Hamlet

Synopsis

Written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father, the King, and then taken the throne and married Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. The play vividly charts the course of real and feigned madness - from overwhelming grief to seething rage - and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

Our Review:

8 November 2002

Ian Brown is the latest in the line of incoming artistic directors to prologue his incumbency by tackling a Shakespearean big beast. It's a risky strategy. If successful - especially with Hamlet, believed by many to be the greatest play ever written - you're left with the problem of how to follow up; and if unsuccessful, you condemn yourself to working out your contract in a game of catch up.

Brown mitigates both these eventualities. He already has nine previous productions to his credit at this address, and Hamlet is the second, not the first, production in the co-ordinated programming of his first season in the chair. It was preceded, and is closely harnessed to, Gemma Bodinetz's September staging of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The two productions share a set (by Angela Davies) - a completely empty timber box with a dozen doors along the walls like a massive Kafkaesque prison cell - and, for dedica...

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Latest User Review

Mike - 4 May 2011:

I would like to give it four plus; that is, not quite five. I became fully engaged in the story as a story, in the psychology as psychology and the performances as reality. Apart from Hamlet accellarating a few times the speeches were constrained to normal speaking speed and I was able to savour the language, hear (almost) all the words and keep a firm track of (most of) the nuances. Hamlet did gabble in traditional Shakespearean style sometimes and then remembered himself. We enjoyed some of the tricks like Ophelia paddling, but especially the chalking. The analysis of "To be or not to be" in six simple monosyllabic words was close to genius - suddenly even I understood....

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