All aboard for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, set on a sinking ship in 1912. Picture: Marc Brenner
SOMETHING is still rotten in the state of Denmark, but now on board a sinking – not stinking – ship in 1912, rather than at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore.
Steered on tour by revival director Sophie Drake (what a good surname for nautical adventures), Rupert Goold’s Royal Shakespeare Company production takes to the seas on April 14 as the clocks to each side of the stage click round to midnight and beyond, marking the 114th anniversary of the demise of the RMS Titanic.
As chance would have it, the York Theatre Royal run opened that night, adding to the poignancy of the occasion. Hamlet is played out in Es Devlin’s design on an expansive deck that restores a spectacular rake to the Theatre Royal stage for the first time since the 2016 renovation, recalling the days when nervous touring companies and repertory shows alike used anti-rake furniture to defy the steep incline.
Complemented by Adam Cork’s sound design of the sea’s swirling motions and hum of the engine, the ship’s bow crests the waves in Akhila Krishnan’s video projections of the ever-rising, whirling, freezing waters, into which the coffin of King Hamlet is tossed, wrapped in the flag of Denmark.
“Hamlet is a play about the inevitability of death: the death of fathers, the death of kings, the mortality facing each and every one of us, but it is also a play about how to live, what makes a good life and a just one too, however brief our allotted time,” says Goold, in a concise summary of Shakespeare’s greatest play.
As happened on the Titanic, Hamlet’s tragedy will “come to pass in a little over two and a half hours”, taking place in real time, lending urgency to Goold and Shakespeare’s quest to answer the question of “what it means to be human and decisive when time is running out”.
In doing so, Goold achieves his desired balance of catastrophic thriller and poetic meditation, a wish made flesh in Ralph Davis’s Hamlet, who is as physical in the sound of speech as he is in movement.
Shaven head meets skull as Ralph Davis’s Hamlet recalls his childhood encounters with late jester Yorick in the RSC’s Hamlet. Picture: Marc Brenner
On occasion, you need to suspend disbelief and go with the flow instead, bathing in the innovation and imagination of an audacious production that is shipshape and Bristol fashion in its delivery. Georgia-May Myers’ Ophelia still dies by drowning; Davis’s Hamlet kills Richard Cant’s delightfully camp, theatrical Polonius with a pistol (referred to as a “rapier”) but fights Benjamin Westerby’s hot-headed Laertes with a sword.
Hamlet will be sent off to England as usual, only to return minutes later, but that is fine. The claustrophobia of a ship from which he cannot escape is a physical manifestation of his mental descent into Elsinore being a prison. Such constraints compound his “madness”.
Davis’s tall, lithe, shaven-headed Hamlet, often bare footed and in rolled-up trousers, is a chameleon in appearance, matching his mood, whether in dark coat, baggy white shirt, red jumper and shorts, ship’s captain’s cap or bowler hat and tails.
His voice keeps shifting gear and accent too, poised and reflective in his set-piece soliloquies; quick to anger with mother Gertrude (Poppy Miller) and murderous Claudius (Raymond Coulthard); haunted in his encounter with the Ghost of his father (Ian Hughes); sometimes playful yet earnest too with best friend Horatio (Colin Ryan) and the Player King (Ian Hughes); ever-changing in tone with Ophelia.
He can be mocking too, mimicking the American accents of dandy, cloth-headed old school friends Rosencrantz (Jamie Sayers) and Guildenstern (Julia Kass). Further impersonations bring out the theatrical in Hamlet (who commissions the incriminating play The Mousetrap), whether in mannerism or voice. At one point, Davis seems to assume a Belgian accent to say “murder” in the manner of David Suchet’s Poirot.
The auditorium may have felt as hot as the ship’s engine room, but setting a play full of water imagery on an icy ship is a voyage of re-discovery that brings out that sinking feeling, the depths of despair in Hamlet to full fathom five. If ‘to sea or not to sea’ is the question, the answer is See It Now.
Royal Shakespeare Company in Hamlet, York Theatre Royal, 7pm tonight; 2pm and 7pm tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Depths of despair: Ralph Davis’s Hamlet, adrift at sea in an undertaker’s coat in the RSC’s Hamlet. Picture: Marc Brenner