• Hamlet (NT Live)

8/3/17 (Thurs), Tokyo

An encore showing of the Barbican production, filmed by the National Theatre people. This Hamlet had broken records not only on stage but in its NT Live incarnation at movie theaters two years ago thanks to the popularity of megastar Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead. While I don’t get the sex symbol thing at all, he was excellent as the monster in the NT’s Frankenstein some years back (also a sellout here in Tokyo), and I’m impressed at any TV/film star who’s willing to put himself out there in a challenging role like this. 

Director Lyndsey Turner has taken considerable liberties with the text, starting with the first lines. Instead of the sentries and the ghost, here we find Hamlet brooding over photographs of his late father while a phonograph plays Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” – very symbolic, I’m sure (it reappears later as underscoring). We thus see a dark Hamlet from the start, a potentially interesting approach. But it devolves thereafter into a series of gimmicky ideas that are distracting and sometimes just dumb. Hamlet feigns his madness, for instance, by dressing up as a tin soldier with a play gun and marching around in a toy castle, all of which just happens to be lying around the palace. Couldn’t they come up with something more logical? Worse, it is Ophelia who dresses him – so is she aware of his scheme? But wouldn’t that invalidate her madness later in the play? It doesn’t make sense.

In another case, Hamlet himself takes the stage in the play-within-a-play and poisons the play king, which complicates things unnecessarily at a time when he was supposed to be carefully watching the reaction of his uncle (whose back was to us much of the time anyway). Also, Ophelia was oddly shown photographing objects with an old camera, a detail that doesn’t add to the play or Ophelia’s characterization in any way that I could fathom. And what was the sudden explosion just before intermission and the resulting rubble in the second half? Is that supposed to be literal, or is the director trying for a metaphor of some kind? I’m not sure she had a clear vision of what she wanted to say. The intended time period was uncertain what with the turntable, camera, piano and such, not to mention the Horatio with face tattoos and backpack; I would guess the 1950s or 1960s, but the director doesn’t really run with the concept other than throwing in a few gadgets (I’m just happy there were no cell phones). The impression was that she was trying to be different for its own sake.

The play was better at individual moments. I was wary in the banquet scene when Hamlet stepped out of the stagy Last Supper-like tableaux and up onto the dinner table, but it worked spectacularly with a stunning “too, too solid flesh” soliloquy, delivered to perfection by Cumberbatch as the others faded away in the darkness. In the best scene of the night, a barefoot and broken Ophelia limps away from the worried queen up a ruined landscape and disappears, going as we know toward her death. Her slow fadeout in that giant space was devastating and beautifully handled. That was followed by a terrific moment when the queen’s discovery of the broken camera and ripped-up photos makes her realize what Ophelia is up to. There were a number of such highlights throughout.

That same is true in a way of Cumberbatch. He was an active Hamlet, running frantically about at times (he apparently lost a lot of weight in the role), and was never less than fine. But he did seem swallowed up by the concept at times. It was the quiet moments in the soliloquies that were far and away his most impressive scenes, especially the “too, too solid flesh” speech and the graveyard bit. All were delivered with utter conviction, achieving the considerable feat of making the many iconic lines entirely his own. I would love to see him in a different production, though I don’t suppose he’ll be doing this demanding role again anytime soon.

He enjoyed strong support from Ciarán Hinds as Claudius, Anastasia Hille as Gertrude and especially Karl Johnson in the brief role of the gravedigger (he also doubled as the ghost). Jim Norton as Polonius was fine but hampered by a silly approach that had him reading his advice from a notepad rather than babbling on in the more familiar avuncular and busybody way. I wasn’t entirely taken by Sian Brooke as Ophelia. Her jumpy portrayal became irritating, and her nervous breakdown was out of an Actors Studio parody (though my friend thought she was the best of the supporting cast).

Set designer Es Devlin put the huge playing space to good use, creating a massive castle adorned with heraldry and ancestral paintings (Hamlet was nicely positioned in front of his father’s portrait at one point) along with a large staircase and landing. The set dictated a large staging, and the director did her best to fill it. It was curiously reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland with barren dirt floor in the second half, which was at least atmospheric. It was hard to tell how the more intimate scenes must have played on that vast set since the film, live or not, necessarily involves close ups. I notice that some critics felt that Claudius and others were subdued in their performances in the theater, whereas I thought they were very natural as seen here, making me wonder if the different media led to different responses.

The production was often puzzling but never boring, and the smaller moments, particularly the soliloquies, were consistently excellent. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone seeing the show for the first time, but it’s an interesting if unconvincing variation. Cumberbatch fans, at least, will be pleased.