2007

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

State Theatre Company

and Queensland Theatre Company

April 3. Dunstan Playhouse. Until April 21

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The main task with Hamlet is to make him come alive. Whatever the leanings in interpretation  – that he be older or younger, bookish scholar or renaissance cleverboots, devious or bi-polar – Hamlet has to engage us in his bid to unmask a murder conspiracy, even though he says, and does, things which don’t add up. This raises questions of motivation and psychology. Hamlet is a much-analysed subject and the appeal and enigma of the play is that, after all these years, and all those performances and interpretations, the case is still open.

In casting dynamic young actor Cameron Goodall in the lead, Adam Cook has made a clear choice in the direction of this newest State Theatre/Queensland Theatre co- production. Goodall’s boyish looks carry a vulnerability as well as youthful energy and his performance is the highlight of the play. With his punky black hair, his goth-dark coat with furry hood and frisky stage movement, he aptly suits Ophelia’s report of –“ his pale feature of blown youth /Blasted with ecstacy” – especially in its coincidence with current slang.

His is an inventive, discursive, sometimes startling performance. The emphasis on his adolescent unworldliness provides us with lively sketches of Hamlet’s petulance and unpredictability – his surly responses to Claudius and the latter’s weary tolerance, his prank with the Mousetrap play, his teasing of Polonius, and the dissociated denial of the old man’s stabbing.

Adam Cook  would have done well to marshal this energy more deftly and wrap his production around it like a glove. The essentially domestic scale of its world, the size and capability of its cast and the drift of its meaning all call for it being staged in the Space not in the huge expanse of the Playhouse. I know economies prevent that, but those of us who saw Neil Armfield’s Belvoir Street version with Richard Roxburgh remember not just a fine cast but the revelation of the play as chamber work.

Instead, designer Bruce McKinven’s set – a handsome but huge curved wooden fort engraved with what looks like a Danish roll of honour – creates an edifice that unduly dwarfs the action. That may work as a theme but not as a practicality and any gesture towards political themes (including the misplaced scene with Hamlet getting the Abu Ghraib bucket treatment from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) is lost with the cutting of the Fortinbras subplot.  Kathryn Sproul’s mixed style costumes also create unhelpful discrepancies  with Lewis Carroll frockcoats for the royals and WW II military uniforms for the court.  And, further undoing the already faltering chemistry between Hamlet and his bride-to-be in this production – a black stovepipe Bad Seed suit for Cameron Goodall and Sound of Music blouse and skirt for Emily Tomlins’ Ophelia.

In fact, Cameron Goodall’s puckish lead performance – which would have suited a posse of Wittenberg emos to go with it – finds few others in the cast to mesh with. Sean Taylor’s reading of Claudius is excellent and – as he ponces about, lovestruck in his ruffle and Cuban heels – almost sympathetic. Barbara Lowing, as Gertrude, is also memorable, not least in her anguished report of Ophelia’s death, and Dennis Olsen brings wit and comedy to the pedantry of Polonius and dignity to his devotion.

Other performances fare less well – John Trutwin’s Laertes improves by Act Five and Joss McWilliam is not helped, nor is Cameron Goodall, by the clunky staging of the ghost scene. Overall, it must be said, with the talents of two cities to draw upon, Adam Cook could have found a batting order with more depth. This Hamlet will work especially well with audiences new to the play, the pace is fast, the action clear and Cameron Goodall is fun and familiar to watch. But it is well short of the complex tragedy that the text invites. In Cook’s loosely managed production, this boy wonder Hamlet has no more hope of revenging the crimes – or follies – of his elders than any teenage rebel. He was always going to be voted out of the house.

The Adelaide Review, No.314, April 13, 2007, p.15.