{"id":4160,"date":"2014-09-18T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T07:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4160"},"modified":"2016-02-05T19:25:50","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:25:50","slug":"hamlet-royal-exchange-reviewed-by-peter-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4160","title":{"rendered":"Hamlet<\/em>, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hamlet,<\/em>\u00a0Royal Exchange, Manchester, 11th September-25th October, 2014<\/p>\n

To begin with: an admission of my own ignorance. When, some months ago, I first espied the poster currently glorying the Royal Exchange, Maxine Peake, that brilliant, severe, intelligent actress last seen here by us as Strindberg\u2019s Miss Julie<\/i>, staring out from beneath a frowning forehead above the word HAMLET, I was struck. Firstly, by a single word: audacious<\/i>. And then by a sense of my own innate sexism (what a piece of work is a man<\/i>): why shouldn\u2019t Maxine Peake be Hamlet?<\/i> Much later, flicking through the programme before the play began, I was struck afresh. There I was thinking that Maxine Peake was the first actress to have dared such a thing as (to paraphrase Withnail and I<\/i>\u2019s Uncle Monty:) playing the Dane<\/i>. What a limited view I had. This whole concept, a woman as Hamlet, was as old as Shakespeare himself. Everyone from Sarah Bernhardt to Rising Damp<\/i>\u2019s Frances De La Tour had had a crack at it. Humbled (there is always so much to learn), and yet excited, I took my seat.<\/p>\n

Things to know in advance of watching this particular production: it is, in some senses, ambivalently modern. Aside of the guards, who wear police tabards, the cast dress smartly, conservatively, shirts, suits, dresses. It could be almost any time in relatively recent years. You will hear much of the rearrangements, the reversals, the excisions, how this scene has been moved and that character lost. This Hamlet<\/i> has no Fortinbras. Gillian Bevan plays Polonia as if s(he) was an office manager, her curtness with her daughter Ophelia providing an additional reason for the eventual madness (and we laugh at her cruelty and are drawn in, accessories to the way in which Ophelia is made an accessory herself). Jodie McNee \u2013 who was so good in A Taste of Honey<\/i> some months ago \u2013 plays Rosencrantz as a tattooed, leather jacketed tough (and, we are sorry to say, is one of the play\u2019s current weak spots \u2013 someone should advise her to run less). But we get ahead of ourselves. The thing to know is that this is a production that likes to mix things up, that pushes at our expectations, that defies us.<\/p>\n

The play\u2019s the thing, though \u2013 and a playful play is what it is. From the poster \u2013 which shows Maxine Peake with an oh so womanly \u2018do \u2013 to the shock of her brooding first appearance, hair savagely shorn, an alien watchfulness as she sits at a dining table alongside Claudius and Gertrude and Laertes and Ophelia and others. All our eyes are upon her, her withdrawal from the family round, her refusal to participate, her glowering presence. In the first of many such baits and switches, we see how unhappy Hamlet is with his \u2013 with his<\/i>? (you are asked, aren\u2019t you, to ask such a question?) \u2013 mother\u2019s speedy marriage to her late father\u2019s brother. The play is the thing but how else can you describe play? Play is dress-up. Play is mask and masque. Play is a trick. And here, as Hamlet, Peake is at her tricksiest. Even over the course of a single speech, modulating her tone, Peake can be Mark E Smith (barking into a microphone from the top of a dressing up box), Peake can be Julie Walters as Mrs Overall (walking about the stage, bandy-legged, a clown showing off for cheap laughs), Peake can be Tom Courtney as Billy Liar (tartly answering back her \u2013 her? \u2013 mother and father). She shouts, she rages, she whispers, she arches her admirable eyebrows, she laughs, she stares corpse-eyed and stony faced, she lies on the ground pretending to be dead. This Hamlet\u2019s a firecracker alright.<\/p>\n

And there is a palpable sense that, somehow, the blockbuster theatre that you hear tell about, the shows that go on in that there London starring actors and actresses what we have seen offof the telly \u2013 somehow (ssssssh) has made its way to Manchester and (ssssssssssh, not so loud) we are all privy to something that is in fact really rather special. The audience is as wired as the actors and actresses. Together, wanting to like the thing, we collectively seize on those elements that are good: the light show that manifests the ghost of Hamlet\u2019s father, John Shrapnel who plays both the Ghost and Claudius, Thomas Arnold who plays Horatio as if Horatio fronted Elbow in his spare time, Barbara Marten as Gertrude (we like Gertrude under Marten\u2019s hand, even though we don\u2019t want to, instinctively we think she shouldn\u2019t earn our sympathy but she does), the aforementioned Gillian Bevan who is as good in her role as (whisper it) Peake is in hers, bringing to this production of Hamlet<\/i> the kind of off-kilter comedy that Michelle Gomez brought to Green Wing<\/i>.<\/p>\n

