Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

filmed live performance from the Royal Exchange, Manchester, seen 23 March 2015

Directed for the stage by Sarah Frankcom and for the screen by Margaret Williams, this production featured Maxine Peake as Hamlet with John Shrapnel as Claudius and the Ghost, Barbara Marten as Gertrude and Katie West as Ophelia.

The Manchester Royal Exchange theatre is in the round, providing an intimate and potentially claustrophobic space to play out an intense and emotionally charged production of 'Hamlet'. Interest inevitably focusses on Maxine Peake, a woman playing the main character. With close-cut pale blond hair, she can look both boyish and beautiful, but the question of the character's age is left ambiguous. Around this Hamlet, both Ophelia and Laertes are young while Horatio is a youngish man with greying hair; Gertrude is not a young woman at all, and Claudius is in late middle age at best. As for Peake's characterisation, her Hamlet is intelligent, volatile, generous to the trustworthy (Horatio and Marcella), and increasingly cold to the mercenary. She has a tendency to display anger at the outside world and Hamlet's own self-disgust by shouting, a trait which has diminishing returns and which runs the risk of being merely histrionic rather than nuanced. All in all, though, it is a powerful and commanding performance.

The production 'cross-casts' other characters as well, in some cases changing the gender of the name as well - Polonia and Marcella - and in others, not bothering - Rosencrantz, the players, the gravediggers. It is a refreshing change to see the character of Polonius transformed into a strong (though fatally fallible) woman, though there is perhaps too large a gap to bridge between the controlling mother, who manages Laertes almost as a puppet in his brief first interview with Claudius, and the over-garrulous courtier-adviser in later scenes.

Katie West portrays a naive Ophelia, whose possible strength as an adult is broken too early and completely by her mother's interference, by Hamlet's scornful rejection, and by the calamity of her mother's death.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern offer an unexpectedly raffish insight into Hamlet's university existence in Wittenberg, with hints of drug-taking and general hedonism, in sharp contrast to Horatio's more sober outlook and clearly more deeply felt friendship for the troubled Prince. The differentiation of response to Hamlet in everyone whom he meets is an important aspect of the general success of this production, since it is essential to see him in his social context as much as to revel in the famous self-revealing soliloquies, which might otherwise just seem like set pieces.

The acting space is well used - the ghost's initial appearances (before speaking with Hamlet) are managed just by lighting effects, emphasising the uncanny. Many light bulbs are lowered to stage level when the ghost finally appears to speak, bathing and shadowing Hamlet's face as they are switched on and off.  Later, the grave-digging scene is set by piling bundles of clothes on stage, which the diggers push aside to create the grave. Ophelia's burial is then touchingly indicated by laying out the clothes that she wore in the grave space, rather than carrying in a coffin.

This production used the text devised for Michael Grandage's production with Jude Law in the 'Donmar at the West End' season in 2009. The major cut is the entire excision of the Fortinbras plot, removing the broader political and military parts of the play - no self-castigation by Hamlet arising from the soldiers' willingness to fight over useless territory, and no encomium at the end by young Fortinbras. The other most obvious alteration (for those really familiar with the play) is that the famous 'To be or not to be' speech is placed near the beginning of the second half, just before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to find out where Polonia's body is, rather than the usual place in the first half before the interview with Ophelia. This cleverly renews attention on Hamlet prior to his comparatively long absence from the stage and adds some balance to the shorter second half as devised for modern performance.