Peter Viney's Blog

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Rupert Goold

Dramaturg Rebecca Latham
Set design Es Devlin
Costume Evie Gurney
Composer Adam Cork

Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakspeare Theatre
Stratford -upon-Avon

Friday 7th March 2025, 19.00

CAST
Luke Thallon – Hamlet
Jared Harris – Claudius
Nancy Carroll – Gertrude, understudy Miranda Colchester
Elliot Levey- Polonius
Nia Towle- Ophelia
Lewis Shepherd – Laertes
Kel Matsena- Horatio
Jack Myers – Marcellus
David Mara – Voltemand
Anton Lesser- Ghost / First Player
Miranda Colchester – Second player, understudy Jessica Temple
James Sobol Kelly- Cornelius / Priest
Joe Usher – Barnardo / Fortinbras
Chase Brown – Rosencrantz
Tadeo Mattinez – Guildenstern
Jessica Temple- messenger / ensemble
Shailan Gohil- ensemble
Ed Mitchell- ensemble
Sophie McIntosh – ensemble

This is the first of three Hamlets at the RSC this year. Then Chichester is doing it as well. Amazingly, it’s a full nine years since the RSC last did it. That’s strange- it is a daunting task, but they’re supposed to present the repertoire and nine years gap for the best-known play is far too long. The trouble is that everyone knows a full RSC Hamlet will be quoted in those Shakespeare in Performance books and essay for the foreseeable future. The new regime of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey have decided to round off their first season as artistic directors with Hamlet, and enlisting Rupert Goold to direct is fair insurance that it will be memorable.

Rebecca Latham deserves a far larger credit as dramaturg because it is heavily altered, with new songs, replaced text, altered sequencing. Some are text level, earth to sea, chamber to cabin, but it’s far more than that.

It’s pacy. Hamlet is the longest play. Uncut it runs to four hours so it’s never uncut. Here, it is three, including a 20 minute interval. Part one is 95 minutes, part two is 58 minutes. Add a bit for applause. It never seems long. We were told it had started at seven, rather than seven thirty, because in the early planning stages they had assumed it might be three and a half hours overall.

It takes place on a royal yacht, the Elsinore, with the set a deck with real water round the edges and projected sea at the rear. The sailors are in military uniform, but we also have dancers and evening dress. It opens with the military burial at sea of old Hamlet, covered wit a Danish flag. Then we fast forward to 50 Days Later. The Titanic reference is writ large. The date is projected 14 April 1912, and a digital clock flashes times up until the interval, 00.00. So part two is 15 April 1912, the day the Titanic sank. I didn’t have to check the date. My father was born the next day. Costume reflects 1912.

The projected background can be calm sea, rough sea, rocks, portholes, larger cabin windows, a map of northern Europe. The engine room deep in the bowels of the ship with moving pistons is where Hamlet confronts his father’s ghost, as if deep in Hell.

First, Luke Thallon as Hamlet. A rock music cliché is to describe a band without the earlier principle member as ‘Hamlet without the Prince.’ This production is the opposite. It’s in the title. This is a Hamlet centred Hamlet if ever there was one. I have endured decades and many productions with Karen saying, ‘OK, he’s good, but he’s not as good as David Warner in the 60s.‘ This is a first. She said that as David Warner defined Hamlet for the 1960s, so Luke Thallon defines it for the 2020s. He is ‘virtually as good as David Warner’ she said, in that he inhabits the part intensely and totally. Yes, the verse purists will hate his innovative pausing. This is Hamlet with Tourette syndrome, this is Hamlet who is literally barking mad … when he wants to be. He completely dominates the play, which is as it should be. The interval comes right after the To Be or Not To Be speech. Most often it comes when the players run off. So To be or not to be should appear before the confrontation scene with Ophelia (Act 3 Scene 1). Here, it’s after the players have departed.

Inevitably this powerful centrality diminishes the other parts. Elliot Levey as Polonius is the exception, as good as a Polonius as I’ve seen and very funny. Added lines on memory loss help. He’s in the diplomatic service of Denmark. He gets a cigar.

Claudius and Gertrude ARE diminished in the balance. The night we saw it, Nancy Carroll as Gertrude was off, and Miranda Colchester was on in her place. The costume was perfect, we saw no lack in having the understudy, which is usually true at the RSC. She did look younger than Nancy Carroll, so slightly less of a pair.

Conveniently, the ‘listening’ scenes are done by descending the stairs at either end of the set, so Polonius is killed (shot here, not stabbed) by Hamlet firing down the stairwell. We don’t see the body, though Hamlet descends and comes back with bloody hands. A great saving on costume cleaning, and indeed comfort for Polonius. At one point ‘rapier’ should have been replaced in the text by ‘pistol’ and wasn’t.

Claudius lost many lines, but then didn’t come across as sufficiently villainous.

His costume and beard conjures up European royalty circa 1912 … Edward VII, George V, Czar Nicholas. It’s a fine performance from Jared Harris, but in the overall concept, it is a supporting role rather than a co-lead.

The Player King is a major conceptual addition. Anton Lesser plays the ghost of Old Hamlet, then the Player King. His identical appearance has (young) Hamlet start in shock. He is supposed to be a lookalike, the same actor. Then the gravedigger lines are split. He is the initial “gravedigger” with Yorick;’s skull in a suitcase. We went on a captioned evening, and you can’t avoid seeing the caption screens. His caption as (first) gravedigger reads ‘PLAYER KING:’ His caption, with the skull (as above) on the RSC photo gallery reads ‘Player King.’ I assume that the idea is that he’s an actor with a skull for use on stage, so carried in a suitcase, rather than ‘first gravedigger’. It can be Yorick’s skull, as the programme notes that people have donated their own real skulls to the RSC for performances. It’s needed to allow Hamlet the Alas, poor Yorick … speech. Then the ‘gravedigger’ comes on with Ophelia’s body wrapped in a flag for burial at sea. It works, though as there are many changes, I might have lessened the time a body might last in the sea.

On the captions, Luke Thallon made use of them, going over to look up at the screen and read them out, ‘Words … words … words … full stop.’

The player scene is run as avant garde kind of kabuki opera in mime with white face and Harlequin costumes. As good as I’ve ever seen it. Hamlet does not emphasise ‘CoUNTry matters,’ a mild loss.

Ophelia is intrinsically an unenviable role, a female actor’s nightmare (I blame Will). Nia Towle does it very well. A major innovation here was having her sing a mildly bawdy Edwardian Music Hall style song, and strip down to the kind of all-concealing Edwardian underwear beloved of 1d in the slot machines for decades. Polonius had confined her. She was free, though mad.

Rosencratz and Guildenstern become a pair of funny Americans in door-to-door missionary suits for Hamlet to take the piss out of. I’ve seen that before. It works. We had Marlowe the next day, in Edward II. There’s the difference. You can’t pull comedy out of a Marlowe tragedy. You can with Shakespeare.

The ship’s deck becomes more and more rocking. At the start of part two, everyone appears in life jackets briefly. We know it’s going to sink. It’s vigorous, the Hamlet / Laertes confrontation is full on action.

The last two scenes are conflated – the Laertes / Hamlet fight goes straight on from the graveside (or flag wrapped body) to the final fight. An athletic and skilled fight it is too, reminding me that the Globe audiences apparently loved the sword fighting and it would have been extended .

The second part is compacted with so much action that it’s almost breathless. The ending is high speed, with the cast slithering down the sloping deck into the ocean void. No Fortinbras of Norway is needed to carry off the bodies.

Negatives? Please watch those powerful LED torches. In the first scene, where they see Old Hamlet from the bow of the ship, the handheld torches had us cover our eyes. They were held pointing straight at us in Row C. Point them upwards, please! Or maybe down, after all you’re on the deck of ship.

It will be remembered as the seaborne one. You shouldn’t read too many reviews before, but Patrick Marmion’s one star Hamlet On The Titanic: Alas It’s A Sinking Ship stood out. He says:
‘Then there’s the awkward problem of requiring a gravedigger on board. This is solved by having TWO of them …’
Ouch. OK, so he hasn’t read the play then. We can’t all have read everything, but this is Hamlet. Universally acknowledged as Shakespeare’s greatest play. A glance at the list of characters alone would tell him there are indeed two gravediggers in the play that Shakespeare wrote. However, the gravedigger lines are shared by the Player King, in that role (so the skull is a stage prop), then later a gravedigger. They don’t interact as in the original. Aside from that he then gets tied up and angry about the issues of characters arriving and departing from a ship in mid ocean. There are islands in the Atlantic. There are ports of call too. Laertes exits by boat with much preparation of ropes and pulleys. As he will be going to Paris, a sailor calls him Monsieur. Then the sea is too rough so they must try the other end. That shows how people get on and off the ship. It’s called WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF, chum.

So the first Hamlet of a year of Hamlets. It deservedly will take its place in future ‘Hamlet in Performance’ lists. I doubt that it will be bettered this year.

Overall: we agreed instantly. FIVE STARS *****

WHAT THE PAPERS SAID
5 star
Ralph Kohn, All That Dazzles *****
Katy Roberts, Reviews Hub **** 1/12
The Morning Star *****
The Stratford Herald *****
4 star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian ****
Susannah Clapp, The Observer ****
Financial Times ****
Mail on Sunday ****
Roni, Theatre & Tonic ****
3 star
Claire Allfree, The Telegraph ***
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ***
2 star
Holly O’Mahoney, The Stage **
1 star
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail *

The review is out on a limb. It’s unusual to see a normally moderate reviewer get so incensed about a production.

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
+
Fat Ham, by James IJames, RSC 2025

RUPERT GOOLD
Albion by Mike Bartlett, Almeida 2017
Richard III, Almeida 2016
The Merchant of Venice, Almeida 2015
King Charles III by Mike Bartlett Almeida / West End 2014

LUKE THALLON
Leopoldstat by Tom Stoppard, West End 2020 (Fritz)
Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Old Vic 2019 (Roland Maule)
Albion, Almeida, 2017

JARED HARRIS
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (film) (Moriaty)

NANCY CARROLL
Young Marx by Richard Bean & Clive Coleman, Bridge 2017
Woyzeck by Georg Buchner, Old Vic 2017
The Magistrate by Pinero, NT Live 2013

NIA TOWLE
A View From The Bridge, Bath Ustinov / West End 2024 (Catherine)

ANTON LESSER
Wolf Hall (TV Series)

ELLIOT LEVEY
Much Ado About Nothing, West End 2011
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, BBC TV 2016
The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes, Trafalgar Studios 2015

DAVID MARA
Merry Wives of Windsor, RSC 2024

TADEO MARTINEZ
Merry Wives of Windsor, RSC 2024

KEL MATESENA
Pericles, RSC 2024