April 10, 2025 · 4:38 pm
A HAMLET THAT STANDS ALONE
“is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice?”
Not monstrous, simply consummate appearing in a courageous, maverick efficiency as Mark Lockyer reprises his much-admired rendering of the entire of Hamlet in 95 minutes, alone, propless, emotionally invested to an virtually horrifying diploma.
It just isn’t a best-of assortment however has the complete advanced narrative seriousness of the play: I used to be struck from the beginning by his willingness to maintain lots of the scene on the battlements which frequently will get reduce about earlier than Hamlet seems: right here as elsewhere it offers correct weight to the politics, the Norway/Poland/Denmark sense of conflict and hazard previous and future. Many nice full-set productions lean so closely on the emotional-psychological story than its wider context.
Indeed oddly, on the finish of this efficiency I felt I had seen a extra full Hamlet than ordinary. Lockyer is deft at reworking into every character – his Ophelia girlish, disintegrating into shocked pathos, his Claudius all jokily coercive pomp, his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern weasels of deference. His Player King offers it the complete OTT Garrickry. The voice of the Ghost is genuinely unnerving, from some horrid depth. Only a couple of times with Laertes would possibly a newcomer briefly hesitate; largely there’s by no means a doubt when Hamlet himself is earlier than us: wrung out or all of the sudden enraged, posing his insanity orsuddenly doubting his actuality.
It is, in brief, magnificent. Not one to overlook. Few extra performances at Wilton’s, then a tour, whose particulars I’ll cross on when somebody tells me them.
Wiltons.org.uk to 12 April
Produced by regenerationtheatre.co.uk for extra particulars of how one can see afterwards
score 5
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