Hamlet
Demetrios Matheou
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 Read more ...
Gary Naylor
$8.2B. That’s what can happen when you re-imagine Hamlet.I doubt that writer, James Ijames, had The Lion King’s box office in mind when he set out to create a Deep South, black and contemporary version of Shakespeare’s drama of familial dysfunction, but he’s got a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece at home and now a run at the RSC. I suspect he’d have settled for that.We open on a barbecue to celebrate the marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra, to her husband’s brother, Rev, after the murder, in prison, of Juicy’s father, Pap. Juicy’s friend, Tio, is larking about, but sees the ghost of Pap and, soon, Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Plays about the theatre tend to go down well with audiences. Why wouldn’t they? The danger is that they become too cosy as actors and audience smugly agree on the transcendence of the artform. Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue comes perilously close to falling into that trap, but, in the end, its wider preoccupations with old age, change, and the perils of the new, make it a rewarding and sometimes even challenging evening.You have to admire Thorne’s versatility. Last week, Stranger Things – The First Shadow opened, for which he contributed to the original story. While that show attempts Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lip-syncing has become the hobby of many a young TikToker, but only an intrepid professional would contemplate using the technique to play Hamlet. Or rather, to “play” some of the knighted thespians and stars who have portrayed him. Dickie Beau is that brave soul. He has brought his 2020 show, Re-Member Me, back to the UK after its progress abroad was rudely interrupted by the pandemic, and it has bedded in nicely. An amalgam of film, multiple recorded famous voices, some witty stagecraft and Dickie’s gifted brand of physical comedy, it has a scope beyond co-ordinating face muscles to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Plays about the theatre are many and varied, from Gypsy and Noises Off to the numerous Shakespeare works that absorb theatrical performance into their very fabric.Jack Thorne's The Motive the Cue immediately takes pole position amongst recent entries in this genre in telling of a onetime Broadway venture – Richard Burton's career-defining Hamlet in 1964, directed by John Gielgud – that surely is itself in time destined for Broadway. By the point, look for various performances, and Sam Mendes' direction, to have been laurelled along the way: the National Theatre hasn't hosted so purely Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Hamlet isn’t often played for laughs. When David Tennant took the comedic approach in the RSC’s 2008 production, it was testament to his mercurial genius that his performance brilliantly conveyed the manic grief of a young man whose world was disintegrating around him.In Sean Holmes’s new production, by contrast, the humour is used not just to shed light on Hamlet’s psychological state, but as a wrecking ball for every preconception about how the text should be played. The result veers between inspired anarchy and a mire of nihilism.George Fouracres – one third of the Daphne comedy trio – at Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truism that every Hamlet is different, depending more than any other play on the casting of the lead. Each production moulds itself around the personality of the actor playing the prince. In Cush Jumbo, working here with Greg Hersov, who successfully directed her in As You Like It and A Doll's House at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, we have an accomplished actor of wit and intelligence, relishing Shakespeare's language and expressing the complex emotions and intellectual challenges of Hamlet, sometimes street-cool, sometimes febrile, always modern.A woman in the role is nothing new Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So it wasn’t Cinderella but Hamlet who was first out of the post-lockdown starting blocks – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much trumpeted musical premiere being foiled by a ping at the weekend. Instead the historic first curtain-up was 20 miles up the River Thames in Windsor, on a Shakespeare production that itself has been disrupted over and over during the past 16 months – possibly with even more urgent, unspoken worries, as the star is Ian McKellen, who was 80 when rehearsal began, and Covid began devastating the older generation, and is now 82.Pingless so far, Sean Mathias’s production, on a plain Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most enduring characters in both literature and art, and yet her part in Hamlet is limited to few lines and fewer motivations. Based on Lisa Klein's novel, the new film Ophelia challenges this interpretation. Daisy Ridley stars as the iconic maiden raising above the petty squabbles of flawed men. Director Claire McCarthy talks about bringing this new adaptation to screen.OWEN RICHARDS: How did you first become involved with Ophelia?CLAIRE MCCARTHY: The job came to me off the back of a film I made called The Turning, which has Rose Byrne in it, a wonderful Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a distinct feeling of back to basics to this opening double bill at the Globe under the theatre’s new Artistic Director Michelle Terry. The elaborations (some would say gimmickry) of Emma Rice’s short tenure have been reined back, and a new concentration prevails. This first presentation – two plays written around 1599, the year in which Shakespeare's original Globe opened: As You Like It was staged that year, Hamlet a little later – is built on a new approach to ensemble that draws on a broader casting base than usual.That involved a gender-neutral approach (with a 50:50 gender ratio Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midway through Hamlet a troupe of actors arrives at Elsinore. Coaching them for his own ends, the prince turns director, delivering an impassioned critique: “O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters…it out-herods Herod: I pray you avoid it.” It’s a philosophy director Robert Icke takes as his own watchword. Out goes declaiming, along with anything demonstrative or self-consciously dramatic, and in its place we get a conversational Hamlet that allows its audience to eavesdrop, forces us to turn voyeur in a contemporary palace of CCTV Read more ...
Matt Wolf
To the list of abiding theatrical partnerships one must surely add Tom Stoppard and the director David Leveaux. From his Tony-winning revival of The Real Thing onwards to Jumpers and Arcadia, all of which played both London and Broadway, Leveaux has proved a particularly dab hand at mining this playwright in all his near-infinite variety. And if Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead as a play doesn't, in my view, rank with much of its author's extraordinary subsequent output, Leveaux's 50th anniversary revival nonetheless does the text's unbridled energy proud. How lovely, too, to encounter Read more ...