Hamlet who’s there?

Reseña

Even at this relatively early stage in its life, this is one of the most compelling, intense and moving stagings of Hamlet that I have experienced. Skillfully pared down to an interval-less hour and a half, this highly energized ensemble version rivets our attention on the two families, and from the opening moments sustains the sense of a claustrophobic world where there is nowhere to run, everything to hide, and nowhere to hide it. Alongside moments of visceral intensity (Ophelia’s disintegration has, for me, never been more believable or more physically upsetting) the show also had some brilliant flashes of mordant humour: Claudius playing his first set-speech to a bluesy beat; and later finding himself half-reluctantly cast as the hammiest of villains in The Murder of Gonzago before exploding with rage when he realized what Hamlet was up to. What shone through the performance was what I had been privileged to witness in rehearsal: a sense of emotional commitment, ruthless honesty and searching intelligence, coupled with a painstaking, scrupulous and profoundly embodied inhabitation of the text. In this respect, the ambition to offer the play in non-performance contexts as well as more traditional theatre spaces is perfectly in keeping both with its intimate style and with its frank, clear-sighted and compassionate engagement with the experiences of emotional breakdown, stomach-wrenching guilt, and raw grief.

Robert Shaughnessy

Professor of Theatre, University of Kent