Hamlet

In the autumn of 1998, Richard Armitage appeared for the first time at the Birmingham Rep in a production of Hamlet.

Directed by Bill Alexander and starring Richard McCabe, ‘Hamlet’ opened for a three-week run at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 22 September 1998. This was Richard Armitage’s first professional engagement in the theatre since graduating from LAMDA in the summer of 1998 and it took him back to his home turf in the Midlands. He appeared in eleven scenes, playing the small roles of Barnardo, the officer of the watch who sees the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the play’s opening scene, and Voltemand, ambassador to Norway, as well as the non-speaking parts of a Lord’s Attendant and Lucianus, a Player.

The production garnered some good reviews in the national press. In the Financial Times, Ian Shuttleworth wrote: "[B]oth the internal story of Hamlet’s vacillation and the external tale of the rottenness in the state of Denmark are told admirably"; Paul Taylor in The Independent called it a "gripping and unsettling production….a sweeping, urgent account of the tragedy and strongly recommended".

HAMLET
Birmingham Rep
Opened 22 September, 1998

The set design is credited to Ruari Murchison, but really it is Tim Mitchell's lighting which defines the space, with its walls, curtains and castellations of white light. The guards on the ramparts in the first scene, punningly, duck under one of Mitchell's beams as they enter; the ghost vanishes at cock-crow behind a sheet of light. As order in the Danish court breaks down, so does the seeming solidity of these effects, as Claudius and various courtiers walk through what are apparently light-walls into and out of scenes. It may be a deliberate decision on director Bill Alexander's part, but it looks as if an idea has rather been let slip than developed.

So much of Alexander's production is so nearly great, but stops short at merely very good indeed. Richard McCabe's shadow has for some time fallen before him across the role of Prince Hamlet: McCabe is particularly distinguished at dealing with complexity both of language and emotion, at portraying them clearly and lucidly without sacrificing any of the accompanying intensity. This Hamlet's antic disposition is not overacted – when the Prince toys with those around him, he is quietly mordant for his own private enjoyment only; similarly, when his distraction grows more genuine, there is no sign of grand Guignol insanity to him. However, there is correspondingly little sign that this Hamlet might ever have had an active, impetuous side to his nature, which throws into imbalance the central dramatic tension between impulse and inaction.

Both facially and in his repertoire of gestures, Gerard Murphy's Claudius is the kind of bruiser who keeps subtly reminding you not to get on the wrong side of him – not openly coarse (until desperation sets in in the later acts), but with a constant undertow of menace. Jack Klaff enjoys Polonius's greatest excesses – "Your son is mad" and the encounters around the players – but reins himself in elsewhere. Rakie Ayola's Ophelia is girlish and immature from the start, degenerating into the shrill, whirling kind of madness which McCabe's prince eschews.

Alexander excises Fortinbras and the war against the Norwegians altogether, and with additional nips and tucks brings the play in at three and a half hours. Although sparks ultimately fail to fly in either area, both the internal story of Hamlet's vacillation and the external tale of the rottenness in the state of Denmark are told admirably.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

Double Review: Pierced humanity engulfed in murk
Paul Taylor reviews `Hamlet' and Judy Upton's `Confidence' at Birmingham Rep

WITH THAT prankster-cherub face and those subversive gobstopper eyes, Richard McCabe communicates a wonderful spirit of suppressed anarchy as a performer and developes a terrific rapport with an audience. Having made his reputation with memorable performances as Shakespearean comic characters - Puck, Autolycus, Touchstone - he now graduates to the hero who is, in a sense, a profound comedian miscast in a revenge tragedy.

Taking the title role in Bill Alexander's gripping and unsettling production of Hamlet at the Birmingham Rep, McCabe brings an expertly-edged, goading levity to the Prince's "antic disposition". He parades about in a night- gown which he gawps inside, to check the state of play with his genitals, at the line: "That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs". Ordered to leave for England, he treats an appalled Claudius to a satirically- lascivious kiss and skips off in a parody of camp, carefree gaiety.

Full of sudden false-footing mood switches, the performance never lets you lose a sense of the hero's pierced humanity. The Elsinore that oppresses Hamlet is unerringly conveyed here as a cavernous shadowy world, littered with whispering young spies - the action taking place on a murk-engulfed wooden thrust-stage that stretches back to a sinister lone door in the far distance. Brutal-looking, but also given to brief fits of panic-weeping, Gerard Murphy - playing the ruler of this realm - is quite the best Claudius I've ever seen. You can almost feel the character's brains and guts knotting from the passionate sweaty intensity with which Murphy's Claudius enacts the tortured wrestlings with the problem of repentance. And there's a wonderfully unsavoury comic blatancy about the way this King manipulates Laertes (Martin Hutson) into believing that he is making the running in the plot against Hamlet.

The text has been cut in an odd manner so that we get the admittedly excellent, yet rarely played scene between Polonius and his spy Reynaldo, but no sight or mention of Fortinbras, the man of action who helps highlight the value of Hamlet's contemplativeness. His absence makes for an unduly sentimental ending. This is, nonetheless, a sweeping, urgent account of the tragedy and strongly recommended.

In the Rep's studio theatre - now given a new look and a new name, The Door - the autumn season of writing gets off to an amusing yet slightly disappointing start with Confidence by the prolific Judy Upton. Seaside towns seem to be for her what daffodils were for Wordsworth, not to mention what depravation was for Larkin. Ashes and Sand, for example, which won her the George Devine Award, focussed on a violent girl-gang in a washed- out resort. In Confidence the havoc along the prom is created by one girl, Ella, an erotic accident-zone who is played with a startling mix of don't- give-a-shit cool and witty insolence by talented newcomer, Jody Watson.

"Do you want to be the kicker or the kicked?" asks a character. Ella wants to be the person who can pay someone else to kick the kicker and, as she embarks on a scheme of tricking tourists into taking boat trips to see a couple of bogus motorised dolphins, she strings along more men than she can manage.

Anthony Clark's production is beautifully acted but I became irritated with the relentless quirky humour and the characterisation - Ella enjoys frozen chocolate bars in the same way Monica Lewinsky enjoyed cigars. By comparison with Ashes and Sand or Bruises, which was a bleak comic exploration of how domestic violence is passed on from generation to generation, Confidence fails to convince you that there is anything major at stake, while displaying bags of eponymous virtue.