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Doctor Who in Elsinore

Patrick Carnegy

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Hamlet
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

There are, though, two incongruous shows going on here, and would that the Prince Hamlet one had learnt from the Claudius and Gertrude, not least in that Patrick Stewart and Penny Downie are surpassingly good in these roles and that Mariah Gale is terrific as the mad Ophelia. Stewart found his own televisual celebrity in Star Trek, but has since wonderfully reinvigorated the Shakespearean stage with his Antony, Prospero and Macbeth. As Claudius (he also plays the Ghost, a spirit who can draw a tear with his loving remembrance of the earthly glow-worm) it is he and not Hamlet who knows how to ‘smile, and smile, and be a villain’. Every word spoken with sense and unemphatic subtlety. What a chilling frisson in his aborting the play-scene with quiet authority. There’s no shouted demand for ‘some light’ — he simply takes up a lantern, holds it to Hamlet’s overexcited face, and gently shakes his head.

In the autumn Tennant is cast rather more suitably as Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Let’s hope that by then he’s got the Doctor well and truly out of his system and remembered what a truly great Shakespearean actor he has it in him to be.

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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.