Skeptics puzzling over the logic of watching 82-year-old Ian McKellen playing student prince Hamlet need only look as far as the play’s second scene in which Hamlet rebukes his mother. “I have that…
need only look as far as the play’s second scene in which Hamlet rebukes his mother. “I have that within which passeth show.” It’s an amplification of the line Shakespeare gave his chorus character ten years earlier in “Henry V”: “Let us … on your imaginary forces work.” Thus an age-blind, color-blind and gender-blind “Hamlet” is, in theory, perfectly valid. In practice, however, Sean Mathias’ rudderless, torpid production at Theatre Royal Windsor stifles McKellen’s still-powerful potential.
Troublingly, each actor appears to be working in a different style. The production gives off the sense that they were each instructed to go away and make a single character choice, all of which were then merely assembled on stage. The result is that aside from a tenderness between Hamlet and Ben Allan’s sweet, earnest Horatio, we’re shown almost no relationships of any galvanizing depth.
But his performance doesn’t change and the choice makes him so emotionally shut down that there’s no discernible connection between him and Jenny Seagrove’s Gertrude. She in turn boasts next to nothing in terms of character besides an accent — Danish? German? Why? — that renders much of the text unintelligible and a wig so huge that it seems to be there solely so it can be yanked off in the closet scene in order to show her metaphorically laid bare.
What’s missing for her is the vital weight in the relationships between characters. Without it, all tension evaporates. The result is that the stings and doomy melodrama of Adam Cork’s soundscape provide more atmosphere than the performances.
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