Denmark is a prison. Elsinore, in Nicholas Hytner’s modern dress production, teems with security guards with earpieces. Everybody is under surveillance. Every step is dogged. Every door, every window, has an eavesdropper. The whole palace is bugged. There is nowhere to hide. Intimate moments between Hamlet and Ophelia are recorded by hidden cameras.
Rory Kinnear is no royal prince; he’s an ordinary bloke, a post-graduate at Elsinore, well into his thirties. His bedroom is a tip. The bed is an unmade mattress on the floor and the only furniture is a trunk, full of books. He smokes a cigarette whilst considering whether to commit suicide or not.
Kinnear is immensely likeable. He’s very good with the verbal wit and rudeness. His Hamlet is not mad at all. He pretends to be mad merely to disconcert, confuse and annoy. He enjoys pranks. Some of them are childishly cheap and unworthy of him. He provides everybody with a T-shirt with a funny face and the word villain written under it and then pulls down his trousers in front of the whole court.
Nobody is more rotten in the state of Denmark than Patrick Malhide’s creepy Claudius, who is not your usual bloated king, but a Stasi-like bureaucrat who addresses his opening remarks to the television cameras. David Calder’s Polonius is no fool and one of Calder’s most telling moments is an unexpected pause when he is in the middle of lecturing his son Laertes on always being true to himself and he is confronted with his own hypocrisy.
Hytner’s production is full of clever touches, such as the arrest of all the players. Not surprising after performing a play which accuses the king of murder. Interesting, too, is the way Claire Higgins’s Gertrude sees the ghost of her murdered husband but pretends she doesn’t. The most startling innovation is that mad Ophelia didn’t drown herself. She was murdered.