Rory Kinnear ends his superb, career-defining performance as Hamlet with “The rest is silence.” Â Unfortunately, the audience has other ideas and spend the next few minutes coughing away and playing their mobile phone ringtones. Note to self: never play Hamlet at the National Theatre in Autumn sniffle season.
There are plenty of other strong performances (Alex Lanipekun as Laertes and Ruth Negga as a brilliant Ophelia) but they, and Kinnear’s tour de force, is lost amid a production that feels like it is striving for something which it never reaches.
There’s nothing wrong with a production of a classic which doesn’t wear its motifs on its sleeves, which lets the text and the performances speak for themselves. Or a production which uses the themes from a classic to make its own intelligent point. But we get neither from Mr Hytner’s production. We get a production heavy with metahpors (it’s all about a surveillance state) which never take flight sufficiently to justify the hinderance they offer to the performances.
The set, for instance, doesn’t work at all. It’s a West Wing-style effort, all white plaster and glass windows (linking to the theme of surveillance and observation, geddit?), but it ended up being just ugly and distracting. For one thing, it seemed to not be quite finished (it was a preview – let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the NT carpentry department is feverishly working away ahead of press night). In any case, it added nothing and detracted a little something.
The production is also stupifyingly long. Three hours and thirty minutes according to the programme, but we didn’t finish the first half until almost nine o’clock (after a seven o’clock start) – there are some pieces of text which I’ve never seen performed before, and you sometimes wonder whether Mr Hytner might have been a little more liberal with the red ink to some benefit. Do we really need another scene with Polonius being Polonial? (Again, caveat that this was a preview so there might be cuts coming)
This is a great production – there are incredible, remarkable, memorable moments in it. The final scene is fantastically performed (despite the best efforts of the audience). Kinnear is really excellent. But there are enough of those little, detracting somethings to make it feel like great performances lost in a production, rather than a production which ever really comes together.
Can’t enthuse quite as much this reviewer! The production lacked PASSION, I thought – in many scenes, Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes and Claudius might as well have been phoning in their Chinese takeaway order, for all the excitement and interest they generated. I really admire Patrick Malahide as an actor, but this role (Claudius) was not for him. He came across with all the malice and gravitas of a Surbiton bank manager. It was hard to feel sorry for Hamlet’s plight, and difficult to believe he loved Ophelia, or that she gave a stuff for him. Gertrude came across as a rather shrill, shallow harridan, and the crucial boudoir scene, where Hamlet should have been in a frenzy of love/hate for his mother, was almost entirely devoid of dramatic excitement and pathos. Conversational rather than declamatory? – yes, that was the style of this production, presumably to “bring it to life” or “modernise” it, or make it “relevant” to today’s audience – but these characters are LARGER than life, and in my opinion demand a much fuller emotional response. On the positive side, I thought the ghost was excellent – though Horatio’s and Hamlet’s reactions were hardly of terror and utter confusion. The Players’ scenes were innovative and engaging, likewise the finale. I’ve no doubt the actors could have produced a charged and exciting performance, given the chance – but this, overall, was not the one.
Me again! Yes, I was there on the cougher’s night – thank goodness not near me – also when a mobile phone went off in the final scene – have to admit, at first I thought it might have been part of Fortinbras’ entourage!!
I agree with Anna, disengaging, passionless, boring and dull. A total waste of an evening.
In shades of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo, the Hamlet family appeared to be a dictatorial clan with nice manners and media savvy. Think ‘Prince Charles meets Caescescu’. The most menacing event was the sound effect of a low pass from a military jet at the start and end, but to what relevance…?
You might add that the minor characters had no sympathy for Shakespeare’s music, nor basic diction. The spear carriers made all too frequent appearances as armed ‘personal protection’ officers to accompany Claudius. At every turn, they drew their guns and posed frozen in the way they imagined such creatures would; the way that Hollywood had taught them. Sadly, they ended up looking more like a bunch of night club bouncers re-enacting Windmill Theatre’s nude Poses Plastiques than anything from the real world.
You got different kinds of ‘mad’ from Kinnear, ranging from basic bad-tempered shouting to whimsical skipping. Talking of which, all the principals who moved at faster than a walk had adopted the ‘National Theatre run’, a balletic movement that they had been practising since drama school. People do not run like that… Just a suggestion. Maybe you guys should try acting ‘running normally’.
With Hamlets like buses; wait for the next one.
It’s a relief to find some viewers who didnt think this was all marvellous as most of the mainstream critics have said. Having just seen it this afternoon, I was disappointed and bored. The characters seemed flat, such that I barely cared who died or why. There didnt seem to be any coherent interpretation; rather a nod towards a variety of well worn themes and motifs . But what I found most difficult was the lack of passion – the lack of any real sense of engagement between the characters. Ah well. Glad I’m not alone.
What a relief! My mother, who first saw Gielgud as Hamlet in the 30s, my partner and I, all felt hugely disappointed by this production, so lauded by the critics. Forget all the supposed subtlety of the staging, we only heard about two thirds of the play. Rory Kinnear had some good moments, it’s true. He made some of the soliloquies sounds fresh and real. But on other occasions, we just couldn’t hear him. Patrick Malahide, as Anna suggests, had little presence, and was unconvincing. He did look a little Putin-like (and maybe this was deliberate), but lacked the cold steel in the eye. We just felt relief when David Calder came onstage and showed he knew how to project his voice and convey the essence of a character. But there was some frankly poor acting here – in a profession where we know there are so many talented actors struggling to find work. What’s going on at The National? We’re off to see Frankenstein soon. Let’s hope the actors come up with the goods then – or at least that we can hear them!
Awful, clattered and arrogant production! Even Rory Kinnear couldn’t save it.
I went to see this production last night in Plymouth. What a relief to read the above reviews, as I also felt exactly the same. It felt like a case of The emperors new clothes, with every mainstream critic praising this production to the hilt. As an educated (B.A Honours Theatre degree/ex actress myself) audience member, this production left me speechless. On the technical side, what on earth happened to the iambic pentameter and the clear pronounciation of words? I found the diction sloppy, the staging static and lifeless, the set ugly and meaningless and the ‘humour’ and characterisation of Hamlet by Kinnear both shallow and vapid.He looked more like a trainspotter waiting for the 10.30 at Paddington.The passion, dysfunction and emotion was totally lost and it quickly resembled a farce in which the main characters did more ‘trotting’ about the stage than a field of ponies.Even the gaffa tape floor markings were so blindingly obvious that there may as well have been neon arrows pointing to the sections where props and set were to be placed. If this is cutting, modern edge, contemporary theatre, then I’ll take the traditional anyday.The words of Hamlet are stunning and deeply moving in the right hands, and I felt this production was an insult to Shakespeares legacy. I found the evening the biggest waste of time and money and would have much preferred to have not gone in the first place.
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