It’s been a busy last couple of years for starry productions of Hamlet, what with David Tennant at the RSC, Jude Law at the Donmar, John Simm up in Sheffield and now Rory Kinnear in Nicholas Hytner’s new production at the National. This sudden spate of stagings might make even the most committed Bard fan slightly weary, except of course when it’s as gripping and vital as this.
Hytner’s first innovation is to set the play explicitly in a police state. All the characters are being watched, either by the ever-present CCTV or by the suited apparatchiks, forever muttering into their earpieces. The political undertones, so often soft-pedalled in performance, are here brought to the fore. Claudius – riskily but successfully played by Patrick Malahide as a vaguely Putin-esque despot – addresses his public speeches to ever-present cameras. Dissenters, whether they’re the players, Laertes’ army or even Hamlet himself, are led away by armed men or threatened with torture. Against the ubiquitous sense of violence and paranoia, the question is asked, implicitly; ‘Does one man’s life really matter?’
The answer, thrillingly, is ‘yes’, because Rory Kinnear’s quite astonishing performance more or less redefines what an audience expects from Hamlet. Kinnear has a magnificent speaking voice, perfect comic timing and the rare ability to swing from high tragedy to low comedy in an instant. What he does here, and it’s both mesmerising and eventually highly moving, is to humanise Hamlet completely. His prince isn’t mad, or transfixed with incestuous desire for his mother, or an impotent wretch unable to avenge his father’s murder. Instead, he’s a young man devastated by grief who gradually comes to realise his destiny is one suffused by violence and loss.
This energetic, intelligent staging moves at a tremendous pace throughout its three-and-three quarter running time, keeping the action as gripping as any modern political thriller. It’s always tempting fate to come out with superlatives, but I can’t remember seeing a clearer, more gripping or more emotionally rich production of this great play.
