Tag: Anna Fleischle

Categories
theatre

Much Ado About Nothing – National Theatre, Lyttleton

Katherine Parkinson in Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s early entry into the now-perennial genre of the rom-com, is a knockabout comedy driven in both drama and humour almost entirely by rich character motivation rather than coincidence or contrivance. It contains perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest pair of lovers as leads and has more sophisticated wit than most of the other happy comedies. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare celebrated marriage in the joining of couples who seemed desperate to marry but were prevented by strict laws. Much Ado internalises these restrictions, making it unusually psychological for a comedy, as Beatrice and Benedick insist on their lack of interest in – and even opposition to – the institution of marriage, only to be undone by love. Yet beneath Shakespeare’s idealising of marriage as an expression of romantic love, there simmers a darkness that can be hard to overlook in the way men treat women.

It makes perfect sense to stage Much Ado as a light-hearted show as a tentpole of a summer season, and the National Theatre have done so in their Lyttleton auditorium this year with Simon Godwin’s delightful production. The Sicilian setting of Messina is now the Hotel Messina, a glamorous resort for the rich and famous (this Beatrice is a starry actor), which invests the production with a sense of holiday detachment. The shadow of the war from which Benedick, Don Pedro and Claudio have returned is rather faint here, bar the umber combat fatigues they wear in the first act and Benedick’s soon-trimmed stubble. By contrast, Christopher Luscombe’s pair of 2014 RSC productions, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing (there titled Love’s Labour’s Won), were set in a melancholy Edwardian England, either side of the First World War. Here, the 1930s is treated as an aesthetic, rather than a time of particular political significance. The conflict is an unspecific one used as little more than set dressing. Instead, Godwin focuses on the ‘merry war’ of words in the waspish relations of Beatrice and Benedick. All of the drama is simply interpersonal.

But what interpersonal drama it is. John Heffernan and Katherine Parkinson are brilliantly cast as the play’s famous lovers in denial. Neither of whom can summon the courage to make the first move, shielding their interest in the armour of mutual dislike. They tie themselves in Gordian knots, philosophically opposing marriage in the strongest terms. Benedick in particular disavows the notion of marriage as anathema to his fiercely independent spirit; to marry would be to submit to state of perpetual boredom that means you ‘sigh away Sundays’ in lieu of meaningful entertainment. Yet his obsession with not marrying is apophatic, pointing to the deep desires he is not yet ready to admit. He would only ever countenance marriage if a woman managed to have ‘all graces’ – ‘fair’, ‘wise’, ‘virtuous’, ‘noble’, ‘of good discourse’. (Here, Heffernan’s reading of ‘and her hair shall be of what colour it please God’ alters the original meaning that it may not be dyed to make Benedick seem more endearing; as long as she has all such qualities, he says, her hair colour is irrelevant.) Benedick constructs an elaborately reasoned logical house of cards for why no woman would ever be fit to marry him, yet it comes tumbling down with the play’s most touching romantic cadence, as Benedick realises that there is one woman who fulfils, even transcends, his criteria after all.

Getting Beatrice and Benedick, ostensibly the play’s main characters, to confess their latent feelings is debatably the A-plot, though it is Hero’s story which has the most plot significance and drama. Benedick and Don Pedro’s young soldier friend Claudio wants to marry the hotel-managing Leonato’s daughter Hero, though he is too shy. Therefore, Don Pedro sets out to woo her on Claudio’s behalf. Yet a rift between Don Pedro (Ashley Zhangazha) and his brother Don John (David Judge) threatens to break everything apart. Don John initially lies to Claudio, that Don Pedro is secretly wooing her for himself, yet this is lie is resolved with relative ease – though the trustworthiness of Don John remains undisputed. Thus, Don John confects a new rumour: that Hero is having an affair. Don John is a forerunner of Iago, albeit without the charm. He does not recruit our sympathies like Shakespeare’s tragic villain, and nor is he successful in steering the course of the play towards his intended tragedy – though for a time it seems like tragedy has occurred, for some of the characters. Yet Don John unleashes the play’s other great psychodrama (alongside Beatrice and Benedick’s mental prisons that restrain their love) – a fear of infidelity. To be married is to risk being cheated on. The horn imagery of cuckoldry is frequent in dialogue, even in Benedick’s celebratory lines at the very end: ‘there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn’.

