by William Shakespeare
seen at the Trafalgar Studios on 29 December 2016
This stripped down version of Hamlet, adapted and directed by Kelly Hunter, emphasises the Ibsen-like domestic turmoil of the play in an intense 90-minute focus on the disasters falling on the Danish Royal house and the family of Polonius. It features Mark Arends as Hamlet, Finlay Cormack as Laertes, Francesca Zoutewelle as Ophelia, Tom Mannion as Claudius, Katy Stephens as Gertrude and David Fielder as Polonius and the Gravedigger.
All sorts of drastic decisions have to be made to create such a short version of what can be an extremely long play while ensuring that it will still make sense and not appear as an evisceration. In this, Kelly Hunter is almost entirely successful, dispensing with all the minor characters but retaining, with sometimes breathtaking aplomb, the major strands of the story so far as they relate to the two families under observation.