by The thematic goods are common at Shakespeare Productions: Veronese Pizzas ahead of Romeo and Julia, meat paste at Titus Andronicus. The new RSC Hamlet has an unusual cruise. The program advertises a collaboration between the theater society and Cunard: seven days on Queen Mary 2 “The power of Shakespeare in Sea”.
Which course is the course on the director Rupert Goold set the Court of Elsinore. His version takes place entirely on a kind of royal yacht scandinavia during a honeymoon cruise for Claudius and Gertrude. A shipping ship, this is also metaphorically a shipping ship.
The budget really presses the boat out. A walking waves in the level (video design: Akhila Krishhnan) lets the piece sail on us, while a monumental deck (designer: Es Devlin) sometimes staggered: In the climate zones, poisons may not be necessary as necessary as sea disease Hamlet and Laertes.
However, this courageous concept is justified by being a coastal game. Four characters are placed on the lake (in this version there are also a naval base) and the fear is expressed in the number of “ship shooters” working in Norway in order to prepare the invasion in Denmark.
The word “Aest” in the original in this context is cleverly to be heard as a “bow”. Elsewhere, Goold and Dramaturg Rebecca Latham make talking: “Chamber” becomes a cabin, “Earth” is overhauled by “sea”. The ingenuity is necessary to explain why Yorick’s skull is not in the drink with the rest of him and the greatest loss is Gertrude’s urgent speech about the death of Ophelia’s river. Here it just goes over the edge.
Where to be recognized, many Shakespeare purists will follow her. However, since the RSC is economically necessary to stage the main games in fast rotation, every iteration should certainly be significantly different. Apart from the offshore environment, the courageous ideas of the new proposal over a red digital watch include on stage, “witch lesson”, which has been signaled as 00:00-that the whole piece takes place during a long night.
And in contrast to some opera productions, high concepts never cramped that would adorn any staging. Luke Thallons Hamlet, student cool and an alternative comedic atmosphere, plays against the speed clock, especially against time. Before and during the great soliloquia, the words about death and revenge that have not been forced by school children for hundreds of years and have not learned from school children.
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Jared Harris’ Claudius radiates the sexual and political ruthlessness of a man who is ready to kill and keep her for a crown, and Nancy Carroll with typical poetic intelligence captures the growing guilt of having betrayed both son and husband. Elliot Leveys Polonius is striking more dapper diplomat than the standard wind bag. The decryption of Nia Town’s Ophelia has a clinical reality that complements another layer of the debate about Hamlet’s relegation. And while every Roscrantz and every Guildenstern (or vice versa) are shaded by the split off of the stopard, Chase Brown and Tadeo Martinez find an undiscovered country as a neat American who must have hit Hamlet on a scholarship.
There will be questions whether Goold should have gone to the lake or not to the lake, but this is a must for his lively atmosphere and intelligence. Traditionalists are warned that the RSC will soon start a Shakespeare radiohead mashup, Hamlet: hail: hail to the thief.
• In the Royal Shakespeare Theater, Stratford-Upon-Avon, until March 29th
