The Time Lord Saves The Prince

A Review of the RSC's 2008 production of Hamlet at The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, starring David Tennant, and directed by Gregory Doran

Steve Newman

The trouble with Shakespeare is that his work is just too familiar, even if you don't know it inside out, it has, over the centuries, become part of our make-up: we know it instinctively, and consequently react to it with an in-built reflex action that, if a production is bad, we step aside to avoid it, as we would a wild punch thrown by an overweight drunk. At other times we are caught totally off guard with a powerful right and left hand combination to the head that sends us reeling. It was like that last Monday evening (8th September) when we were punched senseless by Gregory Doran's much heralded, and much anticipated, production of Hamlet.

What Gregory Doran has done with this production (as he did with his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream back in 2005 - a production revised this season) is to make the text stand up and breathe, as if he has become, through association, something of a Time Lord himself, with the consequent ability to check-out first hand what Shakespeare meant by this line, or that line (of course Shakespeare probably said he had no idea what he meant), which, once he was back in the Tardis, at least gave him the courage to break up and reallocate certain parts of lines – such as Polonius' obviously too often heard lecture about lending and borrowing – into three mouths instead of just the one. In the hands of a bad director this technique (assuming they even thought of it) always misfires, but in the hands of this country's finest Shakespearean director (with a few very good actors) the technique works wonderfully well, making it genuinely reactive and real.

Of course, by casting David Tennant (Dr Who) as Hamlet, Greg Doran has run the inevitable risk of being accused of simply signing-up a 'name' that will sell tickets. But then selling tickets is what theatre is all about isn't it - no audience no theatre, even for a hugely subsidised one. Peter Hall had a similar dilemma in 1959 when he signed-up Paul Robeson, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton, with - like Hamlet this year - all that season's plays (which included Othello and A Midsummer Night's Dream ) sold out months in advance, but, unlike this year, every show was panned by the critics. The audiences didn't mind of course, they'd seen the movie star they wanted to see, for many that was enough.

Now, that could have been enough for most of the Dr Who fans who may have come just to see David, but I would argue that the majority of those fans, once the production began, soon forgot about The Doctor and fell head over heels in love with Tennant the all consuming actor, whose vibrancy, elasticity, eloquence, humour and diction brought this production alive the very second he stepped on stage looking like the epitome of the angry young man with a great deal on his mind. It was almost impossible to take your eyes off him. And even the doubters ( and we heard some negative comments in the foyer before the show started) must have been won over by this young man's ability.

Most productions of Hamlet I've seen invariably take the easy – and accepted – option of showing the Prince as a genetically mad chip-off-a-mad-old-block who was at the centre of a mad and decaying Danish dynasty; in other words not much hope for anyone connected with said dynasty. But what Doran and Tennant have done, and done convincingly, is show a young man genuinely grieving for a very recently dead father, and genuinely at odds and struggling with a step-father (who's also his dead father's brother) who seems to be loved by Hamlet's mother more than she ever loved the young man's father. And if that wasn't enough Hamlet, having come across his father's ghost, discovers that his father was murdered. And to top all that – and Shakespeare does love to layer it on – we and Hamlet also discover that his father was murdered by his new step-father: his father's brother. Now that would leave any of us a bit withdrawn and off balance and candidates for the shrink's couch.

Consequently what we see Tennant create in a remarkably coherent fashion is a young man in many ways determined to restore the dignity of the Danish throne, and if that means killing his step-father (who has confessed to the murder anyway, and plots more), making his mother a widow again, killing Polonius by mistake, and then not giving it a second thought, sending poor old Ophelia to a watery mad house before running off to England where he no doubt sought council with our own Royal Family (and HRH The Prince of Wales was in the audience last Monday too) before returning to settle a few scores, dying nobly in the process. And it all made wonderful sense, as did the last line of this production where Horatio proclaims:

Now cracks a noble heart.

Good night sweet prince:

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Nothing more is said ( all of the final dialogue between Fortinbras and Horatio has been cut) and, in a fading light we see Horatio fall to his knees as Fortinbras enters. By allowing the play to end on the above three lines Doran has made clear what he feels to be Shakespeare's own real feelings for Hamlet – that he was a good and strong man struggling with, and 'winning', an almost impossible fight, that - with the help of the young Norwegian prince Fortibras – will mark the end of the rottenness in Denmark. It was wholly convincing and a wholly convincing performance by Tennant. It was masterful.

And although there were masterful performances by the rest of the cast, not least Patrick Stewart's chilling, erudite, and Saville Row suited Claudius, John Woodvine's Player King, Jim Hooper's hilarious Dumb Show Queen, Peter De Jersey's Horatio, Penny Downie's truly troubled Gertrude, Mary Gale's compelling Ophelia, and Oliver Ford Davies' superb, and superbly funny Polonius, this Hamlet belongs to David Tennant.

Hamlet plays in Stratford until November 15th, when it transfers to the West End of London.

 

***