8 February – 29 March
We often hear of voyages and ship-wrecks in Shakespeare but, apart from the opening of The Tempest, it is hard to think of a single scene actually set on a boat. Which makes the decision of director Rupert Goold and designer Es Devlin to place the action of the new RSC production of Hamlet entirely on a boat all the more remarkable.
The inhabitants of Elsinore from King to gravedigger are uprooted from the Danish shore and sent to sea via one of the most impressive designs I’ve seen. The stage of the main house in Stratford is transformed to the swivelling prow of a giant luxury yacht, its tip grazing the water and sometimes sinking beneath it. The backdrop is an ominously rolling sea with an occasional hint of land. The thinking behind this is suggested by the date that flashes up at the beginning – 14 April 1912 – and the urgent reminders of the time of night indicated by flickering digital displays.
The inspiration is the Titanic and the moments leading up to the collision with the iceberg. As with almost any famous tragedy, whether in drama or in real life, the audience knows what will happen but the participants, mostly smug and self-confident to start with, are in the dark. A few textual changes are necessary: chambers become cabins, the gravedigger is present but surplus to requirements, Ophelia drowns at sea, Polonius takes a bullet while hiding in a companionway rather than being run through behind an arras. Fortinbras disappears altogether though his navy is glimpsed from a distance.
It’s a very arresting conceit and one that is largely justified by the results since what we are seeing and hearing is a very familiar story in a startlingly fresh framework. Luke Thallon’s Hamlet is fresh and engaging too. He picks his way through those soliloquies like a man stepping gingerly across a stream, uncertain which stones will bear his weight. He gurns and gestures, sometimes in mockery, sometimes in genuine distress. He seems thoroughly unsuited at the beginning to the task of revenge with which he has been entrusted by a commanding Anton Lesser as the Ghost. For that key scene the backdrop projection (video designer Akhila Krishnan) changes to a purgatorial engine room, full of orange smoke and giant rods and pistons.
Jared Harris provides an expansive Claudius, his true viciousness and desperation emerging only when he interrogates Hamlet over the whereabouts of Polonius’s body. As Gertrude, Nancy Carroll shows remorse and a touching affection for her son in the bedroom scene. The comedy offered unawares by Polonius (Elliot Levy) and a preppy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is played up in a production which gets more laughter than usual in Hamlet.
In among the wide-screen spectacle, there are many striking moments. The burial at sea of Hamlet’s father, naval style; the strange, resonant scene when the players’ leader (Anton Lesser again) delivers the speech about the death of King Priam, looking directly at Hamlet; the Kabuki-style dancing in the play-within-the-play; the way in which balletic panic takes hold of the passengers as the troubled Elsinore (the name of the ship) runs into choppier seas.
At the end the sheer spectacle almost threatens to overwhelm the text, as the waves rise, the deck tilts to an unbearable angle and the ship founders. But here is a production as much to be watched as to be listened to, and the memory of this new version of Hamlet will stay with the audience for a long time to come.
★★★★☆ Philip Gooden, 19 February 2025
Photo credit: Marc Brenner
