The Stage

Hamlet

Published Wednesday 10 December 2008 at 13:00 by Mark Shenton

How do you do Hamlet without the prince, or at least the advertised one? David Tennant’s much-heralded return to Stratford-upon-Avon last summer was sold out both there and for its somewhat brief London transfer long before its opening in either place, largely on the strength of audience anticipation to see him in the longest (and arguably most challenging) male role in the canon. He’s even on the cover of the programme, lopsided crown on his head and a dagger in his hand.

Though nowadays best known as the current incumbent of TV’s Dr Who, he had long earned that crown via an earlier RSC apprenticeship that had included playing Romeo, and in Gregory Doran’s constantly riveting modern-dress production, he had cut an alluringly conflicted character, registering a range of alternately playful and dark emotions.

But you can’t legislate for illness. And if, as RSC artistic director Michael Boyd has asserted, this production of Hamlet “is more than the sum of its parts”, the company has duly honoured the ensemble nature of its enterprise by going ahead with the press night for the London transfer, though Tennant was unable to perform owing to what director Gregory Doran referred to as a “very severe back injury”.

But if Doran’s hopes that his understudy Edward Bennett would, in the manner of Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, go out a youngster and come back a star, were unfulfilled, it is nevertheless a triumphant validation of the ensemble company ethos promoted by Boyd that had prepared him so meticulously to step into that breach.

There was no faulting of confidence, but there’s another danger to an ensemble working at full tilt, as it does here. The company has grown together with a fierce commitment as they have performed the play over a run of some 60 Stratford performances and stepping in now at such short notice, Bennett feels inevitably like he has a lot of catching up to do.

Previously playing Laertes as a priggish public school boy type, he makes his Hamlet similarly uptight and morally upright. And while performances from the top - with Penny Downie’s regal but skittish Gertrude and Patrick Stewart’s conscience-ridden usurper to the throne as her new husband - to the bottom - with Mark Hadfield bringing fresh comedy to even the tired old role of gravedigger - have matured in depth and range, Bennett sketches his character from a surface of brooding torment and petulance.

But the production, too, gains in strength and focus by being shrunk from the Courtyard’s thrust stage to the more domestic intimacy of the Novello’s proscenium arch, with Robert Jones’s mirrored sets enfolding the action with lavish scenic surprises and impressive stage fights by Terry King.