Saturday a week ago was the "final" repeat of the National Theatre's NT Live cinemacast of Shakespeare's Hamlet, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. I admit that my title conveys a pun, considered in relation to the royal family of the play, but really has much more to do with the performing style.
This is one of several productions featured in the NT Live series which in fact do not originate with the National Theatre. It's a production staged by West End producers Sonia Friedman Productions, and filmed before a live audience at the Barbican arts centre in the City of London.
Another such production, by the way, was the Donmar Warehouse's staging of Coriolanus, starring Tom Hiddleston, which is being called back by popular demand for a repeat cinemacast on November 19 (you can read my review of it here: Sheer Stage Power ).
Anyway, to the production at hand of Hamlet. Apart from Cumberbatch, none of the other actors appearing in the show are likely to be at all familiar unless you are a close follower of the English theatre. All, however, showed considerable gifts in interpreting the maddeningly human contradictions which run through all the characters in the play.
The Barbican's theatre is a flat-floored arena below raked seating, and Es Devlin's set was arranged on this floor as an asymmetrical "V" shaped wall, with the apex of the "V" well over towards upstage right. It included multiple doorways, an upstairs gallery on the stage right short wall, and a long flight of stairs across the back up to the gallery.
This sounds big, but the floor is bigger still -- and so there was ample room to stage whole scenes down centre with the walls completely in darkness. The most startling scenic effect came at the beginning of Act 2, after Hamlet's departure to England, when the entire stage was covered with a litter of broken fragments of what appeared to be rock. The piles grew higher and the fragments bigger as you looked backwards through the open double doors, until the far end of the palace corridor was stacked up at least halfway to the ceiling with heaps of rubble -- a powerful visual metaphor for the collapsing world of the Danish royal family. The whole set -- the palace, really -- was coloured in dull shades of assorted greys and blues, creating a dark and dismal effect -- more like a medieval castle in spite of the unmistakable "palace" décor.
Director Lyndsey Turner made full use of all the possibilities in this set, adding in movable set pieces to create the different room environments required by the play, as well as the outdoor moments. Cuts in the text simplify the main line of the story, at the cost of heavily shortening the parts of a number of minor characters.
Music effects were mainly used to bridge scenes, and heightened the tension very effectively too, with much of the music depending on dissonant chords, deep rumbling basses and shrill high notes.
As noted, this is a highly physical production of the play. Given the huge space available, that's not so surprising. But the extent of the physical activity certainly is. Characters race up and down the long staircase. The graveside fight and duel scenes are loaded with energy. The scene where Hamlet is to depart to England turns into a Saturday-cartoon-like chase scene up and down a corridor and in and out of the doors on both sides -- but because it was all deadly serious, nobody laughed.
This brings out one of the serious drawbacks of the live-to-cinema telecast. After that hugely energetic duel, it's simply not possible for the actors to die and then lie still on the floor when they are still breathing twice each second -- and it's impossible to conceal the breathing from the all-seeing eye of the close-up camera.
This production was notable for the strength of the performances right across the board and down to the smallest minor parts. The overall tone of this court was not so much courtly as bureaucratic, supported by both voices and physicality. The chief bureaucrat, Claudius, set the tone altogether in his first appearances, although he revealed more and more of his tyrannical side as the play progressed. Ciaran Hinds built up the interpretation to a powerful prayer scene in which he shared the focus equally with Hamlet.
Anastasia Hille presented a believably conflicted Gertrude, and reached a peak of vulnerability as she described the suicide of Ophelia.
Ophelia herself was played by Sian Brooke with great subtlety in the opening scenes, and with anything but subtlety in her mad scene. She packed more physical tics and jerks and spasms into ten minutes than many actors could do across an entire evening.
Jim Norton played Polonius as a consummate bureaucrat, always with a useful suggestion or two (or more) at his fingertips. His advice-to-Laertes scene sounded just like an executive summary of the main points at the end of a 4-hour meeting.
Kobna Holdbrook-Smith gave us a Laertes who became an erupting volcano of rage, his anger smothering over any sadness, on his return to Elsinore. For me, this was one of the more one-sided characterizations in this show.
Ruairi Conaghan and Diveen Henry formed an excellent partnership as the Player King and Queen. They started inside a small portable proscenium almost like an overgrown puppet theatre (placed upstage centre), playing their romantic scene in a fashion of a fairy-tale cartoon. The Player King's murder was then enacted downstage centre, forcing the entire "audience" for The Mouse Trap to turn their backs on the "stage" and face us. The point became clear when we saw the facial reaction of Claudius to the murder scene, but it was a clumsy and awkward way of letting us view him.
The one character who rather disappointed me was Horatio, played by Leo Bill. Admittedly it isn't a clearly-defined character, but Bill's anonymous and rather faceless student seemed like a most unlikely friend for Benedict Cumberbatch's energetic Hamlet.
And Hamlet was energetic, as energetic a Hamlet as I have ever seen. No chance for this Hamlet to be stalled into immobility. Even his indecision was a constant war of nerves within himself, and the entire performance was shot through with that kind of nervy, edgy quality. Note that this did not make Hamlet fidgety-nervous. Cumberbatch kept his nerves on a tight rein, but the very tightness of that rein was the measure of how edgy he became. If in the process the character as a whole became a bit more "stagey" than others in the play, no harm was done because this most definitely was a Hamlet searching for the proper role he was to play in avenging his father.
The soliloquies are, as always, central to the character. With this Hamlet, these became the moments when he could unwind a bit of his tension by talking things through to himself. The soliloquies had something of that self-conversational tone to them, and it served the play very well, giving the audience and actor alike a most necessary respite before the tension was ratcheted up again.
This production was called the "Most In-Demand Theatre Production of All Time" when the entire 12-week run sold out in seven hours, more than a year before the show opened (that's close to 100,000 tickets!). It's now been seen by millions more worldwide through the NT Live cinemacast and multiple rebroadcasts. The theatre I was at used one of its largest auditoriums and was probably 80-90% filled.
Was it artistically good? Definitely. Was it a best-ever in any way? Certainly not. The fascination of Hamlet is that there are always more ways to play this tragedy than anyone can dream up -- in which this endlessly challenging and provoking drama perfectly mirrors Hamlet's famous words that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And was it just my imagination, or did Cumberbatch change "your" to "our"?
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