In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The Tempest and as Lenny in Pinter’s The Homecoming. A little further back he’s been Macbeth in a curiously Popish staging by Michael Boyd and Richards II and III in Boyd’s great Histories sequence.
A less Eliotian conceit is the director’s notion that Hamlet is about sword fighting or, in this modern-dress interpretation, specifically fencing. The RST’s deep thrust-stage becomes a chill gymnasium, armoured on every available wall with the cutlery of the sport and the egg-like wire masks customarily worn by the participants. Could there have been dramaturgical input from the RSC’s previous chairman, Sir Christopher Bland, himself a sometime champion jouster with foil and épée?
Executed to perfection by designer Jon Bausor, the gym features at the rear a small curtain stage, the whole suggestive of a leisure facility in a Danish barracks. You know it’s Denmark because of an Elsinorean castle painted on the backdrop for ‘The Mousetrap’, and because Ophelia and Laertes sport the patterned knitwear popularised by detective Sarah Lund in TV’s Nordic epic The Killing. Stark fluorescent lighting for the more violently physical enactments, softer tones for the Court. Little surprise that at Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding party the guests, dancing in slow-motion, had forgotten they were still wearing their wire masks.
This is sadly symbolic of the unmemorable characterisation of Horatio, Laertes and the here less-than-supporting male roles. Polonius is an unmitigated bore, the matronly Gertrude beyond comprehension. As Claudius, the elegantly suited Greg Hicks, usually so compelling, seems even more unsettled than Hamlet, rattling distastefully through his words as though wishing to be rid of them.
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