Princely PerformanceReviewer: Bryce Hallet
By including the Company B Belvoir's Hamlet in its 1995 subscription season, Melbourne Theatre Company has given its audience such a rich and rewarding experience that many recent local offerings pale by comparison.
Director Neil Armfield and his ensemble have crafted a sharply observed contemporary production that taps into all kinds of unhinged behavioral traits to form a spare, near-seamless and enthralling Hamlet. It is awake to the text's comic potential as well as its murky follies.
Moments of truth, agony and pain are exposed in harsh, glaring industrial light, while shadows, flickering lights and dark voids at the edges heighten the play's tone of suspicion, fear and loss.
Armfield adds some superb comic flourishes to accentuate the poisons trickling blow the play's surface. In the interplay of characters he sets in motion a delicately controlled chain of events in which characters, be they weak or strong, are, in effect, out of control.
A number of dramatically charged scenes, irrespective of how familiar they might already be, are made astonishingly vivid by the serene, stolid presense of Geoffrey Rush's Horatio; a moral linchpin in a world gone mad and an eyewitness, like the audience, to uncontrollable, terrifying acts.
Cate Blanchett's "mad" scene is mesmerising for its earthiness; this is not a tragic Ophelia but one of potent sexuality and uncoiling passion. Peter Carroll's superb Polonius is a comically willful conspirator and gossip, while Russsel Keifel (Guildenstern) are inept, naïve and tentative bunglers who would be perfectly at home in a British sitcom.
Richard Roxbrugh's Hamlet, for all the self-conscious idiocy, posturing and deliberations, invests the character with a confused, vulnerable humanity, powering along with natural, fully believable instinct in a world of deceit and theatrical illusion.
The production has great sense and purpose is what is an enduringly insightful, deeply resonant play.
The Australian, September 27th, 1995.
Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.