The play is proof that tragedy and comedy is all about perspective, the final acts playing like a perspective trick in which most characters believe Hero has died from the shock of false accusation (a similar fate as befalls Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and from which she also appears resurrected). Meanwhile, the audience share the knowledge of Beatrice, Benedick and Leonato – that Hero’s death is faked, while Don John’s lies are investigated. The restoration of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale could be viewed as a second go at the Hero resolution, with more artful stagecraft. Here, there is the business of marrying a suddenly remembered sister, a messier series of events that leaves Hero as a largely speechless bride.

John Heffernan and Eben Figueiredo in Much Ado About Nothing

For the most part, the production’s tone is utterly blissful, the verse delivered lightly (especially well by John Heffernan, who seems in his element here). It takes a lot of skill, on the part of actors and crew, to make Shakespeare look this easy. The more challenging or outdated pockets of Shakespeare’s language are never allowed to get in the way of the entertainment, any unfamiliar phrasing smoothed over by the brisk pace. As a result, a relatively low percentage of the laughs come from the original wordplay, yet this Much Ado has a somewhat more sophisticated take on Shakespearean comedy than simply padding out the play with anachronistic ad libs. Instead, almost every scene is invested with a potent sense of situation. Anna Fleischle’s wonderfully revolving set evokes the bustle of a busy hotel during peak holiday season, while also helping to place every scene in a specific location, inside or out, rendering the comic flights of fancy far more particular than just zany interludes to spice up the script.

At times, scenes are composed of two elements, relatively simplistically juxtaposed: Shakespeare’s original words and unrelated physical comedy. This is particularly notable in the scene where Dogberry, now the hotel’s security guard rather than the Constable of Messina, delivers pompous instructions to his juniors before sitting (as we know he inevitably will) onto a piled-high plate of spaghetti bolognese that has been inexplicably present on stage since the beginning of the scene. The scene progresses hilariously as his assistants try to clean the residue of Chekhov’s pasta off his trousers while he remains continues to speak obliviously. The original script here is conspicuously, deliberately secondary in importance. In the Dogberry scenes in particular, entertainment is the highest priority.

Other moments utilise random comic business to heighten not only the humour but the characterisation of the play, such as the mirrored scenes in which Beatrice and Benedick overhear that the other has confessed love for them in secret (in rumours set about by the matchmaking Don Pedro). Benedick’s is a particularly funny sequence; he cocoons himself in a hammock to eavesdrop but falls painfully onto the ground below on hearing of Beatrice’s alleged affections. He then clambers across the set to listen, before secreting himself in an ice cream cart to overhear more closely. In a sequence of pure farce, Don Pedro, Claudio and Balthasar help themselves to ice cream – in the full knowledge that Benedick is hidden inside the compartment now revealed to be the cart’s built-in rubbish bin. They gleefully spoon ice cream and shower sprinkles onto Benedick, while remarking on how strong Beatrice’s love is. At the end, Benedick emerges through the bin’s hole, streaked with residue and trying to remain composed – an extremely effective comic sequence, even if Shakespeare’s hand is nowhere near it.

Godwin directs something similar for Beatrice in the following scene. However, the ice cream routine is understandably hard to top, and he is hamstrung a little bit the order of the play. Comic logic would dictate then that the funnier Benedick scene goes second. The enjoyable clowning of the Beatrice scene is entertaining (she ends up entangled in a beach changing tent, adopting the uniform of a passing porter), but it is not quite as viscerally amusing, lending it a slightly repetitious sense of anti-climax. It is unfortunate, but largely the case, that in this production the men are allowed to get the biggest laughs – both from their wit and their humiliation.

