National Theatre Live: Hamlet

'Hamlet' is one of Shakespeare's most famous and most lauded plays, and one can see why with such memorable characters, some of the most deservedly famous in all literature, and text often quoted and referenced to this day. It is a long play and not easy to perform at all, but the characterisation, language and complex emotions have always riveted me and it has always been one of my favourites from Shakespeare.

While there is a lot to admire about this production, a large part of me thought that it could have been much better as well. Am not going to gush over it as much as one reviewer respectfully, have seen better 'Hamlet' productions though the performance of Hamlet himself is one of the best and most insightful seen. At the same time, while having a few big reservations do find it much better than has been said by the other, again respectfully.

The good things will be started off with. First and foremost, Rory Kinnear is superb as Hamlet. Not only disappearing into this difficult role but clearly showing that he understood it with the nuances and intensity that one doesn't always see in other interpretations, so the viewer understands the character and his motivations. Most of the rest of the cast do very well too and actually most of this review's high rating is for the performances, David Calder's Polonius is one of the better ones and one where the character is not painted in a demeaning light but instead the devoted but also scheming character that he is with some comic timing as well. James Laurenson is also among the best in the role of the Ghost, noble yet also spooky (he doubles too as the Player King in one of the more interesting interpretations of that role). Patrick Malahide is a serpentine Claudius, and it was actually a good thing that this was not a production that didn't try to humanise him or make him more complex. Clare Higgins is a powerfully conflicted Gertrude and brings more of a fleshed out interpretation to a character that is not as interesting as Higgins makes her.

Act 1 was often riveting and there were scenes that were done well. Absolutely loved the Mousetrap scene, very surprising and so entertaining with some of the best use of mime for anything in a long time. Hamlet's grave scene was very moving. Hamlet himself throughout is directed in a way that like Kinnear's performance director Nicholas Hytner understood the character and his way of thinking/motivations. Fleshing out Gertrude also came off well, and it was great that Hytner and Calder understood the role of Polonius and the theme he represents in how appearance and reality contrast.

On the other hand, was not completely crazy about the production values. While Hamlet is a dark play, the production did not look appealing and the minimalist look was indicative of under-budget. Costumes like Gertrude's veered on tacky. A couple of the performances don't register as much. Alex Lanipekun's Laertes is completely flat and Giles Terera veered on being too sympathetic as Horatio. Ruth Negga, in one of the few interpretations of Orphelia to not make me feel anything for her, is let down by her stage direction in one of the production's biggest misjudgments. Maybe Hytner was trying to make Orphelia more interesting or something, but trying to "sex her up" was taken too far which cheapened the character and took away from her poignancy, did not see the point in the changed circumstances of the character's death and the insanity was overacted and under-directed.

Some interesting ideas here, but the oppressive idea that tended to dominate the production, despite moments of tension and intrigue, could have been followed through all the way and at other times could have been handled with more restraint.

Concluding, a lot of good things here but some serious shortcomings too. 7/10 for mainly the performances (particularly Kinnear)

Horatio loves Hamlet; he may even want to be Hamlet. But wishes are not horses, and it makes no sense to cast a born Horatio as Hamlet. Rory Kinnear is a thirtyish, balding plodder with all the charisma of a substitute teacher. He is not unintelligent: he has considered his lines, and he conveys their meaning clearly if not trippingly. (He has even come up with a new reading: "Soft! You, now! The fair Ophelia!"). But he has no charm, no brilliance, minimal wit and limited powers of invention and variation. In brief, he is ordinary. Ophelia tells us that Hamlet is the undisputed Star of Elsinore, and even Claudius admits that the common people adore him. These accolades sit uneasily upon Kinnear, who turns The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark into The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Nicholas Hytner has surrounded him with minimalist scenery and a few familiar concepts. For the second time in a year, we see Denmark as a 21st-century police state. Hytner has replaced Gregory Doran's surveillance cameras with a bevy of Secret Service men, but the idea is the same and entirely wrong, for as a police state Denmark is ridiculous. The "dangerously mad" Hamlet puts on an unvetted play attacking second marriages before the newly-remarried Queen. He runs riot during the performance with obscenities, jeers and threats. He nearly kills the unguarded King at his prayers, but decides to wait. Instead he visits the Queen in her room where he promptly kill Polonius. Doran and Hytner wanted to convey the oppressive omnipresence of Big Brother, but what we see are the serial pratfalls of Keystone Kops.

Matters are not helped by their depiction of the Chief Spymaster. When Peter Hall first directed Hamlet (1965), he reconceived Polonius as a cunning politician using the mask of befuddlement to accomplish his ends. Kenneth Branagh did much the same in his 1996 film. Unaccountably, Doran and Hytner opt for a traditional comic dullard, further dispelling the Orwellian ambiance. At least Doran's Polonius was funny. In contrast, David Calder loses laugh after laugh through bad timing and off-kilter rhythms. (He does the same as the Gravedigger in Act V). I have happy memories of Calder's fantastical, dreamstruck Falstaff, but that was fifteen years ago.

In truth, Hamlet will not bear too much updating. If you choose, like Hytner, to present Ophelia as a thoroughly modern young woman--sexy, feisty, jousting with her strange anachronism of a brother--you raise the question of why she yields so quickly to Polonius' silly edicts. Why does her liberated mind give way before the mundane pressures of a bad love-affair and an aging father's death? Sensing these discrepancies, Hytner suggests that Ophelia does not drown under the weight of her own distraction, but is instead murdered by the royal goons. This doesn't help, and Ruth Negga is too pedestrian an actress to make sense of the muddle.

On the plus side of the ledger, Patrick Malahide is a refreshingly slimy Claudius, a serpent in the orchard indeed. (Some actors try to ennoble the character. Nonsense: the man murders his brother and marries his sister-in-law for gain, and then engineers the murder of his stepson). Clare Higgins fleshes out the underwritten Gertrude in both senses, showing us a once-beautiful woman whom years and alcohol have thickened into a harsh, unlovely middle-age. Her gratitude to Claudius is keen, but her resentment at the passage of time is greater.

Among the ensemble, Matthew Barker impresses as the Norwegian Captain (a small part, but there are no small parts), while Ferdinand Kingsley, son of Ben, is an efficient, yuppified Rosencrantz. The tearful Alex Lanipekun shows us Laertes the sentimentalist but not Laertes the fanatic avenger. Giles Terera looks like Eddie Murphy and plays Horatio about as well as Murphy could. James Laurenson was an embarrassing Gaveston to Ian McKellen's Edward II (1970); as the Ghost and the Player King, he seems to have finally ripened into competence.

"Hamlet without the Prince" has become a metaphor; unhappily, Kinnear and Hytner literalize it. In Doran's production, we saw Hamlet as Harlequin. This was shallow, but more diverting than Hamlet as Prufrock. One has seen worse--one has seen Beale--but one has also seen much better.

I've seen at least a half dozen actors play Hamlet—many highly acclaimed—on screen and on stage. I saw Rory Kinnear's performance as part of National Theatre Live, and on the big screen. In Kinnear's performance, I felt I was seeing the Prince of Denmark for the first time. For the first time, I really understood the character and his motivation—not because I knew the play, but because Kinnear's Hamlet was a real person; he overcame the familiarity and the language to convey the internal life of the prince in an immediate and compelling way. I was engrossed in the character and the play, rather than seeing a Shakespeare classic. It made me a Kinnear fan for life.