Luke Thallon’s Hamlet is all at sea in more ways than one. In Rupert Goold’s scintillating new staging of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, the court of Elsinore has become an Edwardian ocean-going liner heading for stormy waters, aboard it the royal family and the fragile, grief-raddled prince.
It’s an emblematic choice of setting, purposely redolent of the doomed voyage of the Titanic with its dread metaphors of hubris. If it comes at the cost of some slightly awkward cutting and tailoring of the script, it is worth it for the chance to see the play afresh, delivered with new urgency as a tense psychological thriller. At its centre is Thallon’s exceptional, riveting Hamlet: raw, desperate and desolate. You can’t take your eyes off him for a second.
We begin with the catalyst: a prelude in which Hamlet senior is buried, with all due ceremony, at sea — his body tipped into the fathomless depths below. Cut to 50 days later and we are on that same ship, now become a seaborne coffin for everyone aboard. Es Devlin’s ingenious set presents us with a tilting wooden deck at the prow of the vessel, which pitches and tosses — alarmingly realistically — with the waves, while Akhila Krishnan’s atmospheric video design suggests the shifting moods of the ocean ahead. The action is punctuated by sharp orders from nautical whistles and sudden ominous groans and thuds from belly of the vessel.
It’s eerie, nightmarish and claustrophobic, and Goold racks up the tension, compressing the drama’s action to a few hours (marked out by digital clocks beside the stage) and instilling a sense of rising panic. Sailors scurry to and fro and, as the seas become choppier, terrified passengers scrabble for life jackets. Everyone is trapped on this rotten ship of state — none more so than Thallon’s Hamlet, for whom this harrowing expedition is matched by his own internal voyage. More than once you wonder whether this whole drama is in his head as he “drowns the stage with tears” and plays out scenarios of revenge and redemption.
At first he’s alienating, snapping out famous speeches as if they were bubbling through him. That can be jarring and even irritating — you lose some of the poetry — but it’s also the point. This Hamlet is not containable — he’s deeply damaged, unhinged by grief, his bearings lost, tormented by visions of heaven and hell. When he first encounters his father’s ghost (Anton Lesser) in the sweltering boiler room, we are never sure if it is, as his mother puts it, the “coinage” of his brain, and when he sees the spectre in her cabin, his sobbing, quaking distress is piteous and hard to watch. It’s in her dismay, and that of those who have been close to him, that we glimpse the “sweet prince” he once was.
Nancy Carroll is superb as Gertrude, gradually unravelling with the storm, as is Nia Towle’s achingly lost Ophelia. Elliot Levey’s subtly pitched Polonius is a man out of his depth — with his children, with his king, with the increasingly chaotic situation — and Jared Harris’s Claudius is a smooth brute. Throughout, Goold takes liberties, such as moving Hamlet’s famous soliloquy or cutting Gertrude’s speech about the willow tree. Some things work better than others, some are clumsy or even nonsensical (Laertes setting off “for France”, for instance). The crucial duel feels rushed and somehow inconsequential. But the end is wildly spectacular, the corrupt tumbling to the depths, Hamlet transfigured, angel-like.
★★★★☆
To March 29, rsc.org.uk
