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Doctor Who in Elsinore

Patrick Carnegy

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Hamlet
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

The settings and costumes by Robert Jones are in tune with a bang-up-to-the minute Elsinore to suit its star smartly. The reflective back wall reminds us that the show holds its mirror up to us the audience, guilty creatures sitting at our play. Elegant in his black mourning suit, Tennant begins well enough in his tartly clipped exchanges with the King. But left alone with his ‘too, too solid flesh’ soliloquy, he’s in no time bent double, weeping and then collapsed on to his knees. He pulls himself together for a powerfully moving encounter with his father’s Ghost, and there’s justification enough for the manic intensity with which he swears his fellow witnesses to silence, maybe even for the self-inflicted wounding with which he commits himself to vengeance.

But what was left for the putting on of the ‘antic disposition’ of his feigned madness? Simply more and more of the same, and of course a change of clothes. ‘To be, or not...’ is delivered with disjunctive pauses in a dirty red T-shirt, jeans and bare feet, his bandaged hand clasped in front of him, head up, jaw dropping like a fish gasping for air. Claudius’s sending him to England does him no harm, for the returning Prince, now as back-packer with sleeping roll and woolly hat, shows something of the old-Tennant form in his exchanges with the gravedigger, and indeed right through to the end.

But nothing of this can erase the impression of the Doctor on holiday in Elsinore, mistakenly seeking to demystify Hamlet, while missing that inwardness of the role which is its quintessence. There’s a puzzle in that the cover for the programme shows Tennant as Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic image of romanticism, ‘The Wanderer Above the Mists’. Little point in complaining about the predictable cliché of Fortinbras’s assault party, in desert combat kit, dropping in to the deafening roar of helicopters.

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Lillian

August 18th, 2008 6:08pm

Hmmm... The whole point is that he trying to be mad, and that he has matured when he returns from his exile. I have never had the pleasure of seeing Mr Tennant before, but found his performance quite captivating. To dismiss it as 'The Doctor on holiday' is really not seeing the point, I feel, and, in my view of the performance, quite wrong. Ah well... each to their own. I'm sure that he can content himself with all the other glowing reviews he has recieved.