Ioanna Kimbook, Celeste Dodwell, Katherine Parkinson and Phoebe Horn in Much Ado About Nothing

The thinness of the female roles is felt noticeably in Ioanna Kimbook’s performance of Hero, which exposes the writing’s limitations, as many strong actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s female parts do. Kimbook wrings as much emotion and nuance as she can from a part that asks only that Hero is charmed into silence and then victimised. Particularly good are the scenes where Hero is enlisted into misleading Beatrice. Hero coolly intones about Benedick’s apparent affection for Beatrice, while getting hugely and hilariously frustrated at her companion’s unconvincing woodenness.


This production struggles to sell the romance with Claudio though. Eben Figueiredo plays him as fairly meek at first, which is pretty much as Claudio is written, youthful and shy, but this makes Hero seem even meeker in her silent delight at the match. The intention seems to be for a sweetly dorky union of two shy people, Beatrice’s meta-joke ‘Speak, count, ’tis your cue’ followed here by a comically protracted silence. Neither can find the words, at least in public, and the silence can only be broken by a kiss. Yet the result makes both characters seem a little too dramatically inert, Hero so unknown to us at this point that her silence is hard to read as either being overwhelmed with love or full of uncertainty and reservation. The first act is the production’s weakest (and possibly the play’s too). The substitution of Don Pedro’s villainy (in the mistaken belief that he is wooing Hero for himself) for the real cruel intentions of his brother Don John later on could be a highly dramatic tale of the psychology of betrayal – central to the play’s themes of misbelieved rumours, for good and ill, and adultery. Yet it plays out here as an unfortunate longueur in this otherwise snappy take, delivered with not quite enough dramatic intensity.

The other point at which the production comes a little unstuck is at the dramatic peak – the apparent revelation that Hero let in a gentleman at her window during the night before her wedding, revealed only during the ceremony itself. Claudio has been cruelly tricked by Don John and his associates (he mistook Margaret and her lover for Hero), but that cannot excuse the ferocity of his response – nor that of every male character in the play, bar Benedick and the good-natured friar, who discovers he will not be marrying anyone that day after all. It is, of course, in the original play, but the lightness of Godwin’s interpretation elsewhere cannot be easily squared with the torrent of pure misogyny unleashed into the play, which would feel unnecessarily cruel even were the accusations true.

The convivial Leonato has until then proved to be a warm and gentle father, blunting any of suggestions that the match of Claudio and Hero was arranged against her will. Yet now he turns into a toxic combination of Egeus (Hermia’s cruel father from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Leontes (the jealous king who flies into a rage, wrongly suspecting his wife Hermione of adultery in The Winter’s Tale). Leonato wishes his daughter dead, Rufus Wright playing the anger in a serious, violent register: ‘Death is the fairest cover for her shame that may be wished for.’ Patriarchal anger is certainly a valid tone to strike when staging Shakespearean comedy – which is often filled with dark, violent and threatening moments. However, it seems fundamentally jarring with the earlier tone of playfulness and even more so with the relative ease with which the play’s tensions are resolved. It is hard to feel that all can be simply and immediately forgiven – with either father or fiancé – especially as Hero has so little agency in the play’s ending, treated like a prop who can be summoned at will to complete the marriage as if nothing has changed.

