Brooding Prince

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 10th June 2009

Hamlet
Wyndhams

Arcadia
Duke of York’s

Strangely, though, for such an assured production, the supporting cast are a little prosaic, patchy even. Kevin McNally hasn’t any majesty or mystery as Claudius. He just seems quite nice. Gertrude (Penelope Wilton in a floaty trousersuit) is a little too grandmotherly. Ron Cook does a sitcom Polonius, fun but thin, and Alex Waldmann’s Laertes is a charming, curly-headed kid, perfect for the second lead in a high-school romcom, but without the muscle and fire for this dangerous Renaissance hothead. A sweetly bewildered Ophelia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) takes the lunacy just far enough and spares us the usual Broadmoor hysterics. The Ghost, so often fluffed, is superbly done by Peter Eyre, whose voice is so rich and mellow it should be bottled and sold as a headache cure. Despite minor glitches, this is the runaway hit of the summer.

And just behind it comes Arcadia. If Tom Stoppard were to play the fantasy dinner-party game, he’d probably overlook Hitler, Homer and Jesus and just invite ten more Tom Stoppards. And if the Stoppards stayed for the weekend you’d get a play like this shimmering piece of intellectual brilliance.

We’re in a Derbyshire mansion which hasn’t changed for 200 years and we shift effortlessly between then and now. Two interlinked plots run in parallel. Today, a literary sleuth is out to prove that Lord Byron shot and killed a minor poet at the mansion in 1809. We flit back two centuries and we’re shown a languidly brilliant tutor giving lessons to an aristocratic teenage girl who has stumbled across an early version of chaos theory. Stoppard’s verbal frivolities are a delight. ‘As her tutor,’ says a country-house bore, ‘it’s your duty to protect the girl’s ignorance.’ The tutor is challenged to a duel by a cuckolded botanist. ‘I demand satisfaction.’ ‘Your wife,’ he replies, ‘also demanded satisfaction.’

The West End is often said to be short of ‘serious drama’, which perhaps means plays that combine wit, metaphysics, passion, romance, spectacle and sex appeal. Here we have every item on the list plus a bravura cast headed by Neil Pearson as an adorably narcissistic media don and Nancy Carroll as a catty Enlightenment matriarch. If the West End is serious about serious plays then this visually stunning and hilariously funny show — perhaps the wittiest drama written since Wilde was jailed — should run and run.