TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Hamlet
Wyndham's
Theatre Summer 2009
The best thing about this Hamlet is Jude Law, giving a passionate, intelligent and frequently original performance. The worst thing is a general lack of spark and excitement in what is a carefully thought-out but rarely inspired production.
Law, whose last London appearance was as a disappointingly bland Dr. Faustus in 2002, has grown significantly both in stage presence and in ability to make an overly familiar text come alive. The big danger facing all actors in this role is lapsing into empty recitation of the set pieces, but Law's line readings are fresh and natural throughout, without being idiosyncratic, letting us witness a Hamlet feeling and thinking these things for the first time.
The actor's determination to act each line occasionally takes him to an excess of physical business, sawing the air too much with his hands, but it's a small price to pay for the life and reality he brings to the character. Only 'To be' and the Nunnery Scene defeat him, as they do almost every actor, the lines we all know by heart proving impossible for the performer to make new.
And, as a bit of a pedant, I am particularly pleased to hear Law fully understanding and clearly communicating some of the play's deepest philosophical and metaphysical thoughts, as in the 'divinity that shapes our ends' and 'fall of a sparrow' speeches.
Law's accomplishment is particularly impressive when almost everyone around him does lapse into mere recitation much of the time - an indication that director Michael Grandage either devoted most of his attention to his star or just wasn't particularly interested in making the secondary figures as alive and real-sounding. (Grandage's direction also falters in leaving non-speaking actors stranded onstage as their characters seem uncomfortable at watching or listening to what's going on.)
Kevin R. McNally has the legitimate excuse that his Claudius is conceived as very much a public man, most of his speeches the consciously artificial pronouncements of one creating and sustaining a political persona. This pattern makes the few glimpses past the character's mask, as in the Prayer Scene, all the more powerful.
The always-reliable Ron Cook strips away the annoying layers of dim-old-codger comedy that have built up around Polonius, leaving a crisp and competent civil servant who is a formidable obstacle to the hero, though Cook, like the others, tends to slip into empty recitation, as in the rattled-off and unfelt advice to Laertes.
Some may find Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Ophelia disappointing, but her underplaying establishes the girl's fragility from the start, and her quiet and unhistrionic Mad Scenes are especially moving and chilling in the vision of someone collapsing into herself.
Gertrude may be one of the most thankless roles in all of Shakespeare, and Penelope Wilton joins a long list of admirable actresses unable to do much with her. Only in the Closet Scene, where Wilton shows us the real pain of a mother fearing for her son's sanity, does the character come alive.
Elsewhere, only Alex Waldmann's attractively boyish Laertes and David Burke's droll gravedigger really register.
It may be damning with faint praise to say that Jude Law delivers more than we might have expected from him in this Hamlet. But his is, in fact, a fine and thoroughly admirable performance, and by far the best thing in a solidly-good-but-not-great production.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - Hamlet - Wyndham's 2009