The text itself gives only scant acknowledgement to the mountain that must be climbed to resolve the animosity of Claudio in particular. Claudio strikes a tone of attempted amity, but he misdirects the apologies towards a father who has just condemned Hero as strongly (believing Hero to be dead). Figueiredo impressively delivers the speech where Claudio asks him for forgiveness, diverging from Shakespeare, who has Claudio plead his innocence – saying ‘sinned I not, But in mistaking’. Figueiredo’s phrasing instead emphasises contrition over his technical (and extremely dubious) innocence. Godwin tries to enrich Hero’s meagre portion of lines by amending the script with lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, which she intones from under a veil at the funeral procession being held for her. The line ‘Like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth’ takes on the spinetingling register of resurrection, as she will seemingly rise from the grave in the next scene. Yet its deployment is largely to paper over the text’s utter silence on whether or not she still loves Claudio. Godwin’s answer is that she does, even if we can barely see why.

It is also curious that Shakespeare presents such an unusually brisk resolution. The final scene runs to only 120 lines and contains the unions of Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick, and the entreaty that Don Pedro ‘get thee a wife’. The equivalent scene in Twelfth Night runs to 400 lines, Measure for Measure almost 550, while Love’s Labour’s Lost closes with the longest single scene in Shakespeare – a notorious 900 lines (over a third of the entire play). While Much Ado has somewhat less ado to remedy in the final scene (in terms of pure plot mechanics at least) than any of these plays, there is perhaps a greater deal of emotional complexity to deal with. Shakespeare seems to sidestep the difficulty of emotionally rehabilitating Claudio and Hero’s marriage; instead, he makes it work only practically, in securing Leonato’s consent. Hero’s willingness to marry and her forgiveness will always be an issue for a director of the play to negotiate, and Godwin’s decision to play it relatively straight (bar the added sonnet) does not fully assuage our potential concerns.

The show closes with a joyous musical number, performed by the entire cast and the jazz band who pop up charmingly throughout. No notes of melancholy remain; all is forgotten by the characters on stage, but whether we can forget is quite another matter. The tone is so fantastically calibrated for the most part – Heffernan’s attention-seeking impishness mixing particularly well with Parkinson’s blend of ice and acid. Yet the limits are exposes in the Hero plot. The recurring issue of whether Shakespearean men deserve forgiveness is hardly improved by going so unacknowledged. Despite this, Godwin’s production channels its actors’ brilliant chemistry into one of the most entertaining and watchable Shakespearean comedies I have ever seen, even if this comes at the cost of the overlooking play’s more challenging darker depths.

Much Ado About Nothing

Written by William Shakespeare, Directed by Simon Godwin, Set Design by Anna Fleischle, Costume Design by Evie Gurney, Lighting Design by Lucy Carter, Movement Direction by Coral Messam, Composition by Michael Bruce, Sound Design by Christopher Shutt, Fight Direction by Kate Waters, Associate Set Designer Cat Fuller, Music Associate Lindsey Miller, Company Voice Work by Jeannette Nelson, Staff Director Hannah Joss, Dramaturg Emily Burns, Music Direction and Guitars played by Dario Rossetti-Bonell, Drum Kit played by Shane Forbes, Upright Bass played by Nicki Davenport, Woodwind played by Jessamy Holder, Trumpet played by Steve Pretty, Starring Katherine Parkinson, John Heffernan, Ioanna Kimbook, Eben Figueiredo, Rufus Wright, Ashley Zhangazha, David Judge, Phoebe Horn, Wendy Kweh, David Fynn, Al Coppola, Celeste Dodwell, Olivia Forrest, Ashley Gillard, Brandon Grace, Nick Harris, Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer, Marcia Lecky, Ewan Miller, Mateo Oxley
Production Photographs by Manuel Harlan
Reviewed 23rd August 2022
Categories
theatre

The Forest – Hampstead Theatre

Angel Coulby and Paul McGann in The Forest

Following his recent critically acclaimed, devastating family drama The Son and Oscar-winning film adaptation The Father, the return of French playwright Florian Zeller to the British stage is a welcome one. Translated again by Christopher Hampton, Zeller’s new play The Forest arrives at Hampstead Theatre as a world premiere. Though it shares some of the previous plays’ experimental touches, this production lacks the emotional pull of previous works – suffused instead with a coolly detached, almost surgical sheen; though there are moments of bloody violence, the overall effect remains pristine – perhaps like an operating theatre.