But not everything is good. Some would go as far to say that, over the course of its three hour run (three hours twenty if you count the interval that doesn\u2019t announce itself until a good two hours in, knees and backs and shoulders aching at every tier of the Royal Exchange\u2019s towering circumference), this Hamlet<\/i> is uneven. Ah, you might say. But Hamlet is uneven. The character is uneven, a fitful tempest of action and procrastination, that the play should ape the man, why that\u2019s a particular kind of genius right there (Director Sarah Frankcom does deserve a lot of credit, she has done a great job, this Hamlet<\/i> is GOOD Hamlet<\/i> for the most part) \u2013 but if there are things wrong we must note them, mustn\u2019t we? The play\u2019s the thing and if the play\u2019s uneven then so the play is uneven. Who do we blame else? If Hamlet from himself be ta\u2019en away\u2026 <\/i>Well then, Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged. His madness is poor Hamlet\u2019s enemy. <\/i><\/p>\n

And it is madness that most undermines the production. It occurs to me, as a weighty phalanx of old clothes fall from a box in the ceiling immediately prior to the gravedigger\u2019s scene, that over twenty years of attending theatrical events at the Royal Exchange, I have seen a great many plays, a great many of which were very good and a handful of which (the concentration camp Macbeth<\/i>, last year\u2019s deranged Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i>) were very, very bad \u2013 and the reason that the bad plays were bad was, in the main, because a very simple rule is flouted. A play, a whole play, is composed of scenes and each scene works like a number and all of the numbers should add up. When the Royal Exchange gets it wrong, each scene is treated almost as an independent thing, an exercise in how far an envelope can be pushed, a merry dance that sits askance the scenes that rest alongside, such that taken together, the whole becomes muddled. Uneven. The clothes from the ceiling are a case in point (Hamlet addresses Horatio about Yorick\u2019s skull, Yorick\u2019s skull being a rolled up sweater \u2013 and we the audience note the strange difference \u2013 why are we saying a sweater is Yorick\u2019s skull? \u2013 and become alienated from the drama). After the clothes are done with, there is nowhere for them to go and so they are pushed into a circle around the final action. Not once, not twice but three times, principals move first one pile of clothes and then another. Why on Earth do these people keep pushing the clothes about? Are they still meant to represent skulls and earth? Is burial soil surrounding? Or are the clothes just clothes? <\/i>Antic disposition, you might say, to lift a line from elsewhere in the play, or needless distraction. Either way it doesn\u2019t entirely work and Michelle Butterfly is robbed of some of the glory of what would otherwise be a fine Scouse first gravedigger. There are also actors who are little too theatre school (Ashley Zhangazha\u2019s Laertes lets the side down a bit) and actors who leave us cold (Katie West who we last saw in Royal Exchange misfire Blindsided<\/i> is Ophelia and has already attracted some good notices but she left us questioning whether anyone can really do a good Ophelia, so unsympathetic is the character ultimately, the scenes of her unravelling interminable).<\/p>\n

And yet, through all of this, the familiarity of the words and phrases and lines that have passed through the centuries and into eternity, into the very air we breathe, ring out. Good night sweet prince. Brevity is the soul of wit. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. To thine own self be true. The lady doth protest too much. What a piece of work is a man.\u00a0 Doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love. <\/i>The pure beautiful poetry of the piece sings out. Some things can\u2019t be done badly even when they are. Overall? \u201cWas \u2019t Hamlet wronged?<\/i>\u201d Not entirely. It is Peake\u2019s night, as the cast withdraw to allow her a solemn solo bow, the whistles and the applause signal that, for the most part, we seem to feel gladdened to share what it is she has brought to the history of this enduring drama \u2013 and we forgive those things that, for whatever reason, didn\u2019t quite land as well as we would\u2019ve liked.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Peter Wild<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hamlet,\u00a0Royal Exchange, Manchester, 11th September-25th October, 2014 To begin with: an admission of my own ignorance. When, some months ago, I first espied the poster currently glorying the Royal Exchange, Maxine Peake, that brilliant, severe, intelligent actress last seen here by us as Strindberg\u2019s Miss Julie, staring out from beneath a frowning forehead above the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nHamlet, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4160\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hamlet, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hamlet,\u00a0Royal Exchange, Manchester, 11th September-25th October, 2014 To begin with: an admission of my own ignorance. 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