Theatre review: Hamlet (Lazarus / Southwark Playhouse)

I don't have a lot of firm rules for myself on how to write reviews, and those I do have mainly involve avoiding bad habits I dislike in other writers. So I try to always include some description, however cursory, of a play's basic story: Everyone's knowledge and experience is different, so why should I assume that a reader already knows the plot, even if the play's Hamlet? But it's not always easy to follow my own rule if the production itself seems to make the assumption that the audience is ahead of the game - if it's not really telling a story, how do I summarise it? I've been following the work of Lazarus Theatre Company on and off over the years, especially since they've become regulars at Southwark Playhouse. Ricky Dukes' productions of the classics tend to be ambitious, with all that that entails, but they always feel like a risk worth taking: Results can be mixed, but there's usually at the very least some interesting elements to take from his ideas. But he may have overreached himself this time.

Hamlet can take a lot of interpretations, but there's a sweet spot between not giving a production much of a distinct flavour, and letting a high concept overwhelm the play. Dukes' version somehow manages to err on both extremes.

The main conceit is to strip back the amount of characters, not by focusing on specific plot elements, but entirely by age: Only Hamlet and characters close to his own age are left, and anyone over about 30 has been cut out. Sorcha Corcoran's design is bare and institutional, with the cast in matching tracksuit bottoms and sweaters that suggest they're in some kind of young offenders' institution. The framing device is that Hamlet (Michael Hawkey) is in a group therapy session where the characters have a safe space to tell their story from their own perspective, perhaps explaining their behaviour to the peers they've harmed.

It's an intriguing premise and I can understand its attraction: Telling the story from the highly subjective perspective of selected characters is an interesting angle, especially in a show done so often and so open to interpretation, and early on Dukes seems to be getting away with it. But even if we're only getting Hamlet's side of the story, his actions in the play are formed by his interactions with the adults, so excising them completely means there's no context for anything he says or does. I found myself wishing Hamlet would just enlist his friends to act the parts of his parents, even if in an exaggerated, grotesque way: At least then we'd be seeing what's going on, albeit from a very skewed viewpoint.

The production seems to realise the limitations of the high concept as it goes on, and the disembodied voice (Micha Colombo) that introduced the circle of teens at the start keeps returning to read crucial dialogue from Claudius, Gertrude and others. But it's still out of context, and begs the question of why someone we assume to be the group's counsellor is openly plotting to have Hamlet murdered. We also get Hamlet coming back on stage covered in blood, with the voice announcing he's just killed Polonius. Which is all very well for me, but anyone who hadn't seen the play before might wonder who Polonius, who has never been mentioned before even in passing, was.

On top of the edits, the other way the production cuts down the running time is with a very speedy run through the action, which again doesn't help with following what on earth's going on. Ironically, the scenes which pastiche or parody other writers are the ones that are given a bit more time, so the First Player's (Kalifa Taylor) Hecuba speech, and even the "Mousetrap," here played mainly for comic effect, come across much more clearly than any of the actual story. The rest of the text ranges from the muddled to the unintelligible though, and once again Dukes' best intentions and ambitions may have conspired against him: Apparently born out of an actors' workshop, the production gives a showcase to young actors many of whom are making their professional debut.

Unfortunately I kept thinking of Michelle Terry's recent comments about new drama graduates not having been taught how to speak Shakespeare. There's a couple of notable exceptions - whether through natural talent or more early exposure to playing Shakespeare, as well as the aforementioned Taylor, Lexine Lee's Ophelia and Sam Morris' Laertes are very clear both in their speech and in its meaning. But elsewhere the speech is garbled, and I wish I could say I was confident the actors knew what they were saying but I wasn't: Actors fudge their lines in Shakespeare fairly often, as anyone who's seen a production with surtitles will know, but it tends to be slight paraphrases, or things they can then make up. Here random words are missing without which they're not even forming a sentence, let alone one that makes sense. I also always find it bizarre, especially in a production like this that glories in throwing all the rules out of the window, when it also sticks very strictly to one of the versions of the text that uses "a" to mean "he," like this one does, to the further detriment of clarity.

Worst hit by this desperate rush to get to the end of each line whether it makes sense or not is Hawkey himself, sometimes with unintended comic consequences, like when it sounds like he's said "the spirit that I have seen may be Adele: and Adele hath power to assume a pleasing shape." I was left with the image of old Hamlet's ghost wandering the battlements of Elsinore, moaning about his ex and how his taxes are too high. And this is where the production also somehow ends up both too drowned in its own concept and too directionless: Beyond being a brat prone to tantrums, there's no real flavour to Hawkey's Hamlet. Lazarus always have a place in my heart for pandering to my worst instincts for going to shows based on the attractiveness of their casts, but they also generally offer something else once I'm there. Hawkey may be the first person to make a serious play for the Schlong From Far Away award without taking off his trackie bottoms, but otherwise he feels out of his depth. Look, I make no secret of the fact that I'm shallow enough that even in the greatest production ever I might get distracted by wondering if Hamlet's freeballing, but I should be able to be brought back to the play itself pretty quickly.

The end suggests this institute is some kind of purgatory where the events will keep getting replayed - a conceit I like, and the only way to explain a framing device where characters are asked to describe events that left most of them dead. I'm a firm believer that you should try stuff with Shakespeare because even if you fail, the play is still there and will bounce back in the next production. But I also believe in remembering that every production will be someone's first Hamlet, first Shakespeare, maybe first theatre trip, and if you love the classics as much as Dukes clearly does, there's a duty to pass that love on, not present people with something so impenetrable it could confirm every suspicion that it's not for them. If this had been presented under a different title as a riff on Hamlet's themes I might have been more forgiving of it, but as a production of the play itself it lacks the central story and conflicts. The ambition of throwing an inexperienced cast (who if Terry is right won't have been properly prepared for Shakespeare anyway,) into the deep end of radically deconstructing the play has backfired, and Dukes' good intentions have paved the road to Hell. Or to Adele.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare is booking until the 4th of February at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Charles Flint.