That Isaac Asimov’s retelling of a bemused reader’s response to Hamlet – ‘I don’t see why people admire that play so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together’ – has itself become a well-worn anecdote is only a testament to the challenges faced by those daring to stage the play today: acknowledging Hamlet’s canonical status has become clichéd, it is already canon. What can a new production do now when confronted with all that has already been done? There’s only so many different ways you can inflect ‘To be or not to be’. The play itself is haunted by Old Hamlet’s ghost, and today the play’s past versions haunt all those who dare to take it on.
Carys Howell seems to recognise this in her Hamlet, which played at the Keble O’Reilly. In Act 2 Scene 2, she has Claudius, bored and hungover, flick through a programme while Polonius pontificates in front of him. The programme used turns out to be for The Motive and the Cue, Jack Thorne’s new play about John Gielgud’s 1964 production of, you guessed it, Hamlet. Recognising a difficulty, though, is not the same as overcoming it.
This production’s new, present-day, concept was advertised quite explicitly. The marketing team of Nicole Gibbons and Evie Holloway promised a ‘press angle’, as Howell described it in a Cherwell interview. Professedly inspired by recent media coverage of the Royal Family, this production promised to explore the impact of newly emerging forms of media, both social and otherwise on public life. Occasionally, we see Howell’s production live up to this. Between some scenes we hear talk radio-style discussions of Elsinore’s ongoings. In a tone more combative than anything we could hope for from the British media, these additions bring the political infighting of the Danish court into the present day. The new media angle also feels meaningful in Hamlet’s mockery of Polonius. Scrolling on his phone, Josh Sneddon claims to read ‘words, words, words’ and, later, ‘slanders’ from ‘satirical rogues’.
Apart from this, though, the references to new media are quite rare, and feel tacked on. Entering the theatre, we see two actors lying on stage engrossed in their phones, but nothing comes of this. Occasionally, a stage manager comes onstage with a video camera, but the actors never give it any attention, nor does it seem to lead anywhere. There is another problem, though, that first becomes noticeable with the entrance of the video camera. The direction too often follows Robert Icke’s direction in his 2017 version with Andrew Scott. Sneddon’s Hamlet hides behind a sofa in Act 1 Scene 3 just as Scott’s does, and this is not the only instance of copying. Like in Icke’s, the search for Polonius’s body is stylised with torchlight. This continues to the play’s end, when each of the dead characters in the play’s final scene stand up during Hamlet’s monologue and pass him to exit upstage, while Old Hamlet’s Ghost returns once more. The second biggest laugh of the night comes when Claudius mistakes Rosencrantz for Guildenstern and vice versa, only for Gertrude to correct him. This is a joke straight from Icke’s production. Influence is one thing (Howell cites the set design from Icke’s version in her Cherwell interview), but this much results in a production that just feels like a pale imitation.
As for the acting, the standout performer is Joe Bangbala as Old Hamlet’s Ghost and the First Player, who brings an intensity of presence and clarity of speech that sets him apart. Meg Bruton as Horatio brings an endearing quality that justifies Hamlet’s fondness of her, and Nic Rackow’s delivery of Claudius’ public pronouncements is assured. Josh Sneddon plays Hamlet well in parts. He has a habit of pausing in places that loses the meaning of the lines, so that, for example, ‘I do not know why/ Yet I live to say “This thing’s to do”’ turns ‘I do not know why yet I live’ and ‘This thing’s to do’ into separate impulses, with ‘to say’ stranded in between. Perhaps he wants to imply that Hamlet is coming up with his speech in real time, but this comes across as formulaic, especially when combined with his persistently ironic tone. He would do well to follow Hamlet’s own advice to the players: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.’
It is also regrettable that Sneddon fluffs some of his lines. We lose even some lines that Asimov might claim as part of the string of famous quotations, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her’ being one of the most noticeable. It is not an easy task to learn all the lines for the title character of Shakespeare’s longest play, especially when combined with the demands of a degree, but that is what Sneddon signed up for, and he falls short of it too often. That said, his performance grows stronger in later scenes, and he has a good rapport with the more minor characters, especially in scenes in prose.
As a whole, though, the production’s most successful moments are additions that don’t come from the text. When Claudius video calls his emissary, Voltimand, he tells him, deadpan, ‘I think you’re on mute’. All the major laughs come from these sorts of extras. Humour already in the script, like The Gravedigger’s claim that in England ‘the men are as mad as’ Hamlet, tends to fall flat. Similarly, the design team seems to be at odds with the text used. Old Hamlet’s Ghost is dressed well in a dark military suit, and yet he is still described as ‘in complete steel’. The fencing foils in the final scene both have obvious rubber tips on the end, despite Laertes admitting to using an ‘unbated’ sword. Howell is clearly not opposed to minor alterations to the text (she changes the word ‘hugger-mugger’ to ‘speedily’, presumably to make the dialogue easier to understand), so in this vein we ought to have consistent alteration carried throughout.
When Hamlet can finally tell us ‘Now I am alone’, his moment to speak uninterrupted with the audience is barged in on by a soundtrack that seems intended to convey intrigue. Yet, near the end of that same soliloquy, when some intrigue actually presents itself in his plans for the play within the play, the track cuts and Sneddon mutters ‘the plays the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ as he rushes off stage with a blackout coming halfway through the line. This, to me, is symptomatic of the main problems with this production. In parts, the production is interestingly original, but, for the rest, we are left with a production that hasn’t spent enough time thinking about the play as a whole and its specific details. It is all just slightly ‘out of joint’.
