Fine production sparks fresh fireReviewer: Helen Thomson.
Fine performances draw fresh ideas from even the most well-known soliloquies and Hamlet is absorbing through all of the four hours.
Hamlet is a marathon for actors and audience, almost four hours of playing time during which some of Shakespeare's most profound ideas and most complex charcacterisations fill the stage. This Belvoir production, directed by Neil Armfield, is absorbing and rewarding for all of that time. It skillfully re-animates the pulse with a rhythmic ebb and flow of emotional intensity that owes much to the emphasis on ensemble acting.
Richard Roxburgh is a first-rate Hamlet - intelligent, engaging, quizzical and impassioned by turn - but his character is defined in relation to a group of distinctly delineated characters who gradually weave a web of intrigue to enmesh him. Roxburgh gives an almost transparently open reading of Hamlet; his is a tortured soul, but not in an especially metaphysical sense.
Two ideas are emphasised in this production. It dramatises the corruption inherent in any political group with huge discrepancies in power, and it plays upon the paradoxes of performance in many ways. Peter Carroll's Polonius has the suavity of a career sycophant, but also a cold-blooded will to power over his children, which mimics that of the king. His is one splendid performance among many.
As Claudius, Jacek Koman began with a sinisterly comic rendering of a man reassuring himself of his power by orchestrating laughter among his followers. His subsequent growing desperation was curiously chilly and limited in emotional range. His relationship with Gertrude, played by an elegant Gillian Jones, was almost sexless. Unsurprisingly, there was little sense of Hamlet's sexual distaste fueling his revenge.
It's left to the player king to demonstrate kingliness, teaching Hamlet the lesson that passion feigned in performance can exceed the real thing. Neil Armfield has used Horatio, played with enormous sympathy and presence by Geoffrey Rush, to suggest that Hamlet, too, is a player king. His soliloquies are subtly changed in emphasis by Horatio's presence, unseen by Hamlet but not the audience.
Horatio's presence, shadowing most of the action, and his final words opening the play as well as ending it, also act as a reminder that we are watching a play within which are characters trying out roles and plots on each other, with tragic results. Only Hamlet is attempting to sift through to the truth of his own character, and trying to act from examined and tested motives.
Richard Roxburgh's clear and unforced diction, the sense he conveys in even the best-known of soliloquies, that the ideas are new and in process of being worked out, gives a welcome freshness and immediacy to the play's speculations.
It is in fact the naturalness of his hamlet that proves the test of honesty in the other characters. When they are all, one by one, revealed to be role playing and therefore unnatural and immoral. Hamlet's indecisiveness seems less weakness than strength of character.
Cate Blanchett as Ophelia gives a suggestive performance of considerable subtlety. Her mad scene is one of the gradually escalating points of emotional catharsis, culminating in the final carnage when Hamlet dies in the arms of an anguished, sobbing Horatio.
The stark set, little more than a wall of smudged and neglected tombs arrogantly defaced with a poster of Claudius as triumphant king, not only acts as a constant reminder of death, but is a fitting frame for the charnel house conclusion and Fortinbras' final words announcing the public display of the bodies.
There is a coherence and intelligence to this production which throws up, as all really first-class productions do, new ideas and readings of a well-known classic. We come away from it with a sense that Shakespeare had a political as well as psychological and moral point to make, as its fine performances draw us right into the heart of its tragic feeling.
The Age, 21st September, 1995.
Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.