Sheer madness

‘I’m off to see a play about a man who kills his dad,’ I told my five-year-old as I left the house. ‘Because he didn’t give him any ice-cream?’ he said. Mmm, I wondered, it’s possible that Hamlet harboured some childhood grudge against Claudius over a Mr Whippy refusal episode. But such meta-textual speculation is extremely perilous. And when I reached the Young Vic I realised just how grave the danger can be.

Ian Rickson’s bumptious show sets the play in a loony bin. Banana yellow walls. Tannoy announcements. Leering staff wearing canvas security uniforms. Claudius, in a three-piece suit, setting chairs in a semi-circle for Hamlet, Gertrude and the court. Visually this is clear enough but narratively it creates disorder. Is Hamlet an inmate or an employee? Is he competing with Claudius for control of the bin? The answers to such questions are unforthcoming because no serious production would ask them.

Rickson’s asylum is the fertile parent of many blunders and orphans. The Ghost scene is done back-to-front, as a bipolar hallucination, with Michael Sheen (Hamlet) playing the Ghost but not playing Hamlet. Out goes the tension, the poetry and the intricate creeping sense of doom. Out goes the clarity, too. The Ghost’s appearance represents ‘the inciting incident’, as Hollywood terms it, when the hero is given his dramatic task. If played as a solo scene it simply crocks the entire mechanism. Because Sheen isn’t playing Hamlet he can’t show us the character’s astonishment and horror at the discovery of his father’s murder.

‘Oh my prophetic soul, my uncle!’ That melancholy and awesome line is missing. As is another vital utterance. ‘Alas, poor ghost.’ If ever a phrase could be said to herald a shift in the development of civilisation, there it is.