The Helix, Dublin
You read the paper and there he is. You glance at the Leaving Certificate syllabus for the next two years; you go to Second Age's second schools-friendly production of the play in consecutive years; you go home to sleep, perchance to dream, and there he is. There's no getting away from Hamlet.
The most admirable thing about Aoife Spillane-Hinks’s lucid, elegant production is that for all this familiarity, it dares to treat the play as a fresh work. Alyson Cummins’s superb Elsinore is a foldaway palace, where the walls open out to reveal an angular court and portraits of past kings that seem as misty as palimpsests, or shut to expose the battle-ready exterior.
Watching the cast, in sharp-cut modern dress, construct the public face of their kingdom, or seal it like a private trap, is a stimulating reflection of the play in its architecture.
This contemporary gloss brings a sad relevance to Conor Madden’s sullen young Hamlet too, whose view of the stale, flat and unprofitable earth would find resonