Brooding Prince

‘No one can do the definitive Hamlet. It’s too big for that. But you can do an enormous amount.’ Wise words. Jude Law’s as it happens. All Hamlets fail and it’s a great tribute that Law’s fails remarkably little. His stage presence is thrilling, intense and highly athletic, and he has no trouble capturing the pace and rhythm of the verse. What he misses is any hint of humour or warmth. There’s very little ordinary likeability about the Prince. Instead we get a brooding, frustrated outsider full of scorn and bile, and with a strain of impatient mockery that hints at priggishness and even cruelty. His treatment of Ophelia is coarse and violent. Long ago there was a tradition that Hamlet would re-enter after his ‘To a nunnery, go’ speech and kiss Ophelia’s hair. No chance of that here. The soliloquies, which some actors perform as ornamental solos, Law infuses with an intensely personal energy, all passion and self-lacerating doubt. His only attempt at comedy is a not wholly successful chimpanzee routine that only underscores the character’s jaded world-view. This is a fine if not an absolutely first-rate Dane.

Michael Grandage’s perfectly paced production plays to his great strengths: showmanship and practicality. Christopher Oram’s set portrays Elsinore as a dungeon haunted by plots and whispers. The effects are a bit ‘pop video’. Smoke swirls. Lights pierce. Shadows loom. But it all works. There’s a simplicity, a grandeur and a visual menace here that are completely apposite to the play’s mood. Many tired orthodoxies get a spring clean. The Mouse-trap is performed in a dazzling glare of brilliant light that contrasts tellingly with the gloom enveloping the rest of the action. The closet scene (it only became ‘a bedroom’ after Freud’s theories promoted popular anxieties about the Oedipal taboo) is done without a bed. Good choice. The stage direction indicates ‘another Room in the Castle’ and it’s absurd to imagine that a senior courtier would hide himself in the monarch’s bed-chamber. The scene is staged back to front so that we eavesdrop on the action alongside Polonius and the device gives his death a shocking immediacy and suddenness. Brilliant stuff.

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