MARGOT GIBLIN
Nightly at 7.30 The Peacock Theatre, 77 Salamanca Place until 21 June 2009
It’s an octopus.
A plot driving ghost, a young love affair that’s done and busted before we see the pair together, filial obligation, tricky mother- son stuff, secret messages, spies, an embedded play, plots and counterplots, real madness and affected insanity. Saturated with angst, indecision, rashness and folly it’s delivered in a 400 year old, poetic, version of the English language.
The Old Nick Company chose well in inviting John Clark to take this on. His grip on the play and what it takes to get its essence across is impressive.
He has enabled a company of emerging and experienced actors to tell a powerful story well, stripping both it and them of anything liable to distract from the essential human difficulties involved.
A knock out Ophelia –and there have been a few who I would have cheerfully helped into the water – is worth seeing for raw bravery.
Hamlet takes interesting control of his part. There have been actors who have taken this character’s excrutiating indecisiveness to heart. The part is a massive ask for many reasons – its well known antecedents being one, Hamlet’s relative youth another. This production’s protagonist takes us under the wave with him, establishing himself firmly and warmly before he needs to say the words we know so well.
If you want to see a fresh Hamlet, which does far more than put those quotes you know in vibrant context, this one is worth a foray into the cool night air. The theatre’s comfortable, it’s intimacy magically effective for this most audience- engaging playwright of them all.
The play does require, however, more than the usual level of willing suspension of disbelief. There’s an awful lot going on in this ancient Denmark whose ruling body politic is so corrupt, so hamstrung by the past, that a total purge may well have seemed the only answer.
Saturday night’s audience, but a boulder roll from Tasmania’s own Parliament House, seemed to have no trouble believing any of it.
Director: John Clark. Hamlet: Andrew Casey: Ophelia: Natalie Venettacci
