Abstract
What follows are two reviews of the same show – the first, an account of its opening night and the second, of its final performance. Cast changes and differences in audience attendance are dealt with in the second review.
Until Boris Johnson's government postponed its arrival, 21 June 2021 was scheduled to be the UK's Great Unlocking Day – the return to something like normality, the ending of restrictions on numbers gathering for cultural events and social occasions, and the lifting of regulations on masks and social distancing. But at the time of writing (22 June), the UK has the highest per capita number of Covid infections in the whole of Europe as well as Canada and the US. The Great Unlocking is now postponed until 19 July; time will tell.
Hamlet fully opening on 21 June was always going to be a gamble, and the compromise was to play to a 50 per cent house so the pessimist's auditorium half-empty sapped the energies of actors returning to the stage after 18 months ‘resting’, while the optimist's auditorium half-full rewarded us with much missed vitality and spontaneity. The experience was both comforting – what could be more familiar, affable even, than Hamlet? – and oddly disquieting – rasping through masks and peering through misted glasses. Like the entire experience, the show itself was a mixed bag.
Details of the show in the programme specify its running time as ‘2 hours & 30 minutes including an interval of 20 minutes’. Talk about hostage to fortune: the show (including interval) ran for 3 hours and 10 minutes. Admittedly, this was opening night and, one hopes, it will become leaner and more streamlined later in the run; but in order to get down to the proposed duration, it is going to have to lose about a quarter of its current running time. The odd thing is that this is with a text that has already been radically butchered. The whole of 1.1 was binned as were the play's final 40 lines (less surprise here, keeping the focus on the protagonist). Some textual omissions were judicious – the gravediggers were happily truncated and the tedious nonsense of Osric's hat remained on the cutting room floor.
But elsewhere the cuts were less intelligible. Steven Berkoff's utterly unsympathetic, Colonel Blimpish, Polonius, had a wonderfully staccato delivery as he struggled to articulate his mean conspiratorial strategies. His backslapping advice to Reynaldo (Nick Howard-Brown), over a decanter of whisky, ran continually aground against his own early-onset Alzheimer's. But their exchange didn't make it as far as Polonius's exasperated ‘what was I about to say?’ (2.1.50), which would have suited this characterisation perfectly. Again, after Laertes and Hamlet had some quite innocuous argy-bargy on the side of Ophelia's grave (more primary school playground shoving than a heroic confrontation), Hamlet's clarion exit lines, ‘Let Hercules himself do what he may, / The cat will mew and dog will have his day’ (5.1.288–9), were either cut or lost under Ian McKellen’s breath as he wandered off aimlessly upstage, his exit more of a whimper than a bang.
Lee Newby's rather dour set had a traverse, onstage audience seated on either side of the central playing space, spanned above by a metal-mesh footbridge – plenty of opportunity for surveillance and the stomping of marching army boots. Much advance press was dedicated to the colour-blind, sex-blind, and age-blind character of the show, but none of these was particularly striking. We’ve got used to the siblings, Ophelia and Laertes, played by actors of different races; and even Francesca Annis's cross-sex-cast ghost was hardly a shock (though it was a shame to waste such a great actor by cutting so much of 1.5). One sensed these blindnesses were there to cushion the age-blind casting of the play's titular role.
At the age of 83 and a full 50 years after his first stab at it, McKellen played the Prince. Even this was hardly a revelation – a great actor, beautifully clear in the soliloquies and with a lifetime's sense of how to dally with a live audience – one wanted him to be in a better production. Not much was made of his age, and although the duel with Laertes (Emmanuella Cole) comprised little more than an abbreviated tap on the arm (no Errol Flynn this!), one could forgive the lack of action in exchange for McKellen's emotional and vocal intelligence. Although his conversation with Marcellus (Ashley D. Gayle) and Horatio (Ben Allen) was conducted from the saddle of an exercise bike (protesting too much?), at Hamlet's final ‘come, let's go together’ (1.5.191) McKellen draped his arms round their shoulders and they tenderly lugged him off – his exhaustion already beginning to register.
