Perhaps the initial joke in this much-hyped R.S.C. production of Hamlet is that the first thing you see on stage is yourself. There you are, reflected - along with the rest of the audience - in huge, 20-foot mirror-surfaced doors that form the backdrop to the entire production. This impressionistic image has more in common with the Folies-Bergère of Manet’s famous canvas than the plywood reconstructions of classic architecture that normally throw shadows upon the R.S.C. stage. The originality indicated by this visual statement is no false promise, for this is a ceaselessly inventive production, one that leaves all betrayal of hope within the confines of the text.
The production takes place in a contemporary time frame. The opening scene is dissected by carefully choreographed torch beams that bounce off the polished black marble tiles of the stage, illuminating the pitch-black auditorium as if a World War II suburban blitz was expected but delayed. The scene is furtively inhabited by barely visible soldiers who search urgently for an invisible foe.
If the wars of the last century set the scene on the battlements, it is the grand balls of the early 1900s that are invoked in scene two. Extravagant chandeliers appear from the heavens, not sparkling with halogen, but glowing as if powered by coal gas, and growing ever dimmer and more distant in the reflected fog of the huge, luminescent backdrop. A hiccup of imagination and one is gazing upon a vast Victorian ballroom where stands Hamlet, on the very cusp of the thrust stage, isolated by grief, while his mother and murderous uncle hold court.
So which Hamlet will the good doctor deliver to us? Will it be the Oedipal Hamlet? Or the almost catatonic, mentally deranged Hamlet? What David Tennant gives us, as it turns out, is Hamlet as the joker man, a shape-shifting dynamo of wild mood swings who catapults around the stage, bouncing on his mother’s bed like a hyperactive child - a Hamlet badly in need of some lithium. This is a Hamlet with a quicksilver wit and, for all his verbal gymnastics, mimicry, and cornucopia of voices (Kenneth Williams being a brief but memorable instance), a Hamlet still capable of compassion; angst-riven yet wistful, but compelling when soliloquizing. The performance is a tour-de-force of dramatic might that never stops serving the verse. This Hamlet is simply better experienced than read about.
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