It’s the mental state of Denmark we should be worried about in Ian Rickson’s concept-heavy Hamlet, which places Michael Sheen’s long-awaited Dane in a psychological institution.
The result is an Elsinore teeming with cranks and crackpots. Sally Dexter is a gurning Gertrude; Michael Gould, a pernickety Polonius and Hayley Carmichael makes a House Elf of Horatio, bobbing along like Hamlet’s squiffy sidekick. They’ve more tics between them than the residents of Battersea Dogs Home.
The cast have clearly divvied up the disorders, leaving the first half exhausting and laboured, as any narrative momentum is stunted by a multitude of individual traits to be established.
Overseeing the hospital, aided by an army of anonymous scrubs, is James Clyde’s oil-slick head doctor Claudius, an unusually genial and guilt-wracked figure of authority.
There is, however, method in the madness (groan) and Rickson catches a wave in the second-half as a strong metaphor reveals itself. Leave aside the Freud-Laing debate knocking around elsewhere: Rickson’s Hamlet is more political than it is psychological. It is a call to open our eyes, an incitement of Plato’s cave and a cry for revolution against a deep-rooted, self-elected establishment.
In this context, Sheen almost flips the role around and has Hamlet grow increasingly sane as he drives towards revenge. He starts an awkward, frazzled man in hotchpotch clothes. His chin is tucked into his neck; a hand rubs his heart and forehead. His father’s ghost is Hamlet himself – presumably a display of schizophrenic behaviour. (Internalised, it removes the validity of Hamlet’s convictions. When Jonathan Pryce used the same technique in 1980, his Hamlet was possessed. As Peter Brook, citing Edward Gordon Craig, once said: “If you’re not prepared to accept the supernatural in Shakespeare, go home.”)
Sheen’s journey is one of alignment, elevating the subversive rationality of Hamlet’s ‘mad’ quipping, until he eventually rivals Claudius for sanity and overthrows the entrenched controlling hierarchy of the asylum.
In this, Rickson finds real and urgent contemporary relevance in the play. That is, however, not the same as making a success of it and there are serious misgivings nonetheless.
Though it grows thrilling in the second half, its first is stilted and flat. The cast – and Sheen is the worst offender – mostly speak the text as if it was written in size 14 font, pronounced the highlighter marks over their chosen key phrases. It bloats the text and, in aiming for absolute clarity, it becomes almost unfollowable. In coming to us, it cannot draw us in.
Nor does Rickson find a sense of dis-ease in this Elsinore beyond the imbalance of a sane Claudius and a pyscholigically vulnerable Gertrude. There is no guilt about either murder or union. And there are a number of odd moments. What sense has ‘get thee to a nunnery’ from inside an institution? Why does Hamlet look up the effect of drama on the guilty in his own Moleskine notebook?
The overriding problem is that the world never feels real. It lacks the detail, preferring instead generic symbols of institutions – flashing lights, parping alarms, plastic chairs. The result is an anime vision, a production that aims a la Rupert Goold, but misses the attention to micro-moments that grounded, say, his Macbeth.
Yet, this is a Hamlet imbued with humour. Sheen leads a clownish ensemble, his eyes darting innocently, and there are great turns from gawkily square Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Adeel Akhtar and Eileen Walsh) and from Gould as a Polonius like an officious janitor elevated to second-in-command. By contrast, Vivnette Robinson plays Ophelia straight with both purity and clarity and actually achieves a painful, red-eyed mad-scene, rather than the usual whimsical warbling.
Still such is Sheen’s quality that, by the time his motivational fuel powers through his over-poetic speaking, he becomes a gritted, gripping Hamlet. His best are his final moments, a death that creeps up like an incoming tide and is met with a snarl that subsides. Finally, it is his acceptance that registers: with his final words spoken, Sheen simply waits.
At least, it would have had Rickson not attempted a Sixth Sense twist too smart-arse by half. First, it suggests the whole thing never happened anyway – a frustrating end to a lengthy watch – and rewards your efforts with an unimpressive trick. (I note that Derren Brown is thanked in the programme.) Worse though, it is difficult to square with the rest, feeling like an early ‘what if’ that has since tripped up the process. Rickson both cheats his audience and further muddles a bold vision badly executed, which suffocates both play and performance.
Photograph: Simon Annand
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