The last time Rupert Goold directed Hamlet, in 2005, he took the audacious step of excising the avenging Norwegian prince Fortinbras entirely from the play, and creating a high-concept visual feast in which Denmark’s ruling dynasty played out their dysfunctional vendettas as a private family feud uncomplicated by national politics.
Twenty years later he’s done the same thing. Again Fortinbras is nowhere to be seen, and this time all the action takes place aboard a private cruiser, the Good Ship Elsinore, on the 14th of April 1912 (yes, the date the Titanic sank). Affairs of State are notably absent from this ruling court. Unlike David Icke and Andrew Scott’s Hamlet, which was oppressive with surveillance cameras and secret police, Luke Thallon and Goold’s is all heaving decks and vast receding horizons, a romantic, evocative and barren mindscape.
When it comes to Shakespeare, Goold is the master of the ‘One Big Idea’ school of directing. His stunning Macbeth with Patrick Stewart was set in a Romanian torture chamber. His Tempest was an Arctic wilderness that opened with the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast. His Richard III was Game of Thrones inflected, full of ominous walls, brooding thrones and extraneous rape scenes. Goold has a habit of throwing ideas at the play and seeing what sticks. Normally a lot does.
In the case of this Hamlet, audiences and critics have been divided. It’s garnered everything from 2-star hatchet-jobs to 5-star raves. And it’s not very hard to see why. The shipboard concept is wrestled into place and just about held down, like a tarpaulin over a piece of cargo in a storm. In order to make it work, lines have to be altered and actions fudged. Polonius doesn’t say he will hide ‘behind an arras’ but ‘down those stairs’. Hamlet doesn’t go to England (he can’t, he’s stuck on a ship). The gravedigger, well, obviously he can’t dig a grave (not without making a hole in the bottom of the boat), so instead he throws Ophelia’s body overboard. The visiting troupe of players appear to be just floating around in a dinghy in the hope of finding somewhere to perform. And the entire action of the play is shortened to three hours in the middle of the night – exactly mirroring the sinking of the Titanic. Shakespeare purists may well leave feeling both sea-sick and horrified. It’s trying to squeeze a square peg through a round port-hole.
Even more seriously, Luke Thallon’s performance – at least in the first half – is almost outrageously polarising. In an attempt to make Hamlet sound like he is making up his words on the spur of the moment, Thallon fills every line with ‘umms’, ‘errs’, ‘oohs’ and winces. It’s so mannered that the effect is precisely the opposite of what he seems to be attempting. If you want to make Shakespeare’s words sound natural, pretending that you can’t think of what to say only draws attention to their artificiality. It’s a truism to complain that the actor playing Hamlet doesn’t follow the instructions he himself gives to the players, but here it is undeniable. Thallon’s halting delivery is the direct opposite of a ‘temperance that may give it smoothness’.
On top of this, there are odd elements that seem completely out of keeping with the clarity of the concept. The play-within-a-play is a bizarre, mimed affair with the actors making avant-garde musical noises, and Ophelia at one point performs a piece of interpretive dance that belongs more in 1972 than 1912. Neither of these have any place on the deck of the Titanic. Much as Goold and his designer Es Devlin hold true to the central, heaving deck idea, there’s a feeling that they have shied away at times in favour of something contradictory and self-defeating.
And yet.
There is so much to love about the idea. The image of Hamlet’s world being not a European country but a tiny fortress, lost at sea and heading for disaster, certainly intensifies the brooding, claustrophobic, domestic nature of the drama. The ship feels like the train carrying rail tycoon Morton in Sergio Leone’s 1968 Western Once Upon a Time in the West. Travelling aimlessly back and forth at the whim of its capricious leader, it’s a minuscule fortress of luxury trying pathetically to ignore the brutal reality of the outside world. And once you accept the rough edges of its integration with the original text, the idea takes you over. Come on in, the water’s freezing. And the sight of all the characters rolling down the inclined deck and off into the waves at the end recalls some of the most exciting digital moments of James Cameron’s (otherwise execrable) movie Titanic.
The constant movement of the deck, rearing up ever steeper as the ship of Yorick’s fools starts to go down, is a feat of theatrical engineering. It’s both thrillingly vertiginous and depressingly slow and careful, like a haunted house automaton that's been over-regulated by health and safety. But its creaking undulations, backed up by gorgeous visuals of the surrounding sea, make for an immersive, sensual experience.
And Thallon’s Hamlet made more and more sense to me as the play unfolded. His physical tics and vocal interjections are not, I realised, just an actor trying to look realistic. This is a Hamlet with a disability. His verbal diarrhoea, sudden moments of violence, and readiness to say the most embarrassing things at the worst moments, all point towards a character with Tourette’s Syndrome – an affliction which, in 1912, would have been greeted with exactly the impatience and exasperation shown by Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet’s anger is as much a struggle to escape the confines of his own mental and physical limitations as it is to avenge his father’s murder. Seen in this context, Luke Thallon’s performance transforms into one of subtlety and courage. I wouldn’t mind watching it again from the start.
And there are other great performances to be enjoyed here too: Jared Harris as Claudius strikes a perfect balance between wannabe Good King and manipulative evildoer. There is a wonderful moment of repose when, in his study, he lays his forehead on his table and confesses, in the first perfectly measured line of the show, ‘O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven’. Elliot Levey is also a magnificent Polonius. Rather than the usual fussily unbearable old fool, he is a courteous and considerate advisor, careful not to push the Prince too far, and ready to offer advice when needed. In Levey’s hands, Polonius comes across as the most attractive character in the play, and this in turn makes Ophelia’s descent into depression and insanity all the more understandable after his murder: she hasn’t been freed from a comically overweening autocrat, but has lost a loving father. Anton Lesser is also magnificent in all three of his roles: ghost, player king and gravedigger. His voice is as smooth and capricious as the surrounding sea, and he is - as always - a joy to watch. Lesser is more.
But in this production the standout moment is the ‘closet’ scene: the encounter between Hamlet and his mother in her bedroom. For one brief moment the ship seems to vanish, the theatrical acrobatics fade into the background, and we are left with a son, a mother, a mountain of regret and an inability to communicate. In a bitter echo of his advice to hold the mirror up to nature, Thallon’s Hamlet becomes hypnotised by the looking glass in Gertrude’s room, able only to talk through reflections, and hopelessly lost between the concrete world around him and the illusions in the mirror. It is the moment when this production discovers that Hamlet is a tragedy, and, although it comes late, it comes in time. By the end, we are all falling into the sea.
The final image of Goold’s Hamlet is perhaps the most divisive moment of the entire evening. Hamlet, rather than dying, stands on the sinking ship facing the audience, his arms outstretched to the sides in a conscious re-enactment of the iconic image of Kate Winslet at the climax of James Cameron’s film. At that moment Winslet’s character is freed (literally) from gravity and (metaphorically) from the restrictions of her social class. Is Thallon’s Hamlet expressing his own newfound freedom from the pain of existence? Has he accepted ‘not to be’ as the final answer? Or is he simply paying homage to Kate Winslet? I’m going to say ‘both’. Like everything in this production, it’s polarising. And I think I like getting polarised.