Peter Viney's Blog

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Robert Hastie
Set & Costume by Ben Stones
Composer Richard Taylor

Lyttelton Theatre
National Theatre, London
25 September to 22 November 2025

Streamed Live to Cinemas Thursday 22nd January 2026
Poole Lighthouse

CAST
Hiran Abeysekera – Hamlet
Alistair Petrie- Claudius
Ayesha Dharker- Gertrude
Geoffrey Streatfeild – Polonius
Francesca Mills- Ophelia
Tom Glenister- Laertes
Tessa Wong- Horatio
Ryan Ellsworth – Ghost / Player King / First Gravedigger
Joe Bolland – Guildenstern
Hari Mackinnon – Rosencrantz
Phil Cheadle- Marcellus / Captain
Mary Higgins – Osric, Voltemand
Noel White- Bernardo
Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer – Fortinbras
Siobhan Redmond- first player
Seb Slade – Francisco, Reynaldo
Sophia Papadopoulos – 2nd gravedigger
Liz Jadav – nurse, priest

That’s nineteen actors. This is the National Theatre, They can afford extras. I counted near thirty in the final line-up and curtain call.

2025. The year of Hamlet. We saw four: three at the RSC, one at Chichester, so we were Hamletted out by the time the National Theatre added a fifth and so we decided to wait for the live streaming. As we went in, we wondered if any of the crowd had come in under the impression they were going to see Hamnet. It was on earlier in the same cinema on the day.

As we went in, I asked if it actually did start at 7 pm, as the last streamed NT Live had us sitting in darkness for twenty minutes before it began. I was told, ‘We can’t know, because it’s live from the theatre.’ Well, no, it’s not. It used to be, and then they had an introductory speaker. Its London run finished two months ago. It is a recording. Good, you’ll be able to see it on NT At Home soon. It did start at 7 pm, and finished at 9.56 with a 15 minute interval. Not long for Hamlet. Every production cuts, and they all cut different bits. Therefore some lines surprise me every time.

I’ve often looked at cutting the play, and my major sword stroke is the entire Fortinbras subplot. It is in here more or less in full. This week, the third week in January, it really was essential. They didn’t know this when they recorded it, but this is the week of Trump threatening Greenland. So here we have a King of Denmark (Claudius) being threatened by a foreign power. Who by?

By another king beset by His sickness, age and impotence.

At the least, the Danes are asked:

It might please you to give quiet pass
Through your dominions for this enterprise

To which Claudius should reply in his role as Danish sovereign, ‘I have two words for you President of USA, King of Norway, and the second one is “off.”‘

As the Captain says later (Act 4, Scene 4)

We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name

Hamlet does it nearly every time. Somewhere in every production there is a bit that focusses on RIGHT NOW.

It starts with the soldiers on the battlements waving LED torches about. Is that the third or fourth time we’ve seen that? Big yawn. If you’re in the audience and it hits you in the eyes and stays there, it’s horrible. Happened to me when the RSC waved LED torches in Hamlet last year.

One thing I really, really disliked was the very present, very un-ghostly Old Hamlet in battledress. In both scenes he appeared in, he was totally un-ghostly. Good actor, bad idea.

This Hamlet (Hiran Abeysekera) is Prince. Not The Prince of Denmark, but Prince as in ‘Squiggle,’ Prince the rock star. We expected him to burst out in song with Purple Rain or Little Red Corvette, or to Ophelia When You Were Mine. He has black nail varnish, and high-heeled boots. He’s diminutive. We weren’t sure about his delivery, which Karen described as ‘Prince trying to sound like Laurence Olivier just before John Geilgud told him to cut the luvvy voice.’ I thought it over-actorly too. Then there’s sexuality. He makes suggestive remarks to Rosencrantz (Hari MacKinnon)and Guildenstern (Jo Bolland), who both are dressed to look gay, and Hamlet squeezes Rosenkratz’s’s bum cheeks two-handed and later rubs up very close. We were sure he said ‘Rosenkuntz’ too.

Hamlet goes for retro T-shirts. ‘Blockbuster Video’ (What?) and then he has a long time in a T-shirt with lettering reading ‘Tobacco and Boys.’ This is said to be a quote from Christopher Marlowe:

All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools

The T-shirt shouts out at full volume that they are interpreting this Hamlet as gay. The T-shirt is sledgehammer. Far better to have left an ambiguity hanging in the air. Though it makes sense of the female Horatio as best friend. Also, the quote indicates ‘boys’ not ‘men.’ In the 16th century that probably meant before their voices broke so they could play the female parts. Not a good reference.

