Sheen Adds Gloss to Hamlet

Michael Sheen has played Hamlet at last, and fulfilled his promise to restore the edginess and disturbed quality to the role. The key line is that about seeing his dead father in his mind’s eye, Horatio. The whole play, in fact, is the mirage of a disturbed imagination.

Ian Rickson’s production is set in the secure wing of a psychiatric hospital which the audience enters through a backstage labyrinth of locked doors, cramped corridors, treatment rooms and a gymnasium. So you really can say that the performances are “committed.”

Denmark’s a prison alright, but not a political one. I knew something was up when I spotted my neighbour, the former England cricket captain and practising psychoanalyst, Mike Brearley, sitting in the cafe. He receives a note of thanks in the programme.

Twenty years ago Sheen was the most electrifying Romeo I’d ever seen (he’s still the best) and he followed up with a wild and mercurial Peer Gynt at the Barbican. He was obviously the next great Hamlet, but when he joined the RSC in 1997, he only played Henry V.

So it’s been a long wait. He told me some years ago that he was going to do Hamlet with Michael Grandage at the Donmar, but somehow that never happened (or, rather, perhaps, Tony Blair did) and Grandage eventually went with Jude Law.

In fact, though you’d never know it, Sheen hasn’t played any other Shakespeare in all this time. But his control of the verse is total, to such an extent that he eschews lyricism entirely and speaks it like jazz, breaking up rhythms and imposing a quite breathtaking rubato without losing any meaning. 

A violet-suited Claudius runs the asylum, Gertrude is a prime inmate, obviously off her face with drugs, and poor little Ophelia the caretaker’s daughter; Polonius goes around making notes and recording his observations in a dictaphone.

The scenes with the Players are really roughed up, “The Mousetrap” a work entirely of Hamlet’s devising, with a quick burst of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Another pop idol, P J Harvey, has been enlisted to set (very well) Ophelia’s mad song, which she delivers in a wheelchair, plucking at what looks like a treated zither.

I suppose one problem you might have is sitting through the show trying to make it fit the concept, always a bad gig. But it’s all done with terrific enrgy and panache, from the moment Sheen grabs his dead father’s cloak and speaks his words — reminiscent of Jonathan Pryce literally vomiting forth his father’s voice — to the surprise emergence of Osric from Ophelia’s grave and the arrival of a black masked Fortinbras who turns out to be…you guessed it.     

Horatio and Laertes don’t come off too well, the first played insipidly by Hayley Carmichael, the second too bluffly by Benedict Wong. But there was the same sort of problem in Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet at the National. And the bedroom confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude never works when the two of them are shouting at each other in a room without a bed in it. It’s not a sexy production.

Is Sheen a great Hamlet? Almost. He’s certainly urgent and charismatic, very fast and witty. But you never know whether he’s really mad or feigning it. And he’s really too old for a young man, even if he’s meant to be an eternal student. Or is this an extreme case of arrested development?
 
I liked the idea of the Players, just a ragged threesome, turning up like a remnant of cultural care in the community, Pip Donaghy’s old actor wheezing away almost to the point of extinction. But that’s symptomatic of a show that keeps throwing out ideas which you then have to sit back and consider. But it’s never remotely boring.
 
And the horse-shoe, wrap-around configuration of the Young Vic is ideal for Shakespeare, where the asides and soliloquies don’t have to be marked off in any way differently from the dialogue. Sheen does the soliloquies brilliantly.

Several critics went to the last preview, which was scuppered by a technical hitch when the coffin got stuck, or the lighting failed, or something…the reports are conflicting. So they all had a nice extra forty-five minute interval to add to the usual fifteen minute one. As the show runs for three hours, twenty minutes, that meant carriages at 11.30pm.

Never mind, that’s what previews are for, to get the show right, not help critics meet their deadlines.

And last night’s first night audience was equal to the challenge. The model and actress Lily Cole, perched sweetly between director Rickson and Jerusalem author Jez Butterworth, had even spent the afternoon with the students on the street, protesting against tuition fees, bless. If anyone’s thinking of doing a Pre-Raphaelite Hamlet, she’d make a perfect Ophelia…she looks exactly like the floating corpse in John Everett Millais’ famous portrait.