A WILD YOUNG PRINCE OF DENMARK IN THE DUSK
Easy to forget, after decades of prestige-casting and its torrent of ringing, over-quoted lines, how much HAMLET is a play about being young. Here’s angry, grieving adolescent Hamlet and Horatio his sensible bestie; here are Ophelia and Laertes, rolling their eyes at prosy old Polonius but suddenly devastated by his death; here are students Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vainly recruited by the King to entertain a sullen nephew-stepson; here, even, is youth in the soldiers on the castle walls who flinch at both the ghost and the new regime.
It’s about youth, trapped beneath powerful elders whose hypocrisies and dim moral compass they perceive with clear unforgiving eyes,the way we all did once. Jo Carrick’s light-spirited production for Red Rose Chain catches this quality to a marvel: her young cast leap, run and skip around the audience under a great spreading chestnut tree, mock and joke as well as registering griefs and shocks. Vincent Moisy’s vigorous Hamlet spring up onto the high wooden tower and gateway and leaps off (one flinches for him, but his confidence is unsurprising given that, in the spirit of this little company, he has done much of the set- building with his own hands, just as he did for his role in The Ungodly both in Ipswich and New York) .
The other delight of this outdoor production is of course the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who is a 20ft tall puppet of magnificent design by Charlie Tymms, its head the Sutton Hoo helmet, its immense mailed hands gesticulating, wrapping round terrified guards in an ultimate panto “behind you!” moment, reaching out in the bedchamber scene to touch Gertrude, who cannot see it. The puppetry is good, the great mask holds expression deeply: its first appearance sends the guards, panicked squaddies, scuttling around; when Hamlet sees it his gasp of “…father!” as it bows its huge head towards him it is electric. With three operators it paces through and behind the auditorium as we gasp, and reappears suddenly behind the castle to demand fealty: it is simultaneously funny and awe-inspiring. Matt Pension speaks its voice from its great draped heart, doubling as Claudius; two others are its arms.
Actually, the curtain-call realization that this is only a cast of 8 reminds us that, without particular fuss, doubling and tripling in this tight, versatile cast is everywhere, and part of its strength. Carrick has reinstated several of Shakespeare’s comic, bantering scenes often cut by more earnest directors: the guards are funny in their dismay, and as as for the pair transformed later into gravediggers – Emily Jane Kerr and Ailis Duff – they are pure music-hall. Though Kerr of course is also Queen Gertrude, and Duff a memorably funny Polonius, who roams the audience adding a few lines telling us off. Rei Mordue and Seb Yates Cridland are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the latter also Laertes, the former the Player King) . They are nicely laddish (why not add a few “oy-oy!” and “Gett-in!” cries to the text: Shakespeare’s players would have.) Georgie Redgrave’s Ophelia is at first a confident teenager, then a scared one when Hamlet turns rough, and finally allows her distraught state to be more disturbing than conventionally pretty (Redgrave, of course, doubles as both a guard and, later, a comic Osric unskilled at fanfares).
In passing I should mention that though this is a big arena, with four great stands and a pit of folding chairs, none of the players is amplified but all are audible everywhere: that’s Carrick’s old-style insistence on proper projection. Actors who move on from Red Rose Chain are unlikely to join the growing rank of screen-spoilt mumblers.
But Hamlet himself, you ask? And the tragedy, the darkness that has to lie beneath all youthful energy? Vincent Moisy, within the production’s lively spirit, plays the prince of Denmark with vigour: emotional, his mood turning on a sixpence, beautifully overdoing the pretended madness as a lad would, mocking his uncle, uneasy about his mother’s sexuality. But he knows how to fall suddenly into the proper seriousness of the great speeches without losing what went before: his “to be or not to be” is not declaime but delivered with a roaming energy, groping its way towards cloudy wisdom before declining into the disturbing very rough hysteria of his attack on Ophelia.
There are, as any actor knows (and often dreads) a dozen different ways of being Hamlet. Moisy’s is youthful , energetic and interesting: I tend to judge a lot in any Hamlet on how it feels at the moment before the final fight and whether I can believe that he has grown to that acceptance : “the readiness is all” . I only just managed it by a whisker in Rupert Goold’s weird RSC version set on the Titanic this year. But here I was happy with it. And goodness, the final fight – directed by Ryan Penny – is another thing to remember about a summer dusk at the Anglo-Saxon burial ground, together in a breathless audience under a great chestnut tree. It is violent, cartoonishly brilliant (adding two extra corpses for luck) and takes your breath away. Until all the dead rise for the last of Carrick’s original, harmonized songs about our common road to the grave. Beautiful.
redrosechain.com to 23 August
rating 5
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