Review: Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts. Designed by Fiona Crombie, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composer Sarah Blasko. With Brendan Cowell, Colin Moody, Russell Kiefel, Heather Mitchell, Barry Otto, Chris Ryan, Laura Brent, Joe Manning, Tim Richards, Matthew Whittet, Darren Weller, Paul Reichstein and Sarah Blasko. Bell Shakespeare @ the Victorian Arts Centre until August 2.

Hamlet is the most amorphous of Shakespeare’s plays. As the Shakespearean critic Jan Kott pointed out, there is a Hamlet for each age, reinvented afresh. Hamlet has been called the first modern expression of self-consciousness, a man of inaction writhing in indecision against the feudal certainties of his father. Coleridge said that Hamlet was a case study in “mental philosophy”, which examined “the effect of overbalance of the imaginative power”. The play has been a vehicle for examining the brutal circle of state power, in which the bloodletting goes full circle back to rational authority (represented by Fortinbras) or, more recently, a lens to examine the nuclear family, bringing its incestuous passions and tormented relationships to the surface.

And its subtext of madness has prompted so much speculation that Oscar Wilde felt moved to contemplate an essay: “Are The Commentators On Hamlet Really Mad, Or Only Pretending To Be?” Fair question, really. Hamlet is a text so richly turned, with minefields of ambiguity in almost every line, that it will no doubt continue to seduce critical speculators for years to come.

For all that, it’s still a play, “a project” as Shakespeare says elsewhere, “which was to please”. And there is much to please in Marion Potts’ fine production for Bell Shakespeare, from the moment the lights dim on Fiona Crombie’s cavernous industrial set and Sarah Blasko’s bewitching voice floats out over the auditorium.

This is a contemporary Hamlet which, without the patronising edge that has characterised so much of Bell Shakespeare’s ventures into making the Bard “relevant” to young people, draws on contemporary youth culture to create its aesthetic (even, very effectively, calling on horror movies for the unnerving zombie ghost).

Elsinore is an architecture of urban decay, a space made of concrete and rusted metal. It features a shallow tiled pool of water to one side running beneath a metal crypt that climbs up all of one wall. (Water features constantly in this production: it runs down the rusting slabs of the crypt, a symbol at once of the sacred and of the desire to cleanse blood guilt.) On the other side of the stage is a spectacular three-storey spiral staircase. The castle is hinted by fake arches at the back and an arched door to one side.

The space is furnished with some chairs and a table, and, at the back, as if it has been abandoned by former tenants, an upright piano. The whole creates a stage that is at once flexible - up and across and back - and expressive. This fluidity is helped along by one of the real pleasures of this production, Nick Schlieper’s extraordinarily inventive and subtle lighting, which inhabits and shapes the empty stage as much as any of the performers.

Hamlet is seldom performed in its entirety, and this version is no exception. Potts keeps the initial political frame, with Norway on its way to invade Denmark under Fortinbras, but this is forgotten through the middle acts, and Fortinbras’s appearance at the end amid the corpses might well puzzle those unfamiliar with the play. She also boldly (and effectively) cuts all of the play-within-a-play: our knowledge of it is confined to Hamlet’s commentary and a form of cockney mummery involving a tapdancer and Blasko.

Within this, we get a Hamlet who is a petulant adolescent in open rebellion against authority. Brendan Cowell plays Hamlet as a rock god, with echoes of Michael Hutchence as he sways on stage, a shrug-shouldered parodist of himself and everyone else. (His first gesture is to throw his shoes at his mother and uncle.) This is a wholly legitimate interpretation, harking back to the nuclear family take I mentioned earlier. But the fact is that his performance nearly drove me crazy (thus answering Wilde's question) through the first three acts; I thought Cowell was grievously miscast.

What I missed, more than anything else, was Hamlet’s animating, cruel intelligence. For all its energy, Cowell’s performance seldom gave me any sense of the mercurial, impassioned consciousness that makes Hamlet such a fascinating character. I might have forgiven him anything, had that quality been there. Perhaps what is most frustrating is that it’s present in flashes: there were moments after interval when Cowell’s performance became less mannered, and his performance began to grate less, even began to work for me. But these were all too seldom.

However, he is supported by a very strong cast, and the whole production transcends its limitations. Colin Moody’s Claudius reaches the Shakespearean extremes that in Cowell’s performance are only gestures, and his confession of guilt as he prays is one of the strongest moments of the play. I enjoyed Barry Otto’s movingly camp portrayal of Polonius, and Chris Ryan was a strong and deeply credible Laertes, a character who could easily be all blandness. Tim Richards and Matthew Whittet as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make an enjoyably gormless double act, and I very much liked Laura Brent’s naive and fragile Ophelia, whose madness touches a terrible pathos. In short, for all its flaws, this Hamlet is well worth a look.

Photo: Brendan Cowell as Hamlet in the Bell Shakespeare production.