Changing of the Bard

Hamlet was probably written sometime between 1599 and 1602. The Almeida’s new version opens with a couple of security guards watching surveillance footage taken in a corridor. Well, of course it does. Nothing says ‘late medieval Denmark’ like closed-circuit television. Hamlet (Andrew Scott) appears. His black shirt and matching trousers suggest a snooker pro at the Crucible or a steward on a Virgin train. Scott is known as a ‘character actor’ (code for ‘baddie’) rather than a leading man. His petulant, squelched-up face and his Ronnie Corbett physique make him perfect casting for Third Crackhead in a squat melodrama but he hasn’t a chance of capturing Hamlet’s lordly despair, his scathing humour, his meditative isolation, his rebellious grandeur, his personal affability, and so on. Scott gives it everything he’s got, which isn’t much. Gruff, sarky, cynical, bad-tempered, ever prone to the full-on hissy fit, he stomps around in his waiter’s costume bawling out the text as if he were an angry nun or a fed-up driving instructor about to retrain as a cage fighter.