, royal family portraits and, tellingly, an old rocking-horse and boxes of toys stored almost out-of-side under the impressive staircase and first-floor landing.  It could have been somewhere Nicholas and Alexandra might have stayed when they wanted to be a 'normal' family in the summer months.

When we first we see it it is also festooned with large hanging white garlands to celebrate the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude with a long table attended by courtiers dressed in bright colours - apart of course from Hamlet in his inky coat of mourning.  His first monologue "O that this too too solid flesh would melt..." is played direct to the audience with him climbing over the table while all around the others do their best sloow-motion acting.

Turner's streamlining of the text focusing all on Hamlet makes for a swift first act although the interval was placed quite late in the action after Hamlet is shipped off to England and as if to make up for it closing on a non-Cumberbatch scene, Turner has the doors of the set suddenly blow open as leaves and dust swirl through them engulfing the solo figure of Ciaran Hind's Claudius.  It did leave the nagging feeling that Elsinore was the latest venue for SLAVA'S SNOW SHOW.

Sadly the second act built on the niggles I felt during the first act and possibly because Cumberbatch was offstage for awhile, the pace slackened and never really recovered.  A main contributor to that was the fact that in the interval the set is changed to a desolate shell of it's former self with the the stage now covered in mounds of dirt and rock.  Yes it's a good visual flagging up of the fact that the second half of the play focuses on the spiralling paranoia within Elsinore and the threat of war without but it didn't help the flow of the scenes with the cast gingerly climbing over the mounds like worried mountain goats in Jane Cox's gloomy lighting.

In retrospect I think the production highlights all of Lyndsey Turner's worst aspects of vision and direction - the visual over-emphasis and the feeling that the actors are playing in their own sealed spaces and not connecting onstage was all very prevalent.  I also found the whole visual idea for Hamlet distracting: his mad scenes are played while dressed up as a toy soldier and he even finally resorts to dragging on his own large fort to hide in.  It all felt overly-cute and done to get easy laughs for Cumberbatch to the cost of the rhythm of the play - and why for the play scene did he sport a Ziggy Stardust t-shirt??

I had expected Ciaran Hinds as Claudius to really put a stamp on the production and give Cumberbatch a run for his money but he made only fitful impressions, usually when he was in scenes with others.  Anastasia Hille isn't an actress I particularly like but I also felt she was colourless as Gertrude - at no time did I feel any connection between her and Claudius and in particular between her and Hamlet - the closet scene might as well have been two people standing at a bus stop.

I was looking forward to Jim Norton as Polonius but he too seemed to gave a muted, underplayed performance while Ophelia was played by the colourless Sian Brooke.  Turner has thrown greater emphasis on Ophelia in this production, she wanders around snapping away with a box brownie camera during the first act and in her final scene, she drags on a large trunk which Gertrude opens to find hundreds of her photographs and her camera, then watches as mad Ophelia walks away from her up one of the rubble dunes to her watery death.  The trouble is that Brooke does nothing to impose any personality on the role.  Nice black lacy frock though....

The current trend seems to have been to cast a black actress as Ophelia but here the non-traditionalist casting is switched so Kobna Holdbrook-Smith plays Laertes and he at least has a forceful presence when he returns as the avenging angel.  There is also a strong performance from Sergio Vares as Fortinbras, demonstrating the strength of purpose that shows why he will thrive where Hamlet failed.  Karl Johnson, although anonymous as the Ghost was excellent as the Gravedigger. These three actors all stood out in the moribund second act.

The duel scene at the end of the play again showed the frustrating quality of the production, the swordplay was good but Gertrude's poignant last line was allotted to Horatio, her positioning was off to one side away from the action and in the final injustice, absurdly ended up doubled over on one of the mounds with her bum in the air.  Claudius's demise was also oddly bungled, happening upstage and behind the banister on the staircase, it was almost like they had to positioned to be as far away from the centre of the stage which was Cumberbatch's permanent domain.

The whole reason the production was there however was not for Lyndsey Turner's direction, Es Devlin's set, Anastasia Hille's Gertrude or Jim Norton's Polonius... it was for Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.  To be honest he gave the performance I expected to give - he shot through the first act like an arrow, he spoke the text with clarity, waspish humour and with an intelligence that showed genuine understanding and radiated a real star wattage.

And yet.. and yet... and yet...  at no time did I feel Hamlet had taken over him, he remained Benedict Cumberbatch at all times.  This is of course what a star does, they give us various facets of an established persona and there was plenty here to please the 'Sherlock' fans in the house particularly in the cutesy business in the dress-up madness scenes.

But he didn't move me, not like the best Hamlets I have seen have done.  Derek Jacobi (1980, BBC TV), Simon Russell Beale (2000, NT), Rory Kinnear (2010, NT) and the greatest of all Ian Charleson (1989, NT) have all broken through to the real soul of the part so that by the end, when "the rest is silence", you mourn the loss of him in his world and in ours. 

