Hamlet

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. 

This version opens with Hamlet, a contemporary young man in jeans and grey tee-shirt under an open grey shirt, sitting cross-legged on a baggy sofa looking at old family photographs. As the houselights go down, it is he who utters the portentous and startled opening line of the play, "Who's there?" Immediately we are plunged into the drunken and dishevelled tail end of a posh party, with Laertes drumming on upturned buckets, Polonius and Claudius tottering with their bow-ties unknotted around their necks, and Gertrude more drunk (and thus more believably the object of Hamlet's disgust) than I have ever seen her. It is almost a shock to hear the familiar cadences of blank verse uttered by these dissolute partygoers, or by the dismayed but entirely modern looking youth.

The first major hurdle is the ghost scene. Here Hamlet, having spoken his first major soliloquy, suffers a seizure, and, hitting his head with the base of his wrist as if trying to dislodge a splitting headache, he speaks the ghost's words; he seems in dialogue with his own inner demons. This has, of course, been done before, most notably by Jonathan Pryce many years ago at the Royal Court.

Then we are with Laertes asking permission to leave for Paris, which is of course granted. Where we might expect the pompous older brother's farewell advice to the naive sister, and Polonius's subsequent meddling and even worse pomposity, we are immediately catapulted into Ophelia's distraught announcement of Hamlet's strange behaviour. And here we have the first really stunning sleight of hand. Gertrude and Claudius at once turn to Laertes to "draw [Hamlet] on to pleasures" where normally the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, newly arrived at court after Laertes's departure, would be so commissioned. 

Suddenly Laertes is in the awkward position of having to give up his ambitions in Paris in order to spy on his prince, and Hamlet's skewering questions to his university friends are just as embarrassing to him as they would ordinarily be to them. In an even more extraordinary transformation, Hamlet's sudden imperious demand that Laertes should play forces the young man to a frantic display of his drumming skills, which eventually leads him to cry out in pain and leave the stage. At this, Hamlet responds with his great rumination on real and counterfeited emotion - "Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I?" - we have been watching this production's version of the Player's Hecuba speech.

Without the players, the contrivance of establishing the king's guilt must also be recast. Hamlet himself reveals more inner agony as he begins to sing the Cat Stevens song Father and Son, ever more frantically and ever more out of tune, while the others look on appalled and embarrassed, until he finally mumbles the defensive apology of someone who knows he is mentally unbalanced and has crossed a line in public. He manically proposes a game called "Who killed the King?" to which the others unwillingly agree, as if placating a really spoilt child.

The confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude, and the inadvertent murder of Polonius, remain central in this version, but the pace afterwards accelerates as Ophelia drags her father's bloodstained body out at the beginning of her madness, and Laertes is there to witness this from the beginning. It was one of the more dramatic and more disturbing versions of Ophelia's collapse, not least because of the intimacy of the acting space (there are only 98 seats in the auditorium). In a startling visual intervention, Ophelia, pulling on a large cloth held by Gertrude from the side of the stage, described her own death (usually Gertrude reports it). The vengeance plotted by Laertes and Claudius is too hastily discussed for its real significance in showing how the young man's conventional nobility is corrupted by his passion and his king's malevolence, which is a shame considering how much we have seen of his compromises and uneasiness earlier.

David Fielder, having finished his role as Polonius, still lying covered in blood on the floor, is encouraged to stand and be dressed in a mucky boilersuit to become the gravedigger; he and Hamlet discuss Yorick briefly before Ophelia's body is brought in. Hamlet and Laertes squabble over the grave, and in a frenzy Hamlet stabs Laertes and then forces him to stab himself in return. This was I think the least satisfactory abridgement of the action, since it rendered the poisoned drink motif very awkward and prevented the poignant reconciliation between the two young men as they die. Gertrude indeed died from the drink, and Hamlet at his last gasp forced its dregs into Claudius's ear, but it was all too quick and not dramatically satisfying.

Hamlet, however, died with his final words "the rest is silence", and with bodies all around him. Only the gravedigger was left to whisper the final words of the play itself, "bid the soldiers shoot".

The players were all excellent in an extremely demanding production. It was hard to believe that Mark Arends spoke so much of the great part in such a short time, as well as taking on the ghost, while the conflation of so many of the other young men around him into the handsome and energetic Laertes of Finlay Cormack showed all too pointedly how contagious was the rottenness in Denmark. The Gertrude of Katy Stephens, less stately, at the outset more dissolute, was entirely plausible as a self-centred mother who was completely unaware of her effect on her son. Her wheedlingly playful "go not to Wittenberg", delivered as if to a wayward five-year-old, was under the circumstances quite grotesque. Francesca Zoutewelle's Ophelia was stronger and more self assured to start with than is often the case, which made her madness the more compelling - not a switch from naivety to obscenity, but rather the collapse of a vital young woman into angry madness. Tom Mannion brought to Claudius the right combination of initial urbanity only later revealed as a mask for desperate guilt, while David Fielder's Polonius, deprived of all the usual opportunities to develop this character's meddlesome wordiness, still showed us a courtier fatally out of his depth.

I wondered at the high praise this production quoted in its advertising, and nearly thought that I should not bother to see yet another Hamlet, but on the spur of the moment I did see it and I was immensely impressed. Though the final stages of the Hamlet/Laertes quarrel were unfortunately too rushed, for the most part this was  an extremely successful and intensely involving abridgement of the great play.