What a piece of work is man

Like their other productions at the Malta Arts Festival in previous years, the Globe Theatre’s Hamlet (Argotti Gardens) is presented unashamedly as a production by a troupe of wandering players with a limited cast and doubling galore, a minimalist and frankly unattractive set, limited lighting effects, a (not too severely) pruned text.

On the other hand, they provide their own live music, played on the violin, recorder and drums, as an introduction to the production and to the cast, to create atmosphere from time to time and, most surprisingly, to convert the bloodbath of the play’s last scene into a jolly jig, a clever device that allows all the ‘dead’ members of the cast to resurrect without looking very funny.

Last year we saw A Midummer Night’s Dream shorn of the poetry and emphasised the broad comedy. This year, Dominic Dromgoole certainly does not give us Hamlet revisited as a farce.

His production is fast-paced, most scenes following the previous ones almost breathlessly. This enables the cast to get through a great deal of text without creating a single moment of boredom, but results in reducing the dramatic effectiveness and poetic splendour of some key scenes or speeches.

To give just two examples, Joshua McGuire’s Hamlet delivers that most famous of all speeches, “To be, or not to be”, without a second’s pause following the previous scene without any dramatic preparation, the result being flat.

McGuire is not the most intellectual and poetically alluring of Hamlets, sounding often like a slightly morose or very jocular undergraduate, grinning at his own wit, but this speech is so very important to the understanding of the character, and for him to try so hard not to treat it like the jewel it is, is unforgivable.

My other example is that of the “Oh my offence is rank” speech spoken by Claudius, played by Simon Armstrong as a tough and sensual ruler who becomes a thorough villain only in the last scenes.

Claudius is here trying, quite unsuccessfully, to show contrition before God, and this needs a more spacious delivery, and needs to make a great contrast with Hamlet’s vicious “Now might I do it pat”.

Doubling roles can also produce some unattractive effects. Thus John Betts, whose main role is that of a sometimes hilarious Polonius, also plays the minor comic role of First Gravedigger, which he does very well, then rushes out and comes in a minute later as the priest officiating at Ophelia’s funeral and is allowed to send this role up.

This just will not do, for the funeral is meant to be grim and should not elicit small laughs or even grins from the audience.

Even more unacceptable is the performance of The Mousetrap (“The play’s the thing”) in front of Claudius and Gertrude. Here Dromgoole does something that worked wonderfully in the Globe’s The Comedy of Errors two years ago. But here it looks clever but unacceptable, since the Player King and the Player Queen are played by the same actors playing Claudius and Gertrude, so you get the Players and the real royals alternating in the audience’s view each time a curtain is drawn across the stage.

Dromgoole seems to think that once the audience has accepted the artificiality of the whole show it is ready to accept anything, but I feel sure he knows in his heart of hearts – probably more consciously – that certain techniques are just unacceptable in tragic drama.

Dromgoole, however, is a very experienced man of the theatre and knows Hamlet is such a great play that despite any amount of rough edges it will still grip, as long as the players attack their parts and do their best to make their lines – many of them truly magnificent – comprehensible.

The night I saw the production, a strong wind was blowing, and I understand that in some parts of the audience stands a good many lines were lost.

Fortunately for me, I could hear every word perfectly, and though many of the cast are not great verse-speakers in the classical manner, and are probably not meant to be in this production, one of the great pleasures of the evening was to listen to the flow of astonishing imagery Shakespeare wrote for the play.

Of the main parts, only Ian Midlane’s Horatio and Jade Anouka’s Ophelia stand out as unsatisfactory. Midlane, who addresses the audience jovially before the play proper begins, carries on being jovial and hearty and is not even second cousin to Shakespeare’s character, while Anouka, after a good opening as the smiling and obedient girl of her opening scene, misses out on Ophelia’s tragic decline, and her two difficult mad scenes are just awkward.

McGuire’s Hamlet is full of vitality and he is very good at darting back his retorts to the hypocritical or malevolent words addressed to him. It is a pity his physique does not allow him the possibility of attaining anything like the grandeur of a tragic role, and so his proud announcement in the graveyard scene, “It is I, Hamlet the Dane” just falls flat.

In my memory he will remain as the shrewd prince, very good at exposing his false friends Rosencrantcz and Guildenstern (Claudius refers to the latter as Guggenheim, a non-Shakespearean wisecrack) and making Polonius’s pompous life a misery, before putting an end to it.

His scenes with his father’s Ghost (also played by Armstrong) have the true feeling of terror, but I wish his great closet scene with Gertrude had hinted more at the suppressed incestuous feelings at which his speeches hint.

Armstrong’s Claudius develops strongly from the confidence of the early scenes to the nerves and desperate behaviour of the scenes following the play within the play and becomes a psychological wreck in the last scene. His Gertrude (Amanda Hadingue) is a middle-aged woman revelling in her new relationship. In the closet scene her confessions of guilt are touching.

Is John Bett too funny as Polonius? He certainly comes out as the great comic role of the production, the only trouble being that this distracts the audience from his role as Claudius’s unscrupulous chief minister, always ready to second him even if it means destroying his own daughter Ophelia’s happiness.

I think Tom Lawrence does very well as a thoughtful and dignified Fortinbras, a conceited and silly Osric and a Rosencrantz (with Alex Warren’s Guildenstern) reduced to silence by Hamlet’s irony.