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.
