By William Shakespeare
Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

Review by Steve Orme (2004)

Michael Boyd's first production as the RSC's artistic director - it's almost 18 months since he officially took over from Adrian Noble - was well worth the wait. There can hardly be any new ways of presenting arguably the world's greatest and most performed play - yet Boyd has found one.

Hamlet is a triumph for Boyd; it's also a triumph for Toby Stephens in the lead role and for everyone associated with the presentation. It's superbly acted, sensitively directed and cleverly staged.

Hamlet is the fourth in the Tragedies season which has involved a new way of working for the company. Having seen all four plays, I can report that Boyd's initiative is an unqualified success.

By introducing a longer rehearsal period, Boyd has enabled his actors to concentrate on Shakespeare's verse and try out different ways of interpreting speeches which some audiences can recite verbatim. This gives a freshness to words which were written more than 400 years ago.

I don't think I've ever seen such fabulous troupe as the one in Hamlet. The play needs a number of strong characters to succeed; here no fewer than a staggering eight actors shine.

When Boyd and associate designer Tom Piper came up with their ideas for staging Hamlet, they wanted to concentrate on the political aspect of the play and create a dangerous world with rigid rules, a king who was in control thanks to his bodyguards and the concept of Polonius as a feared spymaster.

The set is fairly basic, with a curved black wall at the back which has several doors and openings to allow eavesdropping. A metal gangway that protrudes into the auditorium provides several fascinating entrances.

Boyd and Piper also wanted to create purgatory - the place where the souls of dead people temporarily go to atone for their sins. The Ghost of old Hamlet is clearly in purgatory - a suffering, tormented creature "doom'd for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires". This explains why Hamlet, although anxious to take revenge on his father's murderer, turns into the procrastinating prince - he doesn't want to end up in the same place as his father.

Award-winning Greg Hicks, who last year gave us an arrogant yet humble Coriolanus and this season is superb as Macbeth, almost steals the show. He gives the most amazing portrayal of the Ghost: his lath-like frame is bent over, he has sunken eyes, a pained expression and drags his clanking sword behind him as he ponderously labours across the stage.

Hicks then gives us an elegantly restrained interpretation of the Player King, resisting the temptation to exaggerate, taking nothing away from the verse; and later he effortlessly becomes the gravedigger, extracting every bit of humour from the text.

Clive Wood gives a strong performance as Claudius, comfortable with murdering old Hamlet so that he can achieve his ambition of snatching the throne, while Sian Thomas's Gertrude, classically regal, shows a mother's unconditional love for Hamlet whatever situation he finds himself in.

Richard Cordery, an RSC stalwart, is excellent as Polonius, not a bumbling old fool but a formidable, menacing control freak. Meg Fraser gives us a mature Ophelia who is nonetheless frightened of her father. Gideon Turner is a resilient Laertes and Forbes Masson a caring, humane Horatio.

All their efforts would be devalued if the actor playing Hamlet wasn't up to the job. But from his first appearance Stephens is magnificent. He is bored in Claudius's court as he has to sit through how his uncle came to marry his brother; he rages at Claudius during his "O! that this too too solid flesh would melt" speech; he is almost inconsolably angry when he hears of his father's murder; and he gets more than a sprinkling of laughs from those members of the audience who appear fairly new to the play.

Boyd has also assembled a proficient supporting cast. Hamlet is the best offering in a quality season at Stratford; it's almost a faultless production.

Источник

Directed by Michael Boyd, Toby Stephens plays Hamlet in the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) latest version of the play.

MARK LAWSON:
Natasha, we know it's a fantastically well known play. I was astonished by the number of people who were actually mouthing the words the night I was there, they know it so well. It shows how hard it is to find anything new in it. Have they found anything?

NATASHA WALTER:
I think the real problem for me in this production is that Hamlet himself is Toby Stephens. There is this moment when Hamlet says to the players, "Now do not saw the air too much with your hand" and I think Toby Stephens could have taken that advice on board. You know, there was much too much of the flourishes and the pushing back, so he was always swaggering around the stage, declaiming these words right across the audience and I think there's nothing to Hamlet unless there's a real inward conflicting between what's going on inside and what's going on outside and when you've got an actor who wants to put so much into the external swagger, for me the centre of the play, it just wasn't there.

LAWSON:
Justin, it is, it's a very Gielgudian performance, almost fluting in voice.

JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT:
Yes I actually thought it was brilliant. The thing I liked most about it was it actually gets to the nub of what Shakespeare was concerned with. A 16-year-old worrying about is A- levels, is not a necessary update of Hamlet whereas this was right back to succession, millennial worries, incest, and perhaps the thing I'd never seen before in Hamlet, purgatory. We get a very clear idea that Shakespeare and Toby Stephens are very concerned about purgatory and the ghost comes encrusted with a leprose crust, because he hasn't yet been released from purgatory. It's an extraordinary moment.

LAWSON:
Justin comparing it unfavourably with Trevor Nunn's production at the Old Vic.

TONY PARSONS:
I don't think I've ever seen a production of Hamlet that the audience seemed to enjoy so much. It was a real crowd pleaser. There was a fantastic use of space. The gangway split the audience and you felt like Greg Hicks, who was an unbelievable ghost, would suddenly be at your shoulder as he came clanking it very, very slowly. Or Ophelia...

LAWSON:
Dragging his sword...

TONY PARSONS:
There was that, and they also milked it for a lot of humour. Polonius is practically this Tommy Cooper character and like Natasha, I had a few doubts about Toby Stephens. He seemed to be a little bit too camp and high pitched. "Art though being served", it was a bit like that. The crowd loved him and he is a real leading man but he wasn't angsty enough. He was too, he was more Prince William than Morrissey.

LAWSON:
I had this bizarre experience because there is this cliché of course, Hamlet without the prince and thought he couldn't have it but actually I enjoyed all of it apart from the Hamlet. It was the twentieth I've seen. As a production, I'd put it in the top two or three with Richard Eyre's production with Jonathan Price. I wouldn't put his Hamlet in the top 19 but curiously that didn't matter because some of the lovely little moments that Michael Boyd put in there, for example in the play within the play, Hamlet takes the crown off the player king, so that therefore they have to seize it back off him in order to go on with the play and lovely little touches like that throughout.

CARTWRIGHT:
There's another touch, very significant, you could believe that Toby Stephens could have killed somebody. The only reason he doesn't kill his uncle immediately is because he is worried about the ghost, the honesty of the ghost. He describes him as an honest ghost and then he has the ghost might deceive him. These are very interesting things. I'm sure they were in Shakespeare's mind. I think that you have a man that is capable of killing and he produces a dagger to his mother, and I haven't actually seen a Hamlet like that before. Usually the sort of tremulous, nervous Hamlet comes to the fore.

LAWSON:
Natasha, they use a very unusual text, which is explained in the programme, which is lots of different speeches taken. The effect of that is that Gertrude gets slightly less to do, Ophelia gets slightly more. What did you think of those performances?

WALTER:
I thought the women were the best things about the performance, definitely. I thought the Ophelia was really interesting, because she was so unlike the usual Ophelia which is all kind of trembly and then so kind of girly when she is mad and frail. Whereas this Ophelia has a much more solid presence and when she was mad she went into this strong psychotic rage and I thought that was very effective. I also thought that Gertrude, Sian Thomas, was very good. The way she really let the poetry speak and she had much more of the inward emotion, which made the play live.

PARSONS:
We've been very hard on Toby Stephens, but the audience really loved him. He got this huge...I mean he does have a measure of Hugh Grant about him.

LAWSON:
Mag Frasier as Ophelia, the rest is silence. You can see Hamlet at the RSC in Stratford.

Источник

Published Tuesday 27 July 2004 at 13:40 by Peta David

What sets a Royal Shakespeare Company production apart from others is its ability to make Shakespeare palatable and accessible to everyone. And this production of Hamlet is no exception. Under the careful direction of Michael Boyd, the characters tell a complex tale of family feuding, revenge and gradual descent into madness. This was the first of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and every director tries to draw some unique angle or meaning from the text. This production uses low lighting and a sparse set to create an environment that is both monotone and bleak.

Toby Stephens as Hamlet has the qualities of a great actor in the making. With his chiselled features and brooding presence, he exudes just the right amount of suspicion and torment, although at times his voice was strained and occasionally he appeared to run out of breath.

Other splendid performances were delivered by Richard Cordery as Polonius, who gives much needed weight and depth to the production, while Meg Fraser brilliantly portrays the tragic, love-stricken Ophelia. Greg Hicks as the ghost of Hamlet’s father is gruesomely excellent and his presence is enhanced by a heart-thumping signature tune that creates suspense and anticipates his ghostly approach.

