How David Tennant played Hamlet …
Hamlet
PLOT Theatre Company, Peacock Theatre
Bonkers. Around the twist. Loopy. Mad as a hatter. Tipping over the edge. Unstable. Crazy. Mentally ill. Batshit crazy.
Few (or perhaps none) of these descriptors are particularly politically correct terms for the affliction suffered by Hamlet in the ubiquitous Shakespearean play.
We all know the story, Hamlet being one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays (Loud Mouth Theatre performed a version with a twist earlier this year). A young man is haunted by his father’s vengeful ghost who asks his son to wreak revenge on his wife, the Queen, and her new husband, the now-deceased King’s brother Claudius.
As the spectre tells his son, the lustful and power-hungry pair have slain the now not-at-peace King in order to take his throne and his place in his marital bed. But Hamlet as a play is about more than that – it’s about when and how we depict people as mentally unstable – and when this psychological turmoil is true madness or simply the human brain’s normal response to unbearable levels of stress, emotional upheaval and tragedy.
But is Hamlet even mad at all? Is it just a big phony excuse so he can act like a dick as much as possible to his girlfriend Ophelia, and Ophelia’s conniving dad Polonius (played extraordinarily well as Ophelia’s mum in this production by Deidree McMaster), before bewildering the king and his attendants as he attempts to right his uncle’s wrongs?
Director Tai Gardner sums it up well – he says he certainly doesn’t think Hamlet is mad.
“I believe Hamlet is just a young man put under extreme pressures, and being ‘not mad, but mad in craft’ allows him to relieve some of that pressure while still striving towards his goal,” he says, adding that when you take his circumstances into consideration, Hamlet’s behaviour begins to make sense.
Sounds legit to me – if my mum or dad was murdered, I’d probably act a little “uptight” myself.
PLOT is the University of Tasmania’s amateur drama society, and they have done a solid job with the material of Hamlet. They’ve gone for a black, minimalist stage and costume design – all the characters are wearing black and the throne in the back is set up in sleek ebony. The guys wear black suits, the girls are donned in black skirts and tops, and the Players are jazzed up with black shirts topped off with bowties and braces. The Player King (portrayed solidly by Thomas McManus) descends into an almost tap-dancing jazz number. The whole effect blends nicely with a black speakeasy 1920s style to give an oddly surrealist – perhaps even nihilist – feel.
The coolest thing about this rendition, IMHO, is the fact that Hamlet’s dead old dad, the Spectre, isn’t a character of his own. Rather, he’s split into three characters – including Horatio and two Players – who speak in unison, giving a very spooky and dramatic feel. The characters, although speaking angrily in unison, move in a choreographed sequential fashion, where their postures break and reconstruct in staggered intervals.
It’s creepy, quite frankly, and gives you a sense of being hurled back to a time in the Middle Ages when ghosts and witches and wicked things were as real and present in daily life as ticket inspectors and accountants are today.
Hamlet is currently on at the Peacock Theatre, Salamanca until December 13. Tickets $19/$24.
Amber Wilson
