Theatre review: Hamlet (Young Vic)

Returning to the London stage after a few years of fighting The Good Fight and, more dangerously, The Good Wife in America, Cush Jumbo comes to the Young Vic to play Hamlet for Greg Hersov, a director she worked with a lot in the past when he was Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange in Manchester. There's centuries' worth of tradition of women taking on the role, as well as black actors more recently, but I think she might be making history as the first woman of colour to do it in a major London production. There was never much doubt that she was up to the task, and she gives a powerful performance; but while Hamlet remains my favourite Shakespeare play on account of how infinitely flexible it is, it is of course performed very often because it's seen as such a pinnacle of an actor's career. And this was one of those productions that made me wonder - outside of wanting to give an actor their shot at the big role, what was the reason for staging this particular production, at this time?

Of course, however many times I may have seen the play, any performance - particularly at a theatre like the Young Vic that specialises in bringing in new audiences - will for some people be their first encounter with the play. And on that front, I think Hersov's take will be a decent introduction to the story*.

This isn't a gender-flipped or gender-ambiguous performance: With a buzz-cut and presumably some form of chest-binding, Jumbo is definitely playing a male prince, and in fact the direction she takes could certainly be seen as a comment on masculinity. The Prince of Denmark initially appears to be an understandably depressed young man, upset at his father's recent death and the fact that his mother Gertrude (Tara Fitzgerald) has very quickly moved on to remarry her late husband's brother Claudius (Adrian Dunbar.) But the castle's battlements are haunted by the old king's ghost, who demands that his son take revenge: Claudius murdered him to steal his crown and queen. Hamlet swears to take vengeance, but for reasons that might be interpreted differently here than in most productions, he takes a very circuitous way to it.

At this point one of the major choices for any production of Hamlet comes in: Hamlet starts behaving erratically, but is he just feigning madness as he says, or has he really lost his mind? For me Jumbo's performance answers this in two distinct stages, with a very performative, exaggerated madness to start with, but soon the character loses control, not to an actual mental illness, but to sheer impotent rage. This may be the angriest Hamlet I've ever seen, and Jumbo isn't afraid to make him outright unlikeable. Usually his charm and sense of humour keep the audience on Hamlet's side and overlooking some of his harsher actions, but even the jokes are here delivered with a sneer. This is Hamlet as dead-eyed, manipulative psychopath. He doesn't delay in his revenge because of any dithering or uncertainty over the ghost's motivations or his own ability to take action, he delays because he's too busy being destroyed from the inside out by his own anger.

It means we're more keenly aware here of how needlessly destructive of those around him Hamlet truly is: Rosencrantz (Taz Skylar) and Guildenstern (Joana Borja) are here an influencer couple, clueless but not deserving of being dispatched to their deaths with one of Hamlet's smirks. Most sinned-against is of course Ophelia, which hits particularly hard here as Norah Lopez Holden manages to make her very layered considering how little she has to work with. Despite professing to still love her Hamlet uses her as an unwitting tool in his madness plot, contributing to her own madness and death. I don't think I've been angrier at Hamlet's performative grief at her funeral, that he's largely responsible for.

But for someone who's seen the play as many times as I have, the most shockingly sociopathic moment in his behaviour is in the famous Yorick scene. I liked that Jumbo showed the disgust at the skull that's in the text but rarely shown, but once he gets over that her Hamlet shows zero respect, let alone affection, for the remains of a beloved figure from his childhood. Leo Wringer's Gravedigger, bringing some much-needed levity and heart to the scene, even has to stop him from throwing the skull away and smashing it at the end of the speech. It's certainly a novel approach to the character, and one that feels topical - Hamlet's toxic masculine rage is allowed to destroy a kingdom, and with a female performer in the role it's as if Jumbo is channelling some of her own anger at the world into showing this - but it's a pretty exhausting level to sit through for three plus hours, and it's a shame it doesn't leave much room for the charisma Jumbo's shown in past roles to come through.

The production around this central performance has a much less defined personality however. The modern dress puts it firmly in the present day, but while the rotating mirrored pillars of Anna Fleischle's set design look good to start with, they're never used particularly interestingly and don't create much of a sense of what kind of court Elsinore is. The central pillar's also the scene of some seriously ham-fisted blocking in the death scene for Joseph Marcell's affable Polonius. There's a lot of promising touches but not all of them go anywhere - Laertes and Hamlet don't interact until their final showdown, so I liked Jonathan Ajayi, in the early scene where they share the stage, giving a little suggestion that there's pre-existing tension between them. On the outright disappointing side, Nina Dunn's smoky projections suggest we're going to get a genuinely eerie ghost scene, only for Dunbar to just amble onto the stage to deliver his exposition.

Mother of God! I'm dead!

Dunbar's even more underwhelming as Claudius, presumably meant to come across as a charming but untrustworthy politician: There's a line between "enigmatic" and "just not giving your character a personality," and by the time of Claudius' soliloquy in the chapel it's clear he's crossed it. There's a fair bit of text editing ("To be or not to be" gets moved forward a few scenes,) most of which works fine, but there's a baffling choice at the very end, when Jonathan Livingstone's Horatio is given a couple of Fortinbras' lines†. I'll grant you that I sometimes find "Good night sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" a cheesy line to end on‡ but "He was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally" is an even clunkier ending, and a downright bizarre thing to say if you're Horatio, the person who arguably knew Hamlet best, and should know exactly what he was like without having to theorise about it. (Outwith the ending Livingstone is great, and Horatio's utterly unimpressed reaction to experimental theatre steals the "Mousetrap" scene.)

So certainly a mixed production all things told, and despite a strong concept for the central role, delivered in a powerful performance, I don't think this will go down as a Hamlet for the ages, at least not in my memory. Jumbo gives an intense performance that has the courage of its convictions in exposing the toxicity of a usually beloved character. But Hamlet has half the dialogue in the play named after him, and without much to focus on elsewhere in the production, it can at times feel relentless.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare is booking until the 13th of November at the Young Vic.

Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*having said that, I noticed the person sitting next to me spent much of the interval looking on his phone for a synopsis, so maybe I'm not the best judge of what's a clear telling.

†the Fortinbras subplot seems to have been cut very late in the day, as the cast list still credits Skylar as playing him. It's certainly the right choice, as that ending would have made no sense in the context of this production.

‡and there's nothing sweet about this particular prince anyway.