The set design by Tom Piper is minimalist to the extreme - a black, raked stage against a black wooden curved wall with various entrances and exits to it. This type of set is looking dated now, having been used many times before. It would be good to see something fresh.

Источник

RSC @ Albery Theatre, London, 23 November to 11 December 2004

After a highly successful run in Stratford over the summer, the RSC now bring their latest productions of Shakespeare's great tragedies to London. And they begin with the greatest - Hamlet, the simple story of a procrastinating Danish prince, trying to avenge his uncle's death at his father's hand while (possibly) feigning madness.

The title role is played by Toby Stephens, perhaps still best known for being Maggie Smith's son, but also by fans of theatre for his award winning Coriolanus, and by fans of film for playing the latest Bond villain. Stephens, and indeed the cast as a whole, are fully aware of the magnitude of the task they are taking on. A production of Hamlet is not merely a production of Hamlet, but inevitably bears the burden of hundreds of years of critical interpretation and adulation, as well as a performance history featuring many of the great actors of the past: Gielgud, Olivier, even Kenneth Branagh.

Modern productions have often dealt with this fact by finding a gimmick, a way of repositioning the action of the play to give it more resonance with a modern audience. This is not a criticism of such performances: Sam West played Hamlet a few years ago in a production which made use of Second World War imagery and sparse, modernist sets, and the result was breathtaking.

Yet the current production, directed by Michael Boyd, goes some way toward returning the play to its Sixteenth Century roots. The costumes are all drawn from this era, and the flexible set, a semi-circle of black wooden panels, echoes the simplicity of theatres in Shakespeare's time.

Stephens' Hamlet is volatile, almost histrionic, an emotionally fraught poseur who often delivers his soliloquies through tears, or angry snarls. I was initially unsure of this interpretation of the role; while valid as a version of the character, it puts considerable strain on the play as a whole, in terms of our sympathy for the prince and the way in which other characters respond to him. Stephens, though, got stronger and stronger as the play went on, and by the time he proclaimed 'The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king', there was no doubting the quality of his performance.

The other performance of particular note was that of Greg Hicks. Hicks is exclusively a stage actor, and will soon be playing Macbeth as part of the same season of tragedies; here he depicts the player king, the gravedigger and the ghost of Hamlet's father. His portrayal of the ghost was the aspect of the production which I think will linger longest in my mind; through Hicks' superb physical acting, the ghost became a contorted, tortured figure, dragging after him a huge sword, who resembled a gargoyle. Thanks to Hicks' extraordinary performance, the grotesque portrayal retained grace and pathos. His Macbeth will surely be well worth seeing.

The acting was generally strong, as is to be expected from the RSC, with the inexperienced Meg Fraser turning in a fine performance as Ophelia, surely one of the hardest stage roles to play convincingly. The direction was intelligent without becoming ostentatious, both in its subtleties - Hamlet and Laertes' body language identical in their cruel treatment of Ophelia - and the more obvious, as in the impressively choreographed swordfight at the play's end.

With the many thousands of productions of the play which there have been, each performance needs to justify its own existence, to prove that it has something to add to the pantheon of great versions of Shakespeare's masterpiece. This fine production succeeds in doing so.

- Joe Moshenska

Источник

Быть англичанином и не сыграть Гамлета? Наверное только ленивый не сыграл.
Гамлет у Стивенса "не много криклив''(bgd25)-согласна. Других не видела.А в кинематографе все-таки Смоктуновский. Ведь фильм Козинцева даже англичане признали лучшим.

О, Бен Уишоу, Кристофер Экклстон, Ральф Файнс, Сэмюэль Вест, Алан Рикман - с удовольствием посмотрела бы на любого из них!

з.ы. там прекрасное фото Тоби в образе

maJulie, еще раз спасибо за видео из "Гамлета".
Совершенно другое восприятие, чем просто на слух. Когда прослушала аудиозапись монолога To be or not to be, меня смутил один момент: резкий интонационный переход на словах To die, to sleep-- логически мне не понятен и вызвал недоумение. Но когда я увидела этот монолог - все встало на свои места. Все понятно. Там очень важно видеть мимику и пластику Тоби!
А насчет Оливье и Смоктуновского - они более академичны, сдержанны. Оливье я вообще не люблю, у меня к нему предубеждение.
Возраст Гамлета - это вообще камень преткновения для искусствоведов. И к его возрасту я тоже не равнодушна - как-то для меня неубедительно, когда актер зрелый. (во всяком случае, когда это фильм, на сцене все несколько иначе). Сколько ему лет у Шекспира- кто знает, искусствоведы на этом уже не одну собаку съели. Мой Гамлет- молодой человек с пламенным сердцем, мятущейся душой. И поэтому Гамлет Тоби мне стал близок.