Abeysekera makes for an interesting Hamlet, re-weights many lines, has a great line in facial close ups (though would you have caught them in the theatre?). He also plays a lot of lines with added expressions for comedy. Yes, that should be part of it with Polonius, and with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but methinks the prince doth gurn too much. His delivery is rapid, sometimes a little too much gesture as well. Mainly, he suffers in comparison because we’ve seen three more impressive Hamlets this year. In a different year he might have garnered better ratings.

Every review picks out Francesca Mills as star of the show. She is. We’ve seen her before, she’s brilliant. She is a reduced height actor. Ophelia is the impossible part, it so often fails even with the best. That’s why she excels in her activity and anguish and madness. BUT … Given her astonishing ability, are we supposed to be totally blind to her stature? We can’t be though, which shifts the play sideways from a reality. There is a disconcerting edge. If we take Hamlet with his T-shirt about ‘boys’ and the height difference between Ophelia and the rest of the cast (though Abeysekera looks as short as Prince the rock star), it feels odd.

There is no sexual hint from Hamlet to Ophelia, perhaps just as well. I know the huge Lyttelton theatre. From the balcony and rear stalls she will look very child-like. That’s played up by her decorated shoe box with Hamlet’s love letters. It’s pre-teen.

That shift from ‘real’ is accentuated by the death of Polonius. Hamlet has waved a gun often, but in this scene he points two fingers, not a gun, and Polonius staggers out, realises he has a bloody wound and dies conveniently on a wheeled props trolley. What’s the magic fingers about? Doesn’t that undermine the tragedy and horror? Also, falling onto a wheeled trolley is too obvious a device, especially as he has to stay curled up on it through the rest of the scene before they cover him with a blanket. The blanket could have come sooner.

We discussed it, and Karen hit on Alice in Wonderland. Certainly Rosencrantz and Guildenstern channel Tweedledum and Tweedledee, accentuated by their dyed blonde matching hairstyles, and striped blazers (Rosencrantz gets two) with oversized badges and rugger shirts. Then Claudius gets their names the wrong way round and Gertrude corrects them (OK, I have seen that done before). Add Ophelia scurrying about like a cross between Alice, much smaller than everyone else, and the White Rabbit, and it’s hyper real, or magic real.

We were looking forward to Alistair Petrie as Claudius as he was so good as the head teacher in Sex Education on TV. He has the height and delivery.

Yet again, as happens far too often in Hamlet, there is not sexual chemistry / tension / lust between Claudius and Ayesha Dharker’s Gertrude. They’re both fine at their roles, but it’s the electricity in the space between them you need.

Geoffrey Streatfeild found a different aspect to Polonius, sufficiently worried and sycophantic, but not as addled as some have been. He also gets the full advice speeches, which I like, and I like the way Laertes and Ophelia could finish the sentences for him. We were re-watching him only last week on NT At Home as Archer in The Beaux’ Stratagem. A ploy throughout Hamlet is characters doing lines in unison, or finishing lines for the other actor.

Tom Glenister’s Laertes stood out, as his delivery felt natural in a sea of theatricality. Karen’s best performance of the day award.

The best bits? I loved the set of the main room. It’s like a Florentine palace with murals filling the walls, and covering the doors. There’s even the long radiator at the bottom. The central mural is woods leading to a lake (which the camera holds on during the reports of Ophelia’s drowning) and the sides are battle scenes. While they look fantastic in glimpses, I’d like to have seen more of them.

Then there’s the transition between LED torches waving about on the battlements to the very brightly lit and crowded wedding scene – every time the National pours on the extras like this, we think of provincial theatres struggling for funding. The wedding scene with multiple tables is highly impressive, more so with the camera capturing so many different close up reactions around the rooms. Laertes leaps on a chair and Ophelia pours champagne in his shoe and he drinks it. I’ve been to that wedding.

Then there is the player’s performance where they create a theatre with lots of seats (and fill them) with a curtained stage. That’s the best looking players scene ever. They introduce it with Hamlet handing out programmes to the front row of the actual audience who will be enjoined to watch with care.