In a few years Cumberbatch might have a chance of playing the role again, only hopefully with a director who can possibly connect him to a more integrated production and cast.

I would like to give you, Constant Reader, A Tale Of Two Ricksons.

A couple of weeks back Owen and I *finally* caught up with Ian Rickson's production of JERUSALEM which is now back on in the West End. After opening at the Royal Court to tumultuous reviews for Jez Butterworth's play and Mark Rylance's lead performance, it transferred to the Apollo Theatre then onto Broadway winning in close succession the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for Best Actor. Now the production has returned to the Apollo for one last hurrah.

Rylance - in a performance that threatens to eat you alive - plays Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, a drop-out who lives in a caravan deep in a forest in Wiltshere that borders a small town. Byron, although hated by the town's community as a supplier of drugs, is a natural focus for the town's bored and restless youth who party the night away with Johnny and his slacker mate Ginger (Mackenzie Cook).
As the play opens, Lee, one of Rooster's clique, is travelling to Australia and as his friends try to put him off, Rooster faces his own life-changing events - the local council are going to enforce an overdue eviction notice; his ex-lover threatens to stop him seeing his young son and the father of an absconded girl threatens to lynch Rooster if the father finds out Rooster is involved. All this and it's St. George's Day too.

The last point is quite salient as Jez Butterworth's play is a comment on the state of late 2000s England. Butterworth has Rooster represent the anarchic, subversive and pagan side of England becoming more and more threatened by the advance of the dull grey stupidity of the modern world. Butterworth and Rylance have stated in interview that the character of Rooser was further worked on during the preview period at the Royal Court and it shows. Rooster almost seems to have grown beyond the play and all the characters opposing him are made as unsympathetic as possible.Rickson directs the piece with a surety of hand which makes the running time of three hours hardly noticeable and the play's heady combination of scatter-gun scatology, dangerous undertow and ruminations on the English soul are socked over the footlights by the remarkable ensemble.

Particularly impressive were Alan David as a ruminating English professor out of step with the modern world, Geraldine Hughes as Rooster's ex- Dawn and Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, Rooster's slacker friend. A special mention to Ultz' forest setting which in the closing moments takes on a life of it's own.But bestriding the stage and play was Rylance, it's impossible to think of another actor playing the role as it seems to come as natural to him as breathing. He was quite extraordinary.

Fast forward a few weeks and along with Sharon and Eamonn we found ourselves schlepping around the side of the Young Vic auditorium to enter the soulless, authoritarian, high security asylum which was the setting for Ian Rickson's production of HAMLET.
The big selling-point of this production was the chance to see Michael Sheen give us his melancholy Dane - how I wish he had been doing it as a one-man show.

Everything that seemed so right with Rickson's direction in JERUSALEM seemed so wrong here, his first Shakespeare production. The whole thing seemed trapped in the all-encompassing 'concept'. Nicholas Hytner's version at the National Theatre last year was set in an Elsinore that was rife with surveillance cameras and ever-watchful courtiers but at least the production had room within it to live and breath - here any life is drained away by the heavy-handed concept clamped down over the text. It's view of Elsinore as a maximum security nuthouse is strained and simply ugly.What purchase can there be in Hamlet's feigned and Ophelia's genuine flights of madness if they are outdone by Sally Dexter's jittery, scratchy Gertrude, all wild hair and exposed nerves. I was greatly disappointed in her performance but at least she made an impression which is more than can be said for James Clyde's woeful Claudius. He is not helped by having his one big scene - Claudius' speech as he attempts to pray - performed in a glassed-in office, his speech relayed to the audience by intercom.

All through the play, Rickson's annoying tricks kept shouting "look at this - you never expected to see a Hamlet like THIS eh?" It all smacked of a 1970s theatre collective production - is there to be NO progress? It also didn't help that I missed the final coup-de-theatre by having a bloody actor standing in my eye line. Allegedly Fortinbrass removes his helmet and swipe me, it's Hamlet. Ooops. Spoiler alert.Every so often a performance sparked interest - Hayley Carmichael briefly shone in the last minutes as a female Horatio, Pip Donaghy's gravedigger seized his moment, Michael Gould was occasionally effective as Polonius (played in the usual office bore style) and Vinette Robinson was the latest in quietly effective Ophelias but the casting of light-skinned black actresses in this role is becoming depressingly obvious. Again she was saddled with annoying business - handing out pills instead of flowers during her mad scene - did no one realise this leads to the background to her suicide? - and P.J. Harvey's tunes for Ophelia's snatches of song merely dragged out the playing length.

I also have to say that the idea of having the stage resembling a large open grave from Ophelia's burial scene to the end of the play worked excellently when Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet were piled in next to Ophelia and Polonious, really bringing home the sense of two families laid waste.All of which means that Michael Sheen will be needing some serious chiropractor sessions after carrying this damn show for nearly three months.

