Theatre
Michael Portillo - The cap of youth
Published 10 May 2004
Theatre - Trevor Nunn's wonderfully fresh production presents the prince as a morose teenager. By Michael Portillo
Hamlet
Old Vic, London SE1
In 30 years of seeing Hamlet on stage and screen, I have never been more absorbed or moved than by the production playing at the Old Vic. Trevor Nunn's decision to cast very young actors as Hamlet and Ophelia produces a new take on the play - one that is perhaps nearer to what Shakespeare intended, as the text hints that the Prince of Denmark is 18 years old.
Nunn presents him as a morose adolescent passing through his anger phase. He wears a stupid ski hat, and sits hunched and uncommunicative. He is given to weeping and wipes away the snot with the back of his hand. He is at an age where the thought of sex between adults disgusts him, and he moans not only about how his mother has remarried, but how she used to hang on her late husband, "As if increase of appetite had grown/By what it fed on". He is very bright, and has picked up a few ideas at the expensive German university that he attends; but this gangly youth is, by his own admission, no Hercules. A ghost arrives to tell Hamlet that the man who now sits on the throne and sleeps with his mother murdered the prince's father, and orders him to take revenge. The announ-cement is hugely distressing and the lad breaks down, overcome with horror, disgust and a sense of his own inadequacy. There is no puzzle in this production as to why this very young man hesitates repeatedly before killing Claudius. Would Prince Harry, for example, simply take the ghost at his word and set off to commit regicide? It seems entirely believable that Hamlet instead finds a remote spot and a bottle of barbiturates and sits down to contemplate suicide ("To be or not to be").
Ophelia (played by Samantha Whittaker) is a schoolgirl and a clever-clogs teenager, a pretty thing who is into make-up, loud music, hipster jeans, midriff-exposing tops and swivel-eyed mimicry behind her father's back. She is not as innocent as she looks, and twists men round her finger. She finds Hamlet weird, but does not seem overly put out by his antics until he kills her father.
The other characters are also correspondingly younger than normal. Claudius (Tom Mannion) and Gertrude (Imogen Stubbs) are nouveau types who dress hideously in white clothes and sports gear, and cannot keep their hands off each other. You would want to check out if they were staying in your hotel. Nicholas Jones, as Polonius, is simply the best I have seen in the role, reminding us, with his impeccable timing and comic sense, of Shakespeare's brilliant ear for pompous circumlocution.
I saw as Hamlet the young Al Weaver, who will be appearing alternately in the role with the jubilantly received Ben Whishaw. He gave meaning to the poetry, refusing to be rushed in the soliloquies or intimidated by them, varying volume and pace well. Frame by frame, he made credible Hamlet's progression from self-indulgence to nobility, so we could just about believe Fortinbras's remark that "he was likely, had he been put on,/To have proved most royally".
A measure of any production of Hamlet is whether it makes you think freshly about the play. This ghost, describing his murderous brother Claudius, lays enormous emphasis on "adulterate". In Nunn's interpretation, Hamlet's Oedipus complex is writ large. For Hamlet, the news that his mother slept with Claudius before becoming a widow is as shocking as his father's murder. It leads to a torrid and highly physical bedroom scene during which Hamlet forbids Gertrude ever to give herself to Claudius again.
Throughout, Nunn rejuvenates the text by helping his actors find new ways to deliver the most familiar lines. For example, a slight change of emphasis during the later scenes between Claudius and Gertrude suggests that she obeys Hamlet's order to shun her husband as the pressure on their marriage mounts. The queen hits the bottle, which provides a lovely double meaning when, in the duel scene, Claudius orders her not to drink. (The goblet, of course, contains poison.)
It is evident that Hamlet has much to say about the fear of what follows death. Old Hamlet's ghost is in purgatory (a surprisingly Catholic idea for Shakespeare, surely?), but then again the spirit may be a demon that will lure Hamlet to damnation. Death might not be the end of all suffering, because in the sleep of death we may dream. Nunn reminds us that the Renaissance mind must have been terrorised by competing beliefs and superstitions.
Nunn's youthful Hamlet is not a gimmick. Casting a youngster as the prince dramatically alters our perspectives. The novice actors have submitted wholeheartedly to the director's interpretation, and the result is both coherent and refreshing.
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