Hamlet

Of course it’s always hard to find something new about a 400 year old play, but this production at the National Theatre has a good go at it.  Opening with a suitably atmospheric ghost scene, we shift to a genteel palace interior and meet our prince.  This one is young and cocky, interacting with the audience from the start, and there is a definite attempt to bring some comedy.  

For the first half, the set and the music were evocative to me of a country house Agatha Christie-ish whodunnit.  And that worked very well as Hamlet investigates whether his uncle really did kill his father.  The second half though contains a lot more darkness and metaphysical musings and here I would have appreciated a change in tone.  Instead it carried on pretty much the same.  

Hiran Abeyskera as Hamlet was different in a good way with his youthfulness and lightness of touch in his 'Tobacco and Boys' t-shirt, rattling through and almost throwing away his lines  (so much so that I sometimes found it hard to pick out what he was actually saying) but in the second half  I would have liked a bit more emotional heft and I just didn’t feel it most of the time - partly again because the words were being thrown away a bit too much.  There were a few moments when he landed it just right, the graveyard scene being one, and I would have loved more of that. I have seen plenty of funny Hamlets but without the dark too and the transition between the humour and the tragedy it just doesn’t hit so hard.  

Francesca Mills as Ophelia though was absolutely brilliant, making the best of a part with few lines but moving from comedy to pathos and tragedy seamlessly, giving it the emotional weight missing elsewhere. Ophelia is a role that is hard to get right, and cynic that I am, I am often sighing a bit when we get to the 'Rosemary, that's for remembrance' lines, but for once, she really found a way to deliver that made sense and kept her as a strong woman although broken by events. She is absolutely the stand out of this production for me, and I hope to see her on stage again soon.

We had seats in the slips this time, and while there wasn't much we were missing on stage, we did have that annoying audience member alongside us who came in late, noisily and protractedly removed seemingly endless amounts of clothing, including those with slow, noisy zips, and he continued to be noisy throughout the first half.   The higher cost seats in the circle hadn't sold out though, so in the interval we joined plenty of others who sneakily grabbed seats in one of the empty rows.  Luckily the noisy man stayed where he was, although I did hear him actually rattle the ice cubes in his plastic glass from where I was sitting so he made sure we didn't forget him.