Even more so here than in previous plays, Zeller employs narrative pyrotechnics to explore his theme formally. In The Forest, the nameless main character is an eminent surgeon – but written on the page as two people, Man 1 and Man 2. The role is doubled (by the excellent Toby Stephens and Paul McGann) – contrasting the amiable father and husband with the conniving cheat, the slick, successful healer of others with his desperate urge for self-preservation. The strength of Stephens and McGann’s performances resists such a simple dichotomy though. All of the selves are encapsulated in both; the dual role simply makes these differences more immediately intelligible.

Gina McKee and Toby Stephens in The Forest

Zeller’s thesis – that men contain many selves, and thus the capacity for cruelty and violence – becomes apparent quickly, and the play’s structural twists and turns largely serve to generate intrigue in the relatively simple plot, rather than build on this theme. It is undeniably a powerful dramaturgical device, and Stephens and McGann thoughtfully generate a continuity between the two parts, but I found that the unfortunate by-product was the implicit suggestion of male complexity – as opposed to female simplicity. Why is it that all of the male roles alternate between the male actors – not only with Man 1 and Man 2, but with the other men interchanging as various friends and colleagues too? The intention seems to be critical of men and male behaviour, but the effect is almost contradictory; the men exist in exquisite complication while the women are singular and simple – even one-note in places.

At its heart, The Forest seems to be a play about gender – but it rarely digs into the social factors that might cause this male multifariousness – or prohibit it for women. The idea that men exist in multiple selves while women – in general – do not could potentially be examined in light of social and historical norms. Perhaps women are not permitted to be complicated in these ways? Yet Zeller’s drama largely steers away from a concept of gender that is socialised, historical or constructed. The structure – baked into the drama from the very start – gestures towards a crude biological determinism, which goes without interrogation. By definition here, maleness involves a tendency to lie and manipulate. Womanhood, in contrast, is presented as a form of victimhood – every main female character wronged by a man’s (usually sexual, sometimes violent) behaviour. The Forest seems to assert this as a precondition, not a product, of society – interested mainly in the effects of this inescapable psychological prison than on potential solutions to the problem. The harm is to everyone – though the male experience of internal struggle is vividly staged, while women’s pain is expressed either in silence – or is rendered completely inaccessible, when the women are pushed offstage or killed.

Jonathan Kent’s direction is extremely slick, and the cast wring as much from the material as they can. Gina McKee and Angel Coulby should be especially commended – locating emotion in their sometimes cipher-like characters. McKee particularly remains etched in my mind for the way her suspicions, disappointments and ultimate exhaustion seem to play across her face – especially given the relative lack of expression the Wife is given in dialogue. She exists on stage largely through the play’s repeated actions – clearing up wine glasses and fetching water, frowning at the greetings card on some unexpected flowers. Never is McKee’s understated presence more palpable than near the play’s ending, where her crushing disappointment with her husband is expressed in a vast silence. ‘What is it?’, the Man asks, but she says nothing. As Zeller writes in his stage directions: ‘She indicates “nothing” with her head. But her serious expression seems to suggest the opposite. An interminable pause, loaded with subtext.’ This moment could have ended the play – a reminder of the cost of male vices on women. Instead, Zeller goes on, choosing to conclude with the Man’s weeping, under a spotlight – rather expressing the play’s gendered priorities in miniature.

Gina McKee and Paul McGann in The Forest

Similarly unexamined (or left only to subtext) are other social dynamics in the play – particularly the class and cultural specificities which allow the Man to live the life he does. The Forest is another play in which upper middle-class people have wine and affairs, leading to internal catastrophe – but which has very little effect on the material circumstances of the protagonist. The play’s intentions tend heavily towards the psychological. Yet when the female perspective is so underexplored, heterosexual infidelity (where the man cheats) lacks the same emotional heft of Zeller’s previous subjects (such as dementia and depression). Formally, it seems to be a story about fundamental gender differences, yet the presence of pharmaceutical corruption, bribery and organised murder steer the story into something more generic, yet less universal.

