Hamlet, National Theatre review - turning tragedy to comedy is no joke

The National’s latest production of Hamlet opens with a bang: a sureness of style, atmosphere and refreshing comedic effect, accompanied by a performer, Hiran Abeyeskera (The Father and the Assassin, Life of Pi), whose presence promises a night of sparky originality. 

What a pity, then, that this promise peters out, and an ambitious conceit ultimately fails to deliver. It’s one thing presenting Hamlet as an almost childlike clown, whose emotions are heightened even before he’s aware of the rot in Denmark, but to do so at the expense of the tragedy – of one of Shakespeare’s most tragic figures – just seems petulant.  

That’s not to say this modern-dress production, helmed by the National’s deputy artistic director Robert Hastie (Standing at the Sky's Edge), doesn’t have its moments. And it features one superlative performance, by Francesca Mills as Ophelia (pictured below), which does thrill for both its interpretation and its power to move. That opening section, involving the encounters with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, is a treat: starting in near darkness, characters’ torchlights shining into the audience, every one of the ghost’s appearances – popping seemingly out of the ether – creating gasps throughout the auditorium. 

When the lights come up, we’re transported into an enormous room, a banqueting hall of sorts, with a tapestry stretched across the back wall, candled tables across the floor. Designer Ben Stones and lighting designer Jessica Hung Han Yun are making the most of the Lyttleton’s great span to create something sumptuous.

By this time, Abeyeskera’s Hamlet is already breaking down some third wall, darting bug-eyed glances at the audience to convey his dismay at his mother and stepfather’s unseeming haste to marry. Irony drips from him, but it’s not intellectual, or moral, just naughty. And when he glimpses his old, murdered dad for himself, he positively jumps and yelps with glee – this Hamlet is more Goonie on an adventure than melancholic student with a sudden reason for vengeance.

Abeyeskera is going for broke by making Hamlet an impish clown, to such an extent that this prince’s possibly gay leanings (the camp sparring with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a T-shirt whose slogan "tobacco and boys" alludes to the celebration of male company attributed to Christopher Marlowe) hardly draws attention. It’s amusing enough, but there comes a time when both the character and the performance need to respond to the drama and develop some emotional maturity. And this never, really happens. It doesn’t help that the actor positively flies through the soliloquies, denuding the speeches of most of their meaning and impact. Geoffrey Streatfeild delivers Polonius’s more customary comedy with panache, and Alistair Petrie offers an effective, patrician Claudius, though Ayesha Dharkar’s Gertrude barely registers (pictured above, Petrie and Dharkar). 

It’s Francesca Mills who reminds us of the play’s heft, ironically by displaying a movement from mirth to pathos that Abeyeskera fails to register. At first, her Ophelia is a party animal, high-fiving, taking selfies, matey with everyone, not the innocent beauty that’s usually wheeled out but a funny, confident young woman. So her mental collapse following Hamlet’s cruel rejection and her father’s violent death, displayed at times through shocking roars of anger, is all the more heart-breaking. 

Mills also displays a physicality, whether tearing around the stage, jumping into people’s arms with delight or despair, that keeps the play’s heart beating long after her collaborators have given up the ghost. 

• Hamlet at the National Theatre / Lyttleton to 22 November
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