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.
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