Predictably enough, too frequently the production ground to a halt without McKellen onstage. Alis Wyn Davies's Ophelia was a petulant Joni Mitchell protest singer in a flowing hippie dress and flower-power headband. Her interlude would be well sacrificed to the cause of getting the production closer to its advertised running time. Even though most of her lines were cut, Missy Malek's Osric was virtually unintelligible. But even the old hands were not beyond first-night slip-ups. Berkoff's Polonius spoke of the players being the best in the world for ‘pastoral-pastoral, pastoral-pastoral [and then getting increasingly desperate], comical-logical’. The stage manager will presumably have felt the ire of Jonathan Hyde's Claudius, whose ‘Set me the stoups of wine upon that table’ (5.2.214) was met with protracted silence and his repeated queries, ‘Where's the wine?’, and panicked imperatives, ‘Bring me the wine’, gave rise to a ripple of embarrassed laughter at just the wrong point. First-night errors may be permissible at the local village hall, but with a company of this distinction….
Highlights included Claudius’ doomed prayer, with Hyde articulating just the right mixture of desperate hope and acquiescent certitude of his own damnation; Polonius’ complete indifference to the pain of his own daughter by reading out to the King and Queen Hamlet's love letter to her while Ophelia cringed in humiliation and Hamlet's ‘To be or not to be’ (3.1.58) – a model of thoughtful clarity and coherence marred only by Horatio intrusively giving him a buzz-cut with a pair of electric clippers. Quite unaccountable was the decision to give Jenny Seagrove's Gertrude a thick German accent. So conspicuous was it that the Player Queen (Alison Halstead) parodied it during the dumb show's protestations of marital fidelity.
All being well, I’ll be seeing this show again on its last night (25 September). While I am looking forward to parts of it, a good deal could do with some necessary upgrading before then.
***
At the time of writing (27 September), the data on Covid-19 reveal that the seven-day rolling average between January 2020 and yesterday has the UK well in front of the rest of Europe: 34,000 new infections per day. For comparative illustration, Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands have just 2,000. It's hard not to become anxious given such astronomical rates especially in an auditorium that was pretty well 100 per cent capacity (this was the production's last performance) with a good 30 per cent of those attending unmasked. But the show must go on, and the UK feels very much as if it is in an atmosphere of Covid-negligence brought on by sheer indifference. In spite of the alarming case numbers, there is very little conspicuous mask wearing in public or social distancing. The Covid figures no longer lead news bulletins and schools and universities are (presently) teaching in-person. There's nothing like the UK government for burying its head in the sand and hoping it will all evaporate like a bad dream … (and I am not mentioning the ‘B’-word!).
A couple noteworthy things about the final show in the run. The running time had reduced from 3 hours and 10 minutes to 2 hours and 55 minutes – that's a whole quarter of an hour less but still nowhere near the programme's boast of total duration, including a 20-minute interval, of 2 hours and 30 minutes. (Interestingly, this claim appears in the first edition of the programme – it has been cut from the second edition.)
The other major shift was due to a change in personnel. The Guardian (18 July 2021) reported ‘bitter disagreement’ between Steven Berkoff (Polonius) and Emmanuella Cole (Laertes): ‘Berkoff is the subject of a complaint from Cole that is being pursued by the [actors’ trade] union Equity’ (Brown). Both roles had been re-cast. Frances Barber had been drafted in to play Polonius while Ashley D. Gale had moved up the pecking order from Marcellus to Laertes, leaving the role of Marcellus to Nick Howard-Brown (tripling it alongside his already-doubled Player King and Reynaldo).
Barber's Polonius was even more acerbic towards his daughter than Berkoff's, and demonstrated a personal shock as he read out the description of Ophelia's ‘white bosom’ (2.2.113). Appalled at the intimacy, Barber's Polonius scanned the remaining pages of indecency with a grimace before beginning to read out loud again at ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire…’. It was an effective intrusion into Ophelia's private life, which caused her, shrinking with embarrassment, to flee from the stage. Apart from a different Polonius, the rest of the production remained stubbornly (and with faults outlined above) static.
I had hoped to be able to report some degree of development and increasing sophistication between the production's very first and very final performances. No such luck.