The Forest’s title comes from a recurring metaphor in the play – a nightmare expressing a potent fear of being lost in a forest, every tree different but looking so similar. The experience of watching play is a bit like being lost in a forest at night, with its sinister, uncanny sense that we have been this way before – but that things have changed. (This is often a good thing, and the play is certainly entertaining – its narrative repetitions and variations reeling you in rather than pushing you away.) The space of the forest has long held contrasting symbolism of wildness and wilderness, but also human (male) power; there is danger in the natural world, but which can also be tamed by hunters. Zeller evokes this heady mix of images, replete as it is with traditional ideas of male conquest – the hunt sometimes analogous to romantic endeavour. Yet it is hard not to feel these ideas could have cohered into something more than (admittedly impressive) stage imagery.

Toby Stephens and Gina McKee in The Forest

Zeller and Kent craft a show filled with strange, sometimes fabulous images – designed impeccably by Anna Fleischle. The downstairs portion of the stage slowly fills with more and more flowers, which appear almost magically. A large painting imperceptibly changes, its style becoming more photorealistic while also changing to display the image of the Girlfriend by the end. In the bedroom of her small flat – which looms above the stage, like the sword of Damocles – we see the Girlfriend’s bloody body laid across the bed, over and over. It is a queasy image though, rather aestheticized – as female corpses too often are. At the end of the play, the lights come up on the bedroom set to reveal a huge deer – shot dead – spreadeagled across the bed, reaffirming the earlier metaphor of forests and conquest. The Girlfriend has become the victim of cruel, male endeavour.

The reason for her murder is simply that – growing tired and jealous of the Man’s marriage to the Wife – she threatens to reveal the affair, unless he commits to be exclusive with her. Coulby mostly sells the characterisation, though play struggles to conceive of any relationship desired by a woman that does not amount to heterosexual monogamy. Yet for all of the Man’s obvious flaws, I also found his willingness to commit murder (by proxy, though one scene presents Man 2 firing and wiping the barrel clean of fingerprints) unconvincing – a stretch too far for a man whose morality seemed merely deficient, rather than a complete void.

If The Forest is meant to imply that these are horrifying depths to which men may sink, given the opportunity, in shallow self-preservation, then its logic is not developed quite enough. Murder here felt too easy – its reveal a relatively cheap twist, a feat of rapid costume changing and sly set design, rather than a source of psychological horror. In its presentation of wronged women, the weight of the betrayal is relatively weak, when the female characters are so thinly sketched. Zeller’s writing merely invites us to pity them, rather than sympathise with their suffering.

The Forest

Written by Florian Zeller, Translated by Christopher Hampton, Directed by Jonathan Kent, Set Design by Anna Fleischle, Lighting Design by Hugh Vanstone, Sound Design by Isobel Waller-Bridge, Starring Toby Stephens, Gina McKee, Millie Brady, Paul McGann, Angel Coulby, Eddie Toll, Silas Carson, Sakuntala Ramanee, Finbar Lynch
Reviewed 17th February 2022
Categories
theatre

Hamlet – Young Vic

Cush Jumbo in Hamlet

The Young Vic’s audience has waited almost a year and a half to see Cush Jumbo perform the title role, and Jumbo herself lives up to expectations, even if the production she is in does not. She excels in comic moments and brings a freshness to Hamlet’s madness, through a bravura mixture of wry wit and ebullient clowning. Hamlet here is most compelling when interacting with the younger characters, who teem with vivacity. There is such warmth between Hamlet and Horatio especially, and Jonathan Livingstone makes Horatio a memorable presence from the play’s opening scene to its final soliloquy.