He was certainly charismatic, switching from Hamlet's soliloquies to his gallows humour in the bat of an eye, and investing the role with moments of real humanity. Sadly the one thing I didn't feel for him was any empathy and when Hamlet is left alone with Horatio facing his encroaching mortality, surely you need to have empathy for him. I also felt I was sometimes watching "the wheels go round" during some of his line readings - by trying to speak the text as naturally as possible I was... aware of... the... odd pauses... during his... lines.

Poor Michael Sheen... Ian Rickson done rained on your parade.

Oh and so did I when I sneezed LOUDLY towards the end of "To Be Or Not To Be"

*crimson*

This week the time had come to go back to the bosom of the Bard, namely Nicholas Hytner's production of HAMLET at the Olivier Theatre.Right from the start, with the roar of a fighter plane and the appearance of Francisco, Bernardo and Marcellus in greatcoats carrying assault rifles, the production sets up a Denmark on a war footing while the second scene presents us with a West Wing-style court with Claudius giving his opening speech to a news camera team while security men and apparatchiks linger in the background.

Yes it's a very 21st Century Elsinore, well alluded to with little details like Hamlet and Laertes having to obtain Claudius' signature to leave the country with their passport as evidence and Polonious showing Ophelia surveillance photographs of her with Hamlet as well as planting a tape recorder in the book she carries in the 'Nunnery' speech scene.It was earlier in the day that I realised this would be my first HAMLET at the Olivier since seeing Ian Charleson - gulp - 21 years ago. I have blogged before that I doubt I will ever see a HAMLET to rival Ian's - his suffering from the AIDS virus which would claim him less than three months later gave his performance a power beyond the written word. Indeed once or twice I found myself moist-eyed remembering him, in particular the "We defy augury" speech which I will never hear bettered.

From his opening scene Rory Kinnear set off on an interesting course: pugnacious and sardonic, a hard-edged melancholia but with a very masculine gentleness in the soliloquies which he spoke beautifully so you almost felt you were hearing them a-new. His was not the most immediately winning of Hamlets but I warmed to his performance and this seals his place at the top-table of current stage actors. It also seemed to be more of a performance than a star turn so he certainly banished memories of Jude Law.The other big selling point of the show was to see Clare Higgins as Gertrude and she gave a memorable portrayal of a professional First Lady who grabs the nearest drink whenever she feels the attention is off her which, of course, sets up her incredulous refusal at Claudius' entreaty for her not to drink in the final scene. It was good that the modern dress choice of the production didn't mean they dropped the end of her speech about Ophelia's drowning - "her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up" which was absurdly cut in Michael Grandage's production at the Wyndhams last year.

Oh and speaking of that production, sadly here again Gertrude has to suffer the indignity of having practically the smallest royal wardrobe! Mind you, she was spared the indignity of Penelope Wilton's cardigans, going instead for a tight-fitting sheath dress, occasional matching suit and tottering high heels. Sadly while she was being bounced from couch to couch in the closet scene the thought of Miss Piggy suddenly sprung to mind. Don't blame me Clare, blame Vicki Mortimer's costume and the hair-stylist.

Sadly for me, the biggest mis-step in the production was the Claudius of Patrick Malahide. I was looking forward to his interpretation but again, very early on I got the mental image of Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons" and nothing in his vocally thin performance could shift that.David Calder has also a bit of a let-down as Polonious (looking frighteningly like Charles Clarke!) - this is where the Grandage production triumphed in the great double-act of Kevin McNally and Ron Cook in these roles. However Calder was more effective as the Gravedigger. Giles Terera was also a lightweight Horatio - mind you, he was scuppered from the get-go by the awful idea of having him wear light brown hush-puppy boots.

I liked Ruth Negga's contemporary Ophelia very much although I'm not too sure of the directorial conceit of having her wheel a shopping trolley around in her mad scenes. It was however a nice touch to have her distribute her character's props badly wrapped-up as gifts to the others during the "Rosemary" scene instead of the usual straggly weeds.

Hytner has added a tiny silent scene after her final scene where Ophelia is snatched by two secret service men and bundled away. I am not sure if the idea of Claudius having Ophelia bumped off actually works - does he suspect her derangement would lead her to betray him? - but it was an interesting touch.

Alex Lanipekun's Laertes was easily swamped by whoever he was playing against but Jake Fairbrother was a very convincing Fortinbras - again sharing his obituary of Hamlet with an embedded tv news team.

It is a tribute to Hytner's direction that the three and a half hours running time slipped by unnoticed and he kept a grip of the narrative throughout. Vicki Mortimer's palatial boxed set swiftly changed from location to location with a particular emphasis on windows and hidden doors and Jon Clark's lighting design also deserves praise.