VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED ON SS ELSINORE
Last time the ever-inventive Rupert Goold directed here it was the Merchant of Venice, set in a casino so we could all write “merchant of Vegas” jokes. This time it is Hamlet enacted on a ship at sea. Possibly the Titanic, hinted at by the date on the display, a clock flashing us through the last long night. Es Devlin’s set is worth seeing in its own right: a great deck, bows towards us, which heaves (top stage engineering) with the play’s emotion , right up to the spectacular sliding down-deck of all the cast but two in the final debacle (no Fortinbras, no consoling suggestion of government and nation moving on, Goold’s is a disaster story).
The ship’s deck is backed by excellent projections of sea by Akhila Krishnan and , occasionally , huge moving pistons which definitely add a surreal creepiness ,especially when Hamlet’s conversation with the ghost takes place down in some sort of engine-room. Dead King Hamlet is a powerfully angry Anton Lesser with his hair down his back, and Lesser reappears excellently later as an unnerving Player King (Hamlet screams at the resemblance) and a ‘gravedigger’, since Yorick’s skull is actually players’ prop.
The ship is a fair enough metaphor, since the play is full of Danish seafaring references. The Titanic echoes involve some fearful grinding sounds at the end, presaging the end of this floating commonwealth, but logically it seems also to be a sort of honeymoon cruise with parties and dancing to celebrate the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. So it must be presumed we are not mid- Atlantic but jilling around somewhere in the Skaggerak. Such oddities at first troubled this literal-minded sailor: it’s just about OK to have Laertes leaving early on, since there’s some fiddling about with a possible invisible shorebound launch during Polonius’ first speech. But no clue at all as to how he ever comes back, waving an axe, or how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the Players suddenly arrived onboard (ship never heaves-to: the projections continue remorselessly astern).
But once you shrug all that off and accept the whole thing as a great big stonking metaphor, it’s fine. Indeed the sense the characters’ confinement works as well aboard SS Elsinore as in a castle. And the deck heaving is great, as are the occasional surreal eruptions of the ensemble from hatches (once wearing 1900s kapok lifejackets when the emotion has risen to a peak). Goold’s adjustments to the text are OK too: Ophelia cannot drown in a willowy brook, but goes overboard, as does Polonius’ corpse. Gertrude (a wonderful Nancy Carroll, struggling with conscience and a terrifyingly deranged and threatening son). is gratuitously allotted a bit of Clarence’s dream from Richard III about the ‘pain it is to drown”. But on the whole the seas, the splashes, the great doomy foghorn and the heaving decks are strikingly dramatic, no complaints, Goold’s imagination works.
But of course the central point is Hamlet himself: Luke Thallon, tackling the three-hour everest, the most demanding of RSC debuts. He looks wonderful: pale high brow, eloquent face and long, black jerking expressive body, the whole moving from sullen to furious to gurningly, uncomfortably comic. He exudes a sort of physical hysteria which does not lull even when the text suggests his reason is fully with him.
It’s arresting, but I had an increasing problem with his delivery: of course every Hamlet has to find a way to make the lines his own, as if he was wrenching ideas and despairs from his own head, not spouting famous poetry. But Thallon’s jerking pauses, broken anxious gasps, explosive snarls and comedic almost teenage mugging keep him too much on the surface of the play: surfing, water-skiing, never diving deep. His manner feels reasonable if you take the view that much of his madness is real depressive anger, not feigned, but it does no favours to the sublimity of the text. We cannot feel the great strange Shakespearian thoughts about life and death and suicide and corruption if they re so confined to his one poor crazed brain. There is no visible sign of the noble mind o’er thrown, the ‘sweet prince” never shines through the destructive anger . In the late moment when the enraged Claudius (Jared Harris, very striking throughout) forces the caperingly furious Hamlet’s head into a bucket of cold seawater, the sense of tragedy was slightly marred for me, by sympathy. He needed it. In contrast, the rising madness of Nia Towle’s dignified Ophelia is touching, almost noble.
But it’s a new Hamlet, and a dedicatedly worked one, worth seeing. Thallon will long be one to watch, with respect.
Rsc.org.uk. To 29 March
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