Hamlet

Theatre at the Mill, Newtownabbey

It is widely regarded as one of the greatest plays in English, yet some judge it a creaky old warhorse, best served as a vehicle for a celebrity star turn. Happily, Northern Broadsides, a Yorkshire company renowned for its ground-breaking interpretations of Shakespeare, subscribes to the former view.

Conrad Nelson’s Hamlet is set in late 1940s Europe, at the onset of the cold war. In a welcome piece of age-appropriate casting, Nicholas Shaw brings well-reasoned clarity to Hamlet’s soul-searching soliloquies and mood swings, at times registering as the sanest person on stage. He turns the gloomy tragic hero into a troubled but maddeningly likeable teenager, causing his mother, Gertrude (Becky Hindley), sleepless nights and tempting his scheming stepfather, Claudius (Fine Time Fontayne), to send him into the afterlife, much as he did with his brother, Hamlet’s father.

Nelson packs the evening with music, as a reminder that its writer loved to sprinkle even his darkest tragedies with bawdy wit, fun and mischief. Natalie Dew’s Ophelia contrasts a sultry entrance as a torch singer with a pathetic reprise of the same song before her watery death. In between she responds with tangible desperation to the misogyny of her courtier father, Polonius (Richard Evans), her lounge-lizard brother, Laertes (Tom Kanji), and the volatile, unpredictable Hamlet.

Some production elements fall flat. The haunting of the Elsinore battlements by a Japanese bunraku puppet ghost is devoid of real emotion or chill; the court of Claudius may be marked by sleaze and treachery, but there is neither political clout nor stifling claustrophobia of which Hamlet complains. The killing of Polonius is rather a slight affair, while scenes of blood letting and revenge are diluted by a lack of passionate connection, crucially between Hamlet and Laertes, who should break our hearts as they struggle to settle old scores.

Run concluded