Tonight:
9°c
I CANNOT think of a more terrifying assignment for an actor than the one that faced Edward Bennett last night. As understudy for David Tennant's widely and wildly praised Hamlet he had to take over the role for the press performance at just a few hours' notice, when Tennant's weak back gave out. In the circumstances he put on a remarkable show. You would never have guessed from the self-confidence and composure of his performance, for which he won a standing ovation from the supportive first night audience, that this was a stand-in Hamlet.
I chiefly admired Tennant's prince for his bold decision to characterise the man as manic-depressive, swinging from the elation of mocking, high spirits to the rock-bottom of suicidal dejection in "To be or not to be". But I always thought Tennant's performance one of brilliant surface behaviour and little depth. Bennett is no replica prince dutifully following in the footsteps of Tennant, who was far more prone to imitating the voices of Elsinore inmates. The Bennett Hamlet is an awkward, emotionally withdrawn, physically gauche young man, who does up all the buttons on his three-piece suit, broods in a red T-shirt and comes to resembles a cross between Peter Pan and the young Prince Charles.
He buries his head, unsexually, in the lap of Penny Downie's enigmatic Gertrude in the rather Noel Cowardish closet scene, like the little boy lost this angry, young Hamlet is. But there's no strong sense of Bennett's Prince being wracked and wrecked by trying to do revenge in Elsinore.
Doran's spectacular, modern-dress, mainly bare-stage production, with designer Robert Jones's mirrored walls, giant, swinging doors and gaggle of chandeliers, offers a far more oppressive sense of Elsinore as a prison than at Stratford. Some performances illuminate the Hamlet picture well: Mariah Gale's bereft Ophelia drifts into a painful madness, Oliver Ford Davies's far too mature Polonius, who is being nudged by senility but does not notice, smugly revels in his own tediousness, while Patrick Stewart's Claudius proves a mild-mannered, bespectacled chuckler, with a hidden, vicious streak and a suicidal impulse.
The chief weakness of Doran's production, which virtually does away with the character and politics of Fortinbras, lies in its wispy vagueness. It tries but does not really manage to evoke the dangerous, ghostly, religion and revenge-possessed world of Elsinore where spying is what comes naturally.
