Siege Theatre closes out the Oxford Castle and Prison’s wonderful Summer Shakespeare - a trio of companies bringing the Bard to their picturesque courtyard - with a pacy and sombre take on Hamlet. As a play (and character), Hamlet is notorious for its length and self-seriousness. The character has the most lines of any of Shakespeare’s leads, and has a penchant for philosophical soliloquy. In the wrong hands, this can feel like dithering or dry, indulgent pontification on the author’s part. One of the successes of this production is that it makes Hamlet’s speeches feel integral to understanding him and the plot.
Before we had Don Draper or Tony Soprano, we had Hamlet as a deeply compelling protagonist often mistaken for a hero. But Hamlet is not the noble Prince Charming here to bring justice and peace, he’s an incandescently angry, arrogant, grief-ridden teenager who’s too clever for his own good. His feelings of betrayal and abandonment towards his mother spread into a wild, violent misogyny, and he often pushes away those who could help him due to his own self-righteousness.
As much as Macbeth is seen as the play of paranoia, Hamlet gives it a run for its money. The character is unsure if the apparition claiming to be his dead father is truly sent from heaven or a trick of the devil to drive him to commit an act of murder himself.
Ironically, in his scheming and single-mindedness, Hamlet shows himself to be more his uncle’s son than his father’s. By letting the character be capricious, self-involved and infuriating, this production showcases the necessity for its wordiness. It’s a slow burn thriller about a character who is probably fundamentally good (or at least has the potential to be - we witness Hamlet being egalitarian, humourous, and kind to his friends and servants) but fatally flawed, and the terrible fall out of his attempts to deal with the horribly unjust situation he has found himself in.
In terms of acting, the performers rise to the challenge. Craig Finlay’s Hamlet is a full-bodied, deeply felt performance that captures the character’s ability to ricochet from taunting and erudite to inconsolably emotional. It’s clear he has mastery of his motives and material. His delivery does, however, feel slightly out of tune with the intensity level of the other actors, who also emote deftly but keep their characters' reactions on a simmer rather than a rolling boil. Watching Hamlet suddenly shout or drop to his knees sobbing feels alienating at times, as though Finlay has been projected in from another, more vigorous production of the play.
Rachel Twyford was a standout performer in the show. Her Ophelia was movingly fragile, ethereal and sweet-natured without ever feeling vapid or saccharine. This made Ophelia’s subsequent madness and death feel vividly real and genuinely distressing.
While Colin Burney as Polonius demonstrated great comedic timing, I found myself wishing he’d swap roles with Tom Wilson as Claudius. The former had an austere white beard and effortless authority that would’ve helped contrast with Hamlet’s youth. Wilson was a perfectly good Claudius but seemed more conflicted than ruthless and was not all that far in age from Finlay, which may have undercut the sense of generational divide slightly.
Elsewhere Josh Wedge and Beth Burns (who also directed!) brought energy, light and efficiency to their roles as Horatio and Laetres, as well as Player King and Player Queen in the play-within-a-play. Rocci Wilkinson was an utterly convincing Gertrude, and Rebecca Velikovic infused several small parts with flavour (particularly her Gravedigger). The production also boasted the most cool and stylish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that I’m likely to ever see, in Neve Gascoyne and Megan Murphy.
The staging was minimalist, which worked well, and the costume design was a coherent, tasteful treat. Also an aside - the vintage newspaper styling of the programme was so thoughtful and adorable.
The characters were garbed in 1920s wear. The inter-war period - a time of impulsive pleasure and persistent dread - chosen to reflect a Denmark hanging on the edge of a possible takeover. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he’d lost his son just a few years prior (a boy called ‘Hamnet’) and his father during the creation of the play. Queen Elizabeth was getting elderly and being unmarried and childless, it was not clear who would next take the throne of England. In it’s deep ambivalence, Hamlet seems to be a distinctly grown up work about grief and autonomy, asking endless questions about who rules us, when we must act and when we must trust others, and how to carry on when the future feels entirely uncertain, as Horatio must do past the play’s final scene.
The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, written a few years earlier, feels almost simple by comparison, an effective but didactic caution against needless hate and violence. What Burns does beautifully is allow this ambivalence to unspool without trying to force a clean moral onto it. The weather the evening I went was quite moody, with a melancholy chill and intermittently spitting rain, and it felt extremely fitting for this sleek, gripping production. I’d highly recommend you catch it before it closes on Saturday night.