McDonald’s vertiginously angled, hydraulically operated set suggests that Elsinore is sliding into the sea.
Its opening court scene presents an image of harmony and political health, with only Mark Rylance’s spiritlessly dejected Hamlet signalling the plague that will strike them down. 73
The large planes of flat, subdued color and sparse detail have a two-fold effect. They highlight the characters and, at the same time, emphasize their littleness against the massive ruins and the stormy sea.
The heart of Denmark is rotten, and Daniels concentrates on that heart. Questions of legitimacy, kingship and ambition are treated in terms not of the State but of individual fate. Intrigue is social, courtly, politic, not broadly political. The huge windows open on the sea and the rabble is heard only as an electronic noise, as of sirens. Daniels seems to want to lift the court out of history, to a plane on which the psychological and metaphysical themes can be purely explored. 74
Known as “the pyjama Hamlet,” due to the fact that Mark Rylance wore pyjama bottoms from entering for the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy to his exile to England, Rylance’s performance took Hamlet’s loss of sanity to extreme and believable levels. When the production toured and did a special performance at Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane, one inmate wrote to his local paper, explaining that Rylance “was able to capture every aspect of a person’s slip into the world of psychopathic, manipulative paranoia … Many of us here in Broadmoor are able to understand Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind because we have experienced such traumas.” 75
In Ron Daniels’s RSC production of
Hamlet
, the hero is … a Black Prince of pain and destruction. Antony McDonald’s sets are an expressionistic clash between sloping floors and tilted walls, as if the court were in danger of imminent collapse … the threat comes from Hamlet. We first see Mark Rylance as a tense, pale, hunched figure tightly buttoned in a long, heavy overcoat. His eyes are glazed over with too much introspection. He is clearly on the brink of a crack-up, and his encounter with the Ghost topples him over. This Hamlet suffers from a combination of obsessional brooding and a retarded emotional maturity. In public, he acts up to his breakdown, until it takes over and he regresses to a difficult, irascible adolescence.… Danielsand Rylance show Hamlet to be a moral vessel which is too weak to bear its just cause. When, at the end of a superb, harrowing bedroom scene, he kisses his mother on the mouth, it begins as a kiss of comfort and complicity and ends in a shocked recognition of fear and freedom. Of course, you lose the “romantic” Hamlet; but you gain in hard emotional authenticity. This is a deeply shocking production in the most crucial sense: it shocks you into the difficult recognition that necessary moral actions can be performed by people who do not carry the usual moral price tag. And so our sympathy and pity for Hamlet is hard-earned and therefore all the more real. 76
Frances Barber as Ophelia in 1985 was universally praised for her extremely moving performance. She saw Ophelia as an extension of Hamlet’s character, presenting
the female counterpart and counterpoint to him. She provides the feminine qualities lacking in his sensibilities. Shakespeare uses her innocence and naiveté to illustrate this imbalance and highlight its consequences; the destruction of a potent feminine force, caught up in a male-dominated power struggle.… I noticed Roger [Rees] as Hamlet became more lucid and reasonable as his obsessions took him over. He also used particular gestures each time he saw his father’s ghost, and he was truly in danger of losing his mind. If I was to follow through my theme of Ophelia as a female counterpart to the Prince, it seemed interesting to incorporate some of Hamlet’s gestures into the most inappropriate moments of
Its opening court scene presents an image of harmony and political health, with only Mark Rylance’s spiritlessly dejected Hamlet signalling the plague that will strike them down. 73
The large planes of flat, subdued color and sparse detail have a two-fold effect. They highlight the characters and, at the same time, emphasize their littleness against the massive ruins and the stormy sea.
The heart of Denmark is rotten, and Daniels concentrates on that heart. Questions of legitimacy, kingship and ambition are treated in terms not of the State but of individual fate. Intrigue is social, courtly, politic, not broadly political. The huge windows open on the sea and the rabble is heard only as an electronic noise, as of sirens. Daniels seems to want to lift the court out of history, to a plane on which the psychological and metaphysical themes can be purely explored. 74
Known as “the pyjama Hamlet,” due to the fact that Mark Rylance wore pyjama bottoms from entering for the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy to his exile to England, Rylance’s performance took Hamlet’s loss of sanity to extreme and believable levels. When the production toured and did a special performance at Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane, one inmate wrote to his local paper, explaining that Rylance “was able to capture every aspect of a person’s slip into the world of psychopathic, manipulative paranoia … Many of us here in Broadmoor are able to understand Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind because we have experienced such traumas.” 75
In Ron Daniels’s RSC production of
Hamlet
, the hero is … a Black Prince of pain and destruction. Antony McDonald’s sets are an expressionistic clash between sloping floors and tilted walls, as if the court were in danger of imminent collapse … the threat comes from Hamlet. We first see Mark Rylance as a tense, pale, hunched figure tightly buttoned in a long, heavy overcoat. His eyes are glazed over with too much introspection. He is clearly on the brink of a crack-up, and his encounter with the Ghost topples him over. This Hamlet suffers from a combination of obsessional brooding and a retarded emotional maturity. In public, he acts up to his breakdown, until it takes over and he regresses to a difficult, irascible adolescence.… Danielsand Rylance show Hamlet to be a moral vessel which is too weak to bear its just cause. When, at the end of a superb, harrowing bedroom scene, he kisses his mother on the mouth, it begins as a kiss of comfort and complicity and ends in a shocked recognition of fear and freedom. Of course, you lose the “romantic” Hamlet; but you gain in hard emotional authenticity. This is a deeply shocking production in the most crucial sense: it shocks you into the difficult recognition that necessary moral actions can be performed by people who do not carry the usual moral price tag. And so our sympathy and pity for Hamlet is hard-earned and therefore all the more real. 76
Frances Barber as Ophelia in 1985 was universally praised for her extremely moving performance. She saw Ophelia as an extension of Hamlet’s character, presenting
the female counterpart and counterpoint to him. She provides the feminine qualities lacking in his sensibilities. Shakespeare uses her innocence and naiveté to illustrate this imbalance and highlight its consequences; the destruction of a potent feminine force, caught up in a male-dominated power struggle.… I noticed Roger [Rees] as Hamlet became more lucid and reasonable as his obsessions took him over. He also used particular gestures each time he saw his father’s ghost, and he was truly in danger of losing his mind. If I was to follow through my theme of Ophelia as a female counterpart to the Prince, it seemed interesting to incorporate some of Hamlet’s gestures into the most inappropriate moments of
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