William Shakespeare’s Hamlet - showing at Sheffield Crucible from 16th Sept to 23rd Oct 2010
I’m no stranger to seeing Shakespeare performed - throughout my life I’ve seen productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth (both as a play and as an opera) and various others - but this was the first time I’ve seen Hamlet on stage; not for want of trying to see it but more for lack of opportunity - it doesn’t seem to have been showing anywhere that I have access to for a long time.
So when I heard that Hamlet was showing at the Sheffield Crucible, I got very excited. Hamlet is my favourite Shakespeare, nay, my favourite play, in the world. First studied for the coursework element of my AS level English Literature, I fell in love with Hamlet at first read, so to speak. I universally prefer tragedies to comedies anyway, but something about the themes of Hamlet; the grief, the madness, the concept of the revenge tragedy, had me hooked from the start. I’ve studied it several times since my A-levels, and have only ever found more and more to love in this play. The impact it has is never ever diminished for me.
And my experience of it on stage in no way diminished the text either. The Crucible is an interesting venue, with the audience sitting on three sides of the stage, and it was pleasant to see the cast making full use of the stage and performing to all angles so as not to exclude any of the audience from the action. The scenery was crafted such that wherever one was seated, there was nothing you didn’t see, and it was mind-boggling trying to figure out how the parts moved to change the setting from outside to in and back again. I tried to watch between scenes to figure it out and just couldn’t - very impressive.
The casting of the production, when I was first flicking through the programme looking at each actor’s credentials, looked interesting. John Simm, for example, is bringing experience from Life on Mars, Doctor Who and Human Traffic to his role as the Prince of Denmark himself, and John Nettles I remember myself from watching Midsommer Murders as a child. From what I can gather from their credentials, the two Johns could not be more different. While Nettles completed a turn of 6 seasons with the RSC and so is a dab hand at performing Shakespeare, this appears to be Simm’s first experience of acting professionally in a Shakespearean role. I only learned this upon studying the programme afterwards, and was surprised by my discovery as I would never have identified any difference between the two actors’ experience while watching the play. In fact, I thought John Simm gave a more stirring Hamlet than Nettles did Claudius, even though both were fantastic in their respective roles.
If I had to make criticism of this production of Hamlet, the first would be the amount of humour infused throughout the play, considering that Hamlet is, to all intents and purposes, of the tragedy genre. It may well be that the occasions on which I didn’t expect humour were occasions on which the production team of this version had seen Shakespearean puns in the text that have previously gone unnoticed for me and are best observed and appreciated when seeing the play performed rather than reading it from a page. Nevertheless, there were moments when a low ripple of amusement went around the audience that I didn’t quite agree with, and whether it was intended to pick up on every pun or not, I perhaps would have definitely left a few alone so as to emphasise that while Hamlet’s madness is supposed to appear ridiculous and absurd in comparison to perceived sanity, it is supposed to be recognised as a serious pretence of madness rather than one conceived for comic effect (as in Rowley and Middleton’s The Changeling, which was written around the same time).
The second and final criticism I would make is that the whole thing seemed rather rushed. All of the characters, without exception, appeared to speak rather more quickly than looked natural. I appreciate that Hamlet, like most Shakespeare, spans about 3 hours and they want to maintain pace as best they can so as not to lose the audience’s attention, but I felt that some things, such as Hamlet’s infamous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, could have had a little more stage time devoted to them for dramatic effect.
Seeing Hamlet performed was definitely an interesting experience for me. I went into the theatre with a few questions that had been raised for me while studying and it was satisfyingly useful to see how the production handled these questions, since the interpretation they give on stage shapes the entire meaning of the play from that point onwards. I definitely found the three and a bit hours of Hamlet more enjoyable than other Shakespeare plays I’ve seen, and infinitely more so than watching an opera version of Macbeth (don’t get me wrong, it was interesting, but I’m not sure it was for the right reasons…) and I would gladly sit through it again. Bravo.