On the minus side, they do the Player Queen performing the Priam / Troy speech in full when the players arrive. However well she does it, it’s guff to an audience unaware of the Trojan War, and I always thought Shakespeare was lampooning the declamatory style of his contemporaries. I guess so much effort (and money) was to be invested in the players scene, they wanted to give it full power.

The interval cut comes after Claudius’ confession / prayer (Act 3 Scene 3), then opens the scond part instantly on the Hamlet / Gertrude scene (Act 3 Scene 4), which is not in a bedroom but in the main hall as theatre, with the chairs stacked. I didn’t like the death of Polonius.

The Gravediggers scene is truncated (mercifully as the punning gets tedious) though it can be funnier, and the funeral is elaborate. I would have done a smaller coffin, and milked the poignancy, but I guess Laertes has to leap onto it.

The ending continues the fencing as a sport motif (which echoes the RSC production with Jonathan Slinger). The fight is well done and effective though unspectacular, and the pressing cut hands together spreading the venom is good. We’ll ignore the great advantage given to longer arms. Whether Laertes should assist Hamlet versus Claudius is a moot point.

Overall? It wasn’t too long, but I could see quite long cuts I’d have made. I always watch Hamlet with interest because every director adds some good ideas. There were plenty here.

Overall? The (very good but also very unusual) Ophelia casting and the lack of any (hetero)sexuality between the main four undermines the impact. It never felt like a tragedy. I was never bored, I enjoyed watching it. I’d watch it again, but three stars is the maximum. I can see why some critics were irritated enough to drop to two. Karen was a two.

***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
There are two two-star reviews in The Stage and the Times, and three-star reviews everywhere else, suggesting that Hamlet is not the huge hit that the National Theatre might have hoped. (The Stage Round Up)

Five star
Broadway World *****

Four star
All That Dazzles ****

Three star
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian ***
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ***
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times ***
Nick Curtis, Standard ***
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ***
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ***

Two star
Clive Davis, The Times **
Dave Fargnoli, The Stage **
The Arts Desk **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

HAMLET
Hamlet – NT 2010 Rory Kinnear as Hamlet
Hamlet- Young Vic 2011 Michael Sheen as Hamlet
Hamlet RSC 2013 Jonathan Slinger as Hamlet
Hamlet – Globe 2014
Hamlet – Maxine Peake, NT Live Broadcast from Manchester Royal Exchange
Hamlet- Benedict Cumberbatch, 2015, Barbican, London
Hamlet, RSC 2016 Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet, Stratford
Hamlet, Almeida 2017, BBC 2018, Andrew Scott as Hamlet
Hamlet, RSC 2025, Luke Thallon as Hamlet
Hamlet: Hail To The Thief, RSC 2025, Samuel Blenkin as Hamlet
Hamlet, Chichester 2025 Giles Terera as Hamlet
Hamlet, National Theatre 2025, Hiran Abeysekera as Hamlet
+
Fat Ham, by James IJames, RSC 2025

ROBERT HASTIE (director)
Macbeth, Wanamaker Playhouse 2018
My Night With Reg, 2015

HIRAN ABEYSEKERA
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, BBC TV 2016 (Puck)
Cymbeline, RSC 2016 (Posthumus)
Hamlet, RSC 2016 (Horatio)
The Taming of The Shrew, RSC 2012 (page)

GEOFFREY STREATFEILD
The School for Scandal, RSC 2024
Blithe Spirit, Bath 2019 (Charles Condamine)
My Night With Reg, 2015
The Beaux Stratagem, NT 2015

AYESHA DARKER
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RSC 2016 (Titania)

FRANCESCA MILLS
A Midsummer Nights Dream, Globe 2023 (Hermia)
Malory Towers, Wise Children 2019
The Two Noble Kinsmen, Globe 2018

ALISTAIR PETRIE
Sex Education, Season One, TV Series (Mr Groff)
Shakespeare in Love, Marc Norman & Tom Stoppard,+ Lee Hall, West End 2014

RYAN ELLSWORTH
The Grapes of Wrath, NT 2024
The Motive & The Cue, NT 2023 (also the Player King!)

TOM GLENISTER
Dear Octopus, NT 2024

HARI MACKINNON
The Comedy of Errors, Globe 2023