It has become a commonplace for modern dress Shakespeare tragedies (Hamlet and MacBeth at least) to be set in a totalitarian police state monitored on CCTV and surveillance equipment, or perhaps it's only been those I've seen. It's not a bad idea but it is no longer shocking or original and it's not in Saxo Grammaticus. However, whether the novelty be a modern setting, all-female cast or even, as here, a Bob Dylan soundtrack, the play's the thing.Robert Icke's production from the Almeida Theatre, transferred here to the Harold Pinter, is also 'adapted' but not intrusively so and one adapts quickly to the development of this monumental play that is a huge challenge to do well but has plenty in it to ensure that it takes a lot to fail completely. Andrew Scott is a convincing prince, his soliloquies arriving at their conclusions as he thinks aloud in the way Tony Blair used to pretend to do rather than delivered as if they were pre-meditated dissertations.
Beginning with the ghost but continuing through Ophelia's descent into madness, prompted by the complexities of her father being killed by her boyfriend and her conspicuously close relationship with her brother, to the dispatch into the great beyond of all the central characters, Hamlet is on the brink of the unknown, not least because the characters are enquiring into each other but also because nobody knows whether the prince's adopted 'antic disposition' has transformed into a real one. Three and a quarter hours pass unnoticed as Shakespeare's layers of potential meaning refer us into a compelling canvas of double revenge, subterfuge, paralysis and loss, none of which is to suggest that it can't also have jokes as well. If Lear is somehow profounder by being even darker, I've never understood how many authorities overlook Hamlet as Shakespeare's best, his signature masterpiece, in the later play's favour.
Jessica Findlay Brown puts in a storming performance as Ophelia, a big highlight being a thrilling 'more deceived' scene with Hamlet's fake madness apparently triggering her own genuine case before the rest of her life collapses around her. The production, or her performance in it, makes her thread more central to the play than it sometimes is. But, modern technology and its uses being what they are, which can be threaten to be distracting gimmicks; the screens, 'use of the whole theatre space' and the direction of this film of a staged play, they are used to great effect during the play within the play when the main protagonists sit in the front row of the audience to watch The Mousetrap and are filmed in close-up and seen on the big screen behind the stage. Like the other major tragedies, Hamlet takes place much of the time in dark places but benefits from intimacy, too.
The point of Dylan songs as commentary was lost on me, not being sufficiently conversant with his work to know anything apart from the final One More Cup of Coffee from the Desire album and it might have been that an admirer was dragging it in a bit gratuitously. However, Scott, as well as his Ophelia, Juliet Stevenson as a helplessly complicit Gertrude and Peter Wight, most famously for me one of the constables in Early Doors, as Polonius, in a strong cast, lured us into the downward spiral of suspicion, human fragility and corruption to the inevitable rest being silence.
It was a rare treat and, as ever, one is grateful for having the BBC to provide such things, it only being a shame that there was still plenty of Cosi Fan Tutte remaining on the wireless when it began on television. But we had better not complain. It was a luxurious decision to have to make.
