Hamlet

Published Tuesday 21 February 2006 at 15:55 by Susan Elkin

Ed Stoppard has tiny feet. That is not a flippant remark in a review of what is arguably the greatest and certainly the most famous play in English. The thing abut Stoppard’s Hamlet is the contrast between his appropriately slight, boyish figure with its hint of vulnerability and the large-scale strength of his interpretation of the role.

It makes for very compelling theatre because he constantly surprises. He handles the big soliloquies - so hard to make fresh - with thoughtful, lucid directness but without compromising the verse. He almost makes you believe you are hearing them for the first time.

Anita Dobson plays Gertrude as a sweet-voiced, sensible middle aged mother until she loses her cool in the closet scene thanks to Hamlet’s decisive knifing of the eavesdropping ‘good old man’ Polonius (Michael Cronin) and his relentless hurling of prurient obscenities at her.

Michael Vale’s stark and spare sets means that the closet scene plays on and around a single chair. So all attention is firmly focused on the words here and in the rest of the play.

David Robb’s Claudius captures that complex blend of sexual charisma and ruthlessness which so distresses Hamlet and without which his character makes no sense. Cronin sensibly gives self-important Polonius a gravitas that he loses if he is presented as a buffoon. Then Cronin metamorphoses into a gravelly first grave digger in the darkly comic scene which precedes the harrowing burial of Ophelia (Alice Patten) whose mad scene is very moving.

In many ways it is a traditional revival with Jacobean costumes and intimate playing space. Much of the stage clutter which has crept into the Hamlets of recent decades has gone. Director Stephen Unwin wants the audience to listen. Unwin’s unobtrusive text cuts and a brisk pace of delivery means that Shakespeare’s longest play is down to less than three and a half hours so the dramatic tension holds up well.