Before seeing this latest Bell Shakespeare I had read Chris Hook’s interview with the show’s director Damien Ryan in a recent edition of The Daily Telegraph. Here is an extract.
“I did not look to put my personal stamp on it or throw it all against the wall and reassemble it as an abstract painting.
“This is one of Shakespeare’s best plays. It begins with a ghost story and ends with a sword fight and includes incredible philosophy, incredible comedy, incredible theatricality and I just wanted to get out of the way and tell it but also to find a way to ensure each character or idea has an originality or sense of invention, and in some ways the easiest approach to that was in the casting.”
The good news is that Ryan has cast well. He has collected a talented troupe of players together who bring this Shakespeare tale vigorously to life.
Josh McConville is great in the prized role of Hamlet, the part that so many actors aspire to play. McConville copes with the enormous demands of the role. Quoting from the actor, “There’s all this emotion. The constant grieving and flipping of emotions: from being a clown, to being utterly depressed, to being vengeful, to being ambitious.”
And he delivers his lines, all 1,495 of them, clearly and expressively. Perhaps too effectively! In the row in which I was sitting one young woman had to make a sudden dash to the exit during his delivery of the ‘to be or not to be speech’…
Matilda Ridway is a very feisty Ophelia. In an interview she described how she plays her, “I play Ophelia as this bubbly, boisterous woman full of hope at the beginning, someone who is a match for Hamlet in terms of her vivacity and to see how far I could take that journey as the play brutalises her.”
Yes, the play is brutal to Ophelia. Ridgway’s final scene, when Ophelia is a complete wreck, is devastating to watch.
Sean O’Shea, a regular for many years with Bell Shakespeare, plays both Claudius and the Ghost. That is a big call..I am not sure that having him double up as the Ghost quite works…
In his main performance as Claudius he is effective, portraying him as a very forceful man who sees his world caving in. He memorably delivers the soliloquy, where we hear the King’s conscience gnawing away at him.
We get an interesting portrayal by Doris Younane of Gertrude. This an essentially unsympathetic portrayal. This Gertrude is pretty much an insensitive, cold-hearted woman with little personal insight.
Ivan Donato hits all the right notes in his tender portrayal of Hamlet’s loyal, wise friend, Horatio.
Michael Wahr and Robin Goldsworthy impress as Hamlet’s much less trustworthy friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Wahr is also strong in his portrayal of the very intense and much aggrieved Laertes.
Phillip Dodd gives an outstanding portrayal of Polonius, always wanting to be the centre of the action.
Catherine Terracini and Julia Ohannessian come to the fore with their portrayals of the Player King and Queen in the play within the play which catches the King’s conscience out. They even get to sing in Italian during the murder of Gonzago enactment.
Damien Ryan, working with designer Alicia Clements, also give a starring role to the grand castle of Elsinore.
Here is Damien Ryan again, “My desire was to create a really contemporary production that’s full of atmosphere. The castle of Elsinore is an incredibly powerful presence in the story.
“In other Shakespeare tragedies we see streets, battlefields, churches and so on. But Hamlet is different. Most of the play is contained within Elsinore; this brooding, elegant, quite foreboding, strange castle. I wanted Elsinore to feel like a real figure in the story. So the entire set design looks like a giant window into this vast contemporary Scandinavian palace.”
My verdict. A memorable production of one of the greatest of plays. Bell Shakespeare’s production of HAMLET is playing the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House until Tuesday 8th December.