Theatre review: Hamlet (RSC / RST)

It's 14 years since Rupert Goold last worked at the RSC, and almost a decade since he last directed a Shakespeare play. Now he returns to close off the new leadership's first year in the main house, and in his time away the director who brought us horror movie Macbeth, emo Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Vegas hasn't forgotten how to come up with a high concept. Although whether he can still pull the concept off might be a matter of opinion. Goold brings with him one of his big discoveries from his time at the Almeida, throwing Luke Thallon into the deep end for his first professional Shakespeare role as Hamlet. The titular character is Prince of Denmark, having recently lost his father but not succeeded him as king. That title has gone to his uncle Claudius (Jared Harris,) who as well as his brother's crown has also claimed his widow: Weeks after the old king's funeral Claudius has married Hamlet's mother Gertrude (Nancy Carroll.)

Hamlet isn't exactly happy about the situation, but it's nothing to how he feels after being visited by his father's ghost, who informs him he was murdered by his brother, precisely for the purpose of stealing his queen and power.

The ghost wants him to take revenge, and is presumably expecting a typically bloody Jacobean revenge tragedy rampage, but instead his son starts acting so erratically that even the king and queen notice. Meanwhile Hamlet's actual revenge plan has been postponed in favour of him double-checking the ghost's story for accuracy by getting a troupe of actors to perform a play. And they need to get a move on, because once that's done Hamlet still has to do the actual revenge bit before they all drown. Oh yeah, small detail, this all takes place ON THE TITANIC WHILE IT'S SINKING.

Yes, rumours started to fly a month ago that Titaníque might not be the year's most bizarre story to be set on the iconic but doomed liner, and as production photos have come out in the last week it's become apparent that yes, the cast would indeed be getting a sinking feeling eight times a week. Theoretically this all takes place on the SS Elsinore, but I'm not even sure why anyone bothered with that pretence: A caption tells us this all happens on the 15th of April 1912, and the play's events all happen in a single night as the ship sinks. Which is actually at least two high concepts, and proves at least one too many.

I'm the King Prince of the World Denmark!

The maritime setting is actually largely successful, and leads to some of the most memorable moments. Visually of course, and I'll come back to the design, but also in the way the production gets around some of the story elements that are very firmly set on dry land. As tends to be the case for Goold the text hasn't been treated too reverently, with a lot of chopping and changing. Two of the last three RSC Hamlets have created a cliffhanger into the interval by breaking just as Hamlet is considering killing Claudius at prayer, but in the most obvious bit of text juggling here "To be or not to be" gets moved to just before that scene, and the interval is taken straight after.

There's a similar approach to individual lines, given the familiar dynamic feel by, as well as the odd nautical change, not being too bound up in rhyme and metre. The characters don't always end all their lines, whether because they get interrupted, distracted or just lose their train of thought. It adds a conversational tone without losing the essence of the writing (it's Hamlet, you've got to cut something,) but for me the cleverest change was the one that got Yorick's skull into a setting where all the burials are at sea: Here the skull is planted in the story much earlier, because evidently the clown donated it to the troupe of actors to use as a prop (a development presumably inspired by André Tchaikowsky's skull being donated to the company*.)

But it's the time constraints added to a story that usually happens over days or weeks that trip the production up and leave the plot full of more holes than the ship, not least of all that two characters need to be driven to madness instantaneously. I actually like the idea of the family and political drama carrying on while the ship sinks under everyone's feet - after all as written it happens while an invading army is reaching the castle gates - but that's not how this plays out. By tying the action to the real-life timings (a projection regularly updates us on the time) we already have other crew and passengers running around in lifejackets halfway through the story. That's several hours where everyone's completely ignoring an elephant in the room that's really, oh I don't know, some word that means a very large thing.

