A tale of two Hamlets in Guildford and London

Hamlet

Holy Trinity Church, Guildford

Hamlet is a play set on the border between life and death. It opens with a ghost and closes with a pile of bodies. In between, its bereaved central character spins along that border, talking about existence and extinction, heaven and hell, murder and self-slaughter, his mind haunted by memories and shadows. Sanity becomes a slippery thing, not just for Hamlet but for the traumatised Ophelia and the incensed Laertes.

Two new productions embrace that liminal space. At the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Sean Holmes’s Hamlet plays with the flickering candlelight for which that theatre is famed: the opening scene plunges us into inky blackness with just a tiny glow illuminating the disturbing prospect of a ghost. In Guildford, Tom Littler explores the echoey recesses and dancing shadows of Holy Trinity Church. Both productions, in very different ways, are coloured by the brooding obsessiveness and spiky alienation of their respective Hamlets.

In the Guildford Shakespeare Company’s staging, that prince is Freddie Fox, a slight, blond, clenched individual whom we first encounter in a silent prologue to the action, processing solemnly down the aisle towards his father’s coffin. Next he’s swigging whisky from the bottle and spitting sarcasm, brewing up the loathing and self-loathing that will gnaw at his mind.

This is a Hamlet who may or may not be mad but who is certainly unstable: the ghost here is a disembodied voice (played by Fox’s real-life father Edward), a tactic that reminds us that no one but the prince actually hears his instructions. He drinks — a lot — and his manic antics — taunting Polonius from the pulpit in a bishop’s mitre, for instance — feel genuinely unsettling in this ecclesiastical context.

It’s an intelligent, moving performance full of illuminating insights and supported by a staging rich with revealing touches. Stefan Bednarczyk’s Polonius, here, is a bishop, who launches into homilies at the drop of a hat; Noel White’s Claudius a slick operator who talks at, rather than to, everyone else on the stage; Gertrude (Karen Ascoe) is a woman trying to convince herself she’s done the right thing and slowly sinking inside. Rosalind Ford, as Ophelia, plays the cello — a skill used to very good effect in her touching mad scene — and the isolation of the young people comes across potently. The only warm presence is Pepter Lunkuse’s helpless Horatio.

As so often with Hamlet, what doesn’t come over is the political import of the tragedy: Littler uses helicopter sound effects well, but it’s still hard to sense that a country’s fate is at stake and that the rotten business corroding the royal family has national significance. The staging sometimes struggles with the church’s acoustics and occasionally flips into melodrama. But this is a probing, compelling production that uses its setting to pull out the fearful shadows in the text. And Fox reminds us that Hamlet, for all his vulnerability and legitimate distress, can be hard to like: his aggressive torment of Ophelia is disturbing.

★★★☆☆

To February 23, guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk

Hamlet

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London

That observation is dialled up much further in Sean Holmes’s production at the Sam Wanamaker, where George Fouracres offers an altogether more extreme portrait of alienation and rage. His Hamlet is a moody, broody Morrissey-style malcontent with a Midlands accent, who stomps about Elsinore in his Doc Martens, scrawls graffiti on the walls and sings snatches of The Smiths’ “Bigmouth Strikes Again”. 

He seems — deliberately — to be in a different play to everyone else. While they trip about in ruffs and farthingales, Hamlet is channelling every disaffected youth down the ages: smart, scornful, miserable and infuriatingly self-indulgent. But he also catches his character’s quicksilver intelligence and the way that curdles into something more disturbing. This Hamlet becomes alarmingly volatile and his playful moments (including droll use of the audience in some of his soliloquies) come cheek by jowl with dead-eyed monologues and sardonic outbursts. He is frighteningly unpredictable, increasingly sadistic, and the ghost (Ciarán O’Brien), who rises from an onstage pool which becomes the portal between this world and the next, is a bellicose warrior not so much entreating as ordering Hamlet to commit murder.

This makes for an interesting study of dangerous disaffection and there are other sharp ideas in Holmes’s staging, which brings elements of the director’s earlier deconstructed Shakespeare productions with Filter theatre company. There’s a defiant edge to Ophelia’s madness from Rachel Hannah Clarke; Polly Frame’s Gertrude, reckless in her despair, swigs champagne and heckles during the duel; the gravedigger chats with the audience about comic interludes.

Much less attractive, however, are some of the text disruptions: “Fuck Fortinbras!” yells Claudius, which just feels juvenile. The player’s speech is now an extract from Romeo and Juliet, as if the audience might not grasp the resonance of Hecuba’s grief. It feels as if it’s straining to be edgy and different, and amid all the hurly-burly we lose sight of the tragedy.

This is a restless production that wrestles the play away from moody beauty and gives us a splintered, messed-up world seen through Hamlet’s eyes. But what gets lost along the way is the emotional depth of Shakespeare’s tragedy. It’s unmoving.

★★★☆☆

To April 9, shakespearesglobe.com

Spike

Watermill Theatre, Newbury

For a real-life comic genius and eccentric outsider, we could look to Spike Milligan, key member of the legendary BBC radio comedy outfit The Goons. Launched in 1951, The Goon Show was a game-changing blend of skill, anarchy and ridiculous sound-effects, paving the way for alternative comedians to come. And while the gleeful delivery of the performers cemented its success, the deliriously absurd scripts tumbled out of the mind of Milligan, a brilliant maverick and a man scarred mentally by his wartime experiences.

Spike by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman pays tribute to his talent in the best way possible — by being very silly indeed. It begins by embracing the creative versatility of radio: ingenious sound effects artist Janet (Margaret Cabourn-Smith) talks us through a Foley table, crafting chases, battles, forests and beheadings out of cabbages, rulers and hot water bottles. It then celebrates the Goons’ comic relish of that potential, bouncing from scene to scene with manic Goon-ish intensity.

Paul Hart’s production rattles through the early days, as the irrepressible Harry Secombe (Jeremy Lloyd), urbane Peter Sellers (George Kemp) and Milligan cook up the gleeful mayhem of the show.

It goes down swimmingly with the public, less so with BBC executives. “The secret of comedy is professionalism,” intones Robert Mountford’s starchy head of comedy, a man without a funny bone in his body. Milligan, having had his fill of orders in the army, resents this dim-witted snobbery and struggles with both PTSD and a schedule that runs him ragged. Underneath all the knockabout, Hislop and Newman touch on serious issues: the shock of the new, the obtuseness of the establishment and the importance of mental health issues.

John Dagleish is great in the central role, giving Milligan a gangly charm but also a restless, driven quality that makes plain the whirling mind that is both his gift and his torment. It could go a great deal deeper: the BBC and army chappies have as much substance as the military top brass in Milligan’s scripts, and the drive to be upbeat also constrains it. But it’s a genial and affectionate tribute.

★★★★☆

To March 5, watermill.org.uk