One reading of the play could suggest that Hamlet, and his fellow younger characters, are trapped in the world of the play, repressed by courtly strictures and Claudius’ kingly ambitions. Yet here, the younger actors almost seem trapped themselves, their lively energy blending oddly with the other very different acting styles on display. Hersov’s sprawling production has great moments, from the characters’ terror at the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the opening scene to the dumbshow, but there is an utter lack of cohesion. This manifests in the costuming – a modern dress melee of outfits which vary from practical, to chic, to formal, and somewhat inexplicably to spy-like dark suits and sunglasses – as well as the music choices. The singing of Norah Lopez Holden’s Ophelia is moving, yet it feels like it belongs to a very different production.

Jonathan Livingstone in Hamlet

Yet most of all, what jars is the clash in style between the traditional Shakespearean delivery of Claudius, Polonius and Gertrude’s roles and the looser naturalism of the younger characters. Perhaps this was intentional, but the effect ends up grating. Adrian Dunbar’s approach to Claudius is initially promising, projecting a kingly authority with overtures of friendship and just a hint of menace. Yet as the play goes on, he lacks interiority, behaving in private almost identically to his public performances. Everything is pronounced rather than spoken, his words those of a patrician and patriarch. Such a choice makes sense when he addresses Hamlet, yet it makes his marriage to Gertrude seem entirely functional – perhaps a consolidation of power.

Tara Fitzgerald’s Gertrude is even more thinly sketched. It makes sense that Claudius would marry the previous queen to maintain a grip on the throne, but Hersov, Dunbar and Fitzgerald’s cold approach makes the text feels flattened – with no sense of (even private) passion between the pair. This seems especially strange given the tenor of Hamlet’s disgust at his mother; he is horrified not so much by the usurpation and abuse of power than the ‘incest’ the remarriage constitutes. Yet Claudius and Gertrude barely touch, sharing one kiss in the play which feels motivated only by a regard for their public perception. In this version, they are not that into each other. It is a valid interpretation, but you cannot help but feel this production often chooses the duller option at each of these narrative crossroads. In this version of the script, the decision does bump up against textual problems too, such as Hamlet’s insistence that his mother begin practising abstinence, and that with time it will grow easier. Here, there does not seem to be the need.

In many ways, the narrative of Claudius and Gertrude plays as an anti-tragedy, particularly a rejoinder to Macbeth (though Shakespeare wrote that later). The pursuit of monarchical supremacy through murder is pure tedium, according to Hamlet, especially Hersov’s version. The murder is an offstage event before the play begins and there is no passion or power-lust. Claudius simply seems to have thought that killing his brother would be a good career move. Again, this seems representative of the production’s frequent decision to leave psychological richness un-mined. Sometimes it feels like the play is only ‘doing Hamlet’, rather than examining the emotional realities of the play’s world.

Adrian Dunbar in Hamlet

Anna Fleischle’s set design is strangely monolithic – containing giant rectangular blocks which fill up the back half of the stage. The grimy gold colour scheme conveys the gilded cage Hamlet finds himself in. As he remarks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ‘Denmark’s a prison’ – though he fails to notice how he himself imprisons Ophelia. Yet the design limits the stage space and hampers the action. Polonius standing behind a curtain is replaced by him standing behind a block, the effect of Jumbo stabbing behind it cumbersome and bathetic, making the scene dramatically inert. At other times, the production cannot decide how it wants to represent action in the design. The ghost of King Hamlet is initially an offstage presence, machine guns trained on the audience with palpable fear. Yet the effect is diluted by having the ghost later appear in strange (often indecipherable) projections behind the characters, as well as given physical form in one scene by Adrian Dunbar. The production tries a bit of everything, but the result seems unfocused and indecisive – less than the sum of its parts.

