Hamlet

While the idea of a female Hamlet is nothing new, German film actress Asta Nielsen can be seen soliloquizing the role in a ground breaking 1921 silent film version, this production is setup to fail from the very beginning due to the choices made by the lead actress.

There are so many elements within this production that deserve praise; the minimal set design, gender swapping some of the supporting roles (Polonius becomes Polonia, etc.)and the overall storytelling is masterful here. It's too bad that all of it means nothing when your main actress screams at the audience the whole time.

As a character who is dark, brooding and melancholy by nature; any actor tasked with fleshing out a performance must find the balance between his need for revenge and a potentially having a psychological breakdown after finding out your Uncle killed your Father and married your Mother! Therefore creating a relationship and connecting with your audience is crucial as to whether or not we care about Hamlet's situation! In the case of Maxine Peake, the actress playing Hamlet, I quickly found myself wanting her to SHUT THE HELL UP. This is because it seems she was pushing too hard and wasn't able to find any subtle nuances in her vocal performance. I'm not sure if she was trying to fill the space or if the actor chose to portray Hamlet as someone who is not grounded in reality, but ultimately her choices disconnected me from her character and in fact turned me against Hamlet because her dialogue was not believable and felt REALLY forced.

If you cannot modulate your vocal performance in front of a live audience it is very easy to turn them against you. This is what happened here and its a shame because so many other aspects of this production succeed.

You're only as strong as your weakest link - in this case I desperately wanted Hamlet to connect and just talk to me.....not scream and shout for 3 hours!

It's not so uncommon to see 'tour de force' performances on screen because cinema and TV affords the actor the physical space and respite to tear the arse out of a performance. It's a one off and retakes allow them to experiment and finesse the part and to build in nuances.

But of course the stage has many 'tour de force's' to reference, Olivier springs to mind in the Shakespearian silo, but they are fewer in number and elitist in observation.

Nevertheless, in the digital cinema world, to that august canon must be added Maxine Peake's Hamlet.

Let's ignore the gender issue here. It's a red herring. The fact is that Peake is, by anyone's measure, slight.

And yet the sheer energy she exudes performance after performance is ant like in its ability to punch above its physical weight.

Her skill is to mesmerisingly tic and twitch her way through a descent into moral madness. It's very compelling indeed.

And yet her slightness brings with it a vulnerability that really draws you in. Captured on the big screen it only serves to emphasise the greatness of this performance at the Royal Exchange Theatre during last year's Manchester International Festival.

If you get a chance to see one of these 'live' theatre screening jump at the opportunity. You will thank me.

Absolutely stunning production from stage to screen. Maxine Peake as Hamlet works brilliantly and her performance was a real tour de force. My only criticism was that the music was discordant and overly loud at times making it uncomfortable to listen to. It is VERY long - take refreshments, you'll need them but there is an interval which, for comforts sake, would have been better a little sooner than it came. The second part seemed very much shorter but I didn't time it. Most of the the supporting actors were very powerful with some gorgeous comic touches and how they managed to convey everything with such simple staging is beyond me. Go see this, it will knock your socks off!

The production is solid, the corps quite capable and there are some touches - The Mousetrap section- which are quite good changes. The Polonia in place of Polonious is a trick and not particularly interesting.

Judgement rests here on Hamlet/Peake. Her performance has merit but it has many defects. The shouting, the shrillness and the pitch is set very high and almost old fashioned in its quaint gestures. She does not command through physical movement which is rather too similar to Tom Cruise when he tries to be strong, and instead conveys a lower than average statured man mimicking power. Overall Peake's Hamlet is like a very young angry gang kid from a housing project.

There is, as with the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet, which received so much attention, a sense that these productions are used to raise status and advance careers above anything else. This is not a great Hamlet; it is quite interesting, that is all.

I wanted to like this production and was intrigued by the roles of Hamlet and Polonius being played by females, although in the former case I could not really tell whether s/he was supposed to be a lesbian or a male in the staged play. Polonius was absolutely changed into the mother of Ophelia, with the father disappeared in the way that the mother is nonexistent in the original play. (I assume that she must have died during childbirth or something along those lines, since no one ever utters a word about her).

Some of the acting struck me as quite good (esp. Claudius), but I felt that Hamlet was portrayed as someone more drunk and out of control than plagued by existential and moral concerns. The performance included way too much screeching and screaming for me to watch comfortably. There are other ways to express sorrow and dismay and even anger but those were avoided, leaving only a sort of monolithic emotivistic outburst conveyed through voice volume and histrionic facial contortions.