This also includes people like the players, who have no personal connection to the story. I'm sure the inspiration here is the Titanic's band playing on, but I suspect the real musicians stoically played tunes they already knew, rather than going "well, we're going to die anyway, we might as well learn something one of the passengers has just composed to prove a point." The time limit also makes it a lot harder for the setting to work: I can buy that Laertes (Lewis Shepherd) was upset enough by his father's death and worried enough for his sister that he'd want to return to a sinking ship; not so much that the crew of the boat that took him away would bring him back though. On the flipside, Claudius' plan to have Hamlet killed in England is convoluted at the best of times, let alone when the alternative is to do literally nothing and he'll be at the bottom of the ocean in a couple of hours anyway.

All of this also leaves the supporting cast with little chance to really make their roles their own: The female characters in this play particularly need attention to make a mark, so Carroll and Nia Towle's Ophelia are pretty much left swimming against the tide. Harris fares a bit better with a drunken, vicious Claudius, while some of Polonius' worst waffle has been cut, so Elliot Levey gives us more mildly embarrassing, ineffectual middle-aged dad than doddering old fool.

Which leaves us with the two leads - yes there's usually just one, but then Hamlet doesn't usually have to compete with an actual ship. Es Devlin's set turns the RST's diving board stage into a huge ship's deck on a gimbal, wobbling about as it starts to become unstable before starting to see-saw in the second half, flinging cast members around wildly. The visuals won't be forgotten in a hurry, and create moments like the atmospheric meeting with the ghost down in the engine room, pistons pumping in the background and water already starting to leak; along with Adam Cork's music it helps build this into Hamlet-as-thriller. As for the finale where the ship's finally tipped right over, it'll be hard to beat this year in both the coup de théâtre and endearing whatthefuckery stakes, as one by one the characters are killed off, slide down the deck and under the stage - so even at the height of the drama there's room for a tongue-in-cheek reference to the James Cameron film.

So it's impressive in itself that Thallon can give us an interesting take on Hamlet up against all these distractions. After a run of productions that have emphasised the nastiest elements of the character's toxic masculinity, he finds a way back to the tragic hero through his mental health struggles. The question about any actor's Hamlet is whether he's really mad or just pretending as he claims to be, and while some of the ticks and twitches seem exaggerated depending on who's watching, deep down this madness is real. His real tragedy is that he was very nearly out of the woods - when we first meet him he's genuinely angry and upset, but when Kel Matsena's Horatio arrives he gets back his energy and sense of humour and seems ready to move on. Instead the ghost's message sends him spiralling in the other direction.

Instead of doubling the Ghost as Claudius, the production goes for the other popular casting of having him return as the Player King, so now when Hamlet sees Anton Lesser among the actors his reaction is a genuinely disturbed terror. And his cruelty towards his friends is very clearly set up as a response to his paranoia after finding himself in the middle of a conspiracy: He's actually very genuinely kind to Ophelia right up until the point where he realises she knew their conversation was being spied on. Meanwhile we have a particularly likeable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Chase Brown and Tadeo Martinez' pair of Americans utterly out of their depth among Danish royalty, with Martinez in particular movingly heartbroken that his friend thinks they've betrayed him in some way they can't even understand.

Here it's Hamlet himself who kills the unfortunate duo, a sign of how out-of-control he really is but also done in an expressionistic way that's confusingly at odds with the rest of the production. Worse is Akhila Krishnan's generally dramatic projections also including a digital clock next to Devlin and Evie Gurney's otherwise Edwardian design - there's certainly a few elements of the show the feel like last-minute fixes. Plus at no point does Thallon pose like one of your French girls, and that's just a wasted opportunity. So for all that I loved Goold's batshit brand of ambition, if you ask me whether the production works as a whole it has to be a no. But if the question is whether this is ridiculously memorable, visually stunning and generally worth catching, my answer might be different.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare is booking until the 29th of March at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner / Ikin Yum.

*so no, I couldn't leave the building until I'd found someone who knew if André played the role in this production. Apparently he's now only brought out for special occasions, but had been used for Press Night. Then again the RSC has a history of lying about whether or not André's been used, because the official reason for them retiring him is that knowing about the real skull was distracting audiences.