Вы учили монолог на английском? Это что, в англ. спец.школе?

Toby Stephens Hamlet Interview
Toby Stephens plays Hamlet in the current production. Here he talks about, among other things, corruption, succession, madness and religion in the play.

Early Impressions
The impression I had of Hamlet was of someone intriguing but in the end slightly irritating because he went on so much: he seemed so self-indulgent. That bothered me, so I went away and read the play and realised that what had happened was that the part had become terribly bogged down with modern psychology. It had become a play about a self-involved, non-altruistic person constantly fighting his own demons. It had also become a part about a scholar rather than about a prince. Hamlet was continually interpreted as a person incapable of ruling, incapable of doing the task that his father had set him. Whilst Hamlet can be played in many, many different ways, I personally don’t think that’s the way I can do it – for me it’s not a play about a man who procrastinates.

Succession
The play was first performed in a culture somewhat paranoid about the question of succession. In Elizabethan times (and indeed prior to that) there were constant tussles for power and rebellions fomented around people who thought they should be king. Hamlet returns to Denmark when his father dies, but it’s Claudius, not Hamlet, who is crowned. In the play, Denmark is an electoral monarchy – a son doesn’t automatically become king because his father was king, and yet Shakespeare was writing for a primogeniture culture. An Elizabethan audience would automatically have assumed that the king’s son would inherit. Because Hamlet doesn’t succeed his father on the throne, he is denied any function. That’s an aspect our director Michael Boyd has brought out in this production - the political nature of the play. If you have the rightful king at Court and Claudius has usurped his place, there is a feeling that Hamlet suddenly becomes radioactive. Nobody wants to be associated with him because the power is with the King and Hamlet is seen as a threat.

Which Edition?
Because in some places the play does become repetitive, Michael pruned the text heavily, even hacking away whole soliloquies at times. We’ve also gone back to the first Quarto for a lot of scene orders. The first Quarto is probably the nearest thing we have to a prompt copy. It’s thought that the Folio, which would run for well over 4½ hours, was the full literary text Shakespeare wanted kept for posterity. The Folio is full of wonderful passages but it’s unsustainable in theatrical terms. Shakespeare was pragmatic and I’m sure at the time he would have cut the text. For example, in the second half of the play there’s a very long scene between Horatio and Hamlet in which Hamlet tells Horatio about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - how he woke up and looked in their pack and so on and so on. It’s beautiful, but far too long. So we’ve replaced it with an incredibly succinct scene from the first Quarto between Gertrude and Horatio which serves two functions: firstly, it tells the same story, only succinctly, and secondly it shows us that Gertrude has been changed by what Hamlet has said to her in the closet scene. It all helps to make the second half of the play move at an incredible pace.

Research
I did an enormous amount of reading of various academic texts about the play and what amazed me was that everybody thought it was such a problematic play. The difference between academia and theatre is that academics look at a play like Hamlet purely in literary terms – they don’t approach it in the same pragmatic way actors do. When you’re working on a scene you suddenly realise why things are the way they are. For example, John Dover Wilson wrote at great length about the play within the play, asking how it could sustain both a dumb show and The Murder of Gonzago? He asks why Claudius doesn’t just storm out. But what becomes very clear when you’re playing it is that it’s done for dramatic reasons. The eyes of the Court are on Claudius as Hamlet desperately tries to push him to the edge, get a reaction out of him and test his guilt, so it makes complete sense that the dumb show becomes part of the machinery to do that.

Spying
We’ve based Polonius on a sort of Walsingham figure, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster. Intelligence in those days was written in coded letters or carried by word of mouth. In a world in which spying is rife, there are people listening in, overhearing things. That’s why, for so much of the play, Hamlet is so cryptic. Much of what he says has double, triple, even quadruple meanings. Hamlet is very, very clever at not being nailed down by people like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, who are, essentially, sent to spy on him. Michael has created a paranoiac world where people are listening in on people and others, like Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are used. The Court is a very small world, a claustrophobic, intense and fairly repugnant world and at the hub of this web you find Polonius.