There is one textual idea here which borders on brilliant though. The existence of Hamlet in three versions – the much shorter First Quarto, thought by some to be a pirated copy or poor imitation, the Second Quarto and the Folio – forces directors to select the text they want to perform in far more detail than simply where to make cuts. Hersov, like many other directors before him, has found the ‘To be or not to be’ speech to be particularly pliant, and he moves the iconic lines (Act 3 Scene 1 in the Cambridge edition) to the middle of Act 2 Scene 2, after Hamlet has played the fool in conversation with Polonius.

Hamlet implicitly mocks Polonius for being old as he paraphrases the ‘Words, words, words’ he has just been reading. He describes how ‘old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plumtree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.’ These sentences could be dismissed as incoherent rambles in service of Hamlet’s pretended madness, yet in their juxtaposition with Hamlet’s renowned words, they seem much more important.

Hamlet’s ironic mockery of ageing forces him to acknowledge his own mortality – but even worse, the cruelty of a life which keeps going on. Hersov and Jumbo thus deliver the well-worn soliloquy with a resonance that feels genuinely unusual. Instead of contemplating mortality and suicide, the speech is recast as a meditation on ageing. ‘These tedious old fools!’ Hamlet proclaims, in Act 2 Scene 2, immediately before ‘To be or no to be’. He is a young man tyrannised by the ambitions of the old, yet, when left alone, he reconsiders. Is this a fate that awaits him one day too – the ‘calamity of so long life’?

Norah Lopez Holden and Cush Jumbo in Hamlet

If Hersov’s tonally inconsistent production has a unifying gesture it is a trend for sudden reversal, specifically from Jumbo’s hilariously energetic physical comedy to haunting, horrified introspection. Another such contrast comes in Act 5’s grave scenes. Though the production’s music choices are generally odd and eclectic, ‘Three Little Birds’ is an inspired choice for the gravedigger’s entry. He is a ‘fellow [with] no feeling of his business’, who ‘sings in grave-making’, and his cheer perfectly contrasts his solemn task. The scene continues as riotous comic routine, shot through with sickening dramatic irony: we know Ophelia is dead, while Hamlet does not. Jumbo reads ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ with impish sarcasm and bubbles with chaotic mirth as she shares the gravedigger’s detachment – a detachment Hamlet will soon struggle to maintain. In isolation, the scene is a triumph of acting and, unlike in most of the play, the tone is perfectly judged.

It makes for a strong contrast with the solemn funeral that follows. Jonathan Ajayi is particularly impressive as Laertes – his resolve after his father’s death (in his attempts to comfort Ophelia) now shattered by the devastating further loss of Ophelia. Yet the restrictiveness of the set – and the resultingly poor blocking – pushes Hamlet off the main stage, crouched in the shadows. Why has this moment, which should be a whiplash realisation for Hamlet, been hidden? Hamlet’s anagnorisis should surely not be invisible.

This moment is emblematic of the problems of the production as a whole – particularly as Hersov and Jumbo interpret Hamlet as fundamentally bored by life, rather than exercised by injustice or plagued by suicidal ideation. Death registers as a shrug for him, but though seeing a man so worn down by life’s ‘slings and arrows’ that he will go quietly to his death can be deeply moving, in this version Hamlet has already been in this state for most of the play. The final deaths play out as a formality – though the swordfight (here using knives) is deftly choreographed by Kev McCurdy in the limited stage space. As a result, I felt little of the tragic weight that should accompany the ending. The play only stops, rather than ends.

Hamlet

Written by William Shakespeare, Directed by Greg Hersov, Design by Anna Fleischle, Lighting Design by Aideen Malone, Sound Design by Emma Laxton, Video Design by Nina Dunn, Movement Direction by Lucy Hind, Starring Cush Jumbo, Jonathan Ajayi, Joana Borja, Adrian Dunbar, Tara Fitzgerald, Norah Lopez Holden, Jonathan Livingstone, Joseph Marcell, Adesuwa Oni, Taz Skylar, and Leo Wringer
Reviewed 12th November 2021