| Hamlet |
At Wales Theatre Company |
| Wales Theatre Company , Swansea Grand Theatre , October 28, 2005 |
Wales Theatre Company , Grand Theatre Swansea , October 28, 2005 This review first appeared in the Western Mail... It’s the most famous play in the world: there cannot be anything that creates so much expectation from an audience with an imagined or real familiarity with the work. We know the quotes (and there are around 400 lines from the play in a dictionary of quotations), we know the famous speeches, we know the characters. Hamlet, the tragic hero, in particular, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, David Warner, Mel Gibson, Alan Rickman, Ethan Hawke, moody introspective hollow-cheeked young men moping around indecisively and maybe with a thing about their mother. So picture this: a short plump 30-ish man prone to arm-waving whom we first see weighed down in a thick overcoat, dwarfed by burly fellow-students (obviously members of the uni rugby squad) and a big evil uncle who could be from East Enders. Michael Bogdanov’s choice of lead for his Wales Theatre Company production of this classic among classics is Wayne Cater, a man who at times looks like a rejuvenated Van Morrison or moderated Danny de Vito, and at best is no-one’s idea of a romantic hero. Which he isn’t. This Hamlet is an unprepossessing mature student who is cursed by having to set things right when his father’s ghost tells him that he was murdered by his own brother who then weds the not unwilling widow. It is but the first of the challenges Bogdanov issues in this brave production, and if we can adjust our expectations to accept Hamlet as short, plump and 30-ish then the rest is easy. Like, for example, the ever-present threat of invasion from a neighbouring military power – the play opens at a military base and a huge radar looms over many scenes in an impressive set by Sean Crowley and Ed Thomas, helicopters land and take off, searchlights sweep the audience and Laertes stages a mini-coup with guerrillas wielding Kalashnikovs. Or Ophelia as a be-jeaned teenager, Gertrude as a randy new wife, The Mousetrap as a Japanese Noh play – and the swordfight at the end as a real competitive duel, just about the best and most convincing I have ever seen on stage. It’s what Bogdanov, one of the world’s most exciting directors (even if his takes on classics don’t always work) now running one of Wales’s most accomplished companies (and, criminally, for a pittance of public money), always does: make us see the familiar afresh. If that means having a short plump 30-ish Hamlet – and it’s there in the text – then it works, especially when the accomplished Cater delivers with such clarity, consistency and conviction. He becomes not just a non-heroic figure but symbolically a small man surrounded by towering powerful enemies and technology. Not perfect, not right necessarily, but human. If Cater’s performance is not just the most stereotype-challenging but is also confident and engaging, the others match him for playing against clichéd portrayal and realism – Kath Dimery’s Gertrude is remarkable, while Catrin Rhys’s Ophelia goes quite against expectations of a pre-Raphaelite heroine. There are, it has to be said, some performances that slow the production down and are painfully conventional, all the more so in a reading that tingles with electric surprises, and they come from the older, more traditional actors. And, yes, most of the delivery is crystal-clear in every way but there are some who as yet cannot make themselves either understood or credible. And if we are looking for catharsis, a purging of the emotions, I’m not sure that’s what this Hamlet offers. Life isn’t that simple. But I found it thrilling, engaging, with a fast-moving plot most of the time, exemplary in its clarity and if not tragic in the conventional sense, often moving. Ironically, perhaps, in view of some reactions to the appearance of the central character, I felt it had real stature. There aren’t the political frissons of Bogdanov’s Shakespeare Trilogy this time last year, where there were clear references to the Iraq war, but we may feel that in Polonius’s trite sermonising and in Claudio’s praying, for example, we can see the muddled sanctimonious hypocrisies of Bush, Rumsfeld and Blair, and there is no doubt that the Elsinor of this Hamlet is of today’s world, not one of dramatic fiction. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
This review has been read 657 times There are 33 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