Religion
Everything happens so quickly to Hamlet – his father dies and in less than two months his mother has remarried, married her brother-in-law and Hamlet has been shoved out of the way. Naturally he’s full of righteous indignation but in the first soliloquy, you get a strong sense that he’s also baffled. Right from the word go, Hamlet knows there is something wrong, so when Horatio and the guards tell him about the ghost, he believes them immediately. He wants to believe them. And he immediately he chooses to believe, when he sees the Ghost, that it is ‘an honest ghost.’ I read a wonderful book by Stephen Greenblatt called Hamlet in Purgatory which gives a history of Purgatory from a specifically English context. The Ghost comes to Hamlet from Purgatory i.e. a concept Catholics believed in but not Protestants. England had changed very rapidly from being Catholic to Protestant. Under Mary it returned to the old faith and back again under Elizabeth. Beliefs weren’t clear cut, faith vacillated - Catholicism wasn’t just simply wiped out. No one knows whether or not Shakespeare was a practicing Catholic, though it seems likely his father was. Much of the religion, the specifically Catholic religion, is covert in the play. I think Shakespeare is questioning which is the real faith but he had to be incredibly careful, which is why much of it is buried or incredibly cryptic. He risked severe punishment if he was thought to be pro-Catholic. In a sense though, religion falls away and the end of the play is far more secular. In the final scene, the audience is left not knowing where Hamlet has gone – is he in Purgatory? I think it’s important that the ending is left open.

Corruption
Essentially the play is about corruptibility – that’s one of the main themes, the corruptibility of humanity, whether in a physical or a moral sense. To a certain extent at the beginning of the play Hamlet, who has until now been sheltered from it, is suddenly faced with the reality of the world. Until then he hadn’t realised how corrupt and corruptible humans are. The play is full of images of corruption and decay – that’s one area where academics can be particularly helpful. I read a brilliant analysis of the language of the play and how much of it is to do with disease, corruption and weeds. It’s disgusting right from the start and through the first part, gets worse. In the second part, when Hamlet returns from England, there’s less imagery. Instead you’re given a physical sense of decay –Yorick’s skull, Ophelia’s grave and so on. Hamlet seems colder, more objective when he’s holding the skull. He’s learnt to let go of much of what was festering in his mind. It’s as though he’s stepped outside and, after a struggle, he’s more able to accept, has a colder view of the world. The first half of the play is more cerebral, the second half more physical. I think what Hamlet learns is that he can’t take on the corruptibility of humanity because he can’t do anything about it. He has that wonderful line to Laertes when he says ‘Let Hercules himself do what he may, / The cat will mew, and dog will have his day’ [5.1.287-8]. He knows it’s useless to fight against it any more.

Madness
I don’t think Hamlet is mad but at times he must wonder about his sanity because he’s alone in the way he thinks. At moments he does seem to come very close to the edge of real madness - Shakespeare deliberately makes it ambiguous. In the closet scene, for example, his father saves him. I genuinely believe his mother can’t see the Ghost and there are various theories as to why she can’t - she is a state of sin and so forth. For my own part I think it’s more moving that she can’t see it and yet Hamlet’s desperately trying to make her see.

Stamina
Actors of all ages have played Hamlet but in the text it very clearly says he’s 30. I think that’s quite deliberate, because there is something about turning thirty that forces you to grow up, to face up to things. That, coupled with death of a father, is a major reshaping of one’s whole way of looking at the world. On a purely technical level, I have more skills now, at 35, than I had 10 years ago when I played Coriolanus here at the RSC. Coriolanus is an incredibly linear part, whereas Hamlet is much more expansive and complex. I’m glad it wasn’t Hamlet I was asked to play back then. It’s a hugely demanding role both vocally and physically - at the end of almost four hours, Hamlet has to fight with Laertes. I was lucky, because the rehearsal period was longer than usual, which gave me time to prepare (I was actually rather grateful too when Michael cut bits!). We would run scenes again and again and again, then Michael would give us notes and we’d run it again, all of which helped to build up stamina – emotional, mental and vocal stamina. It’s very different to working in film and it took a while for me to get back in shape. I haven’t done any Shakespeare for nine years, so it’s lovely for me to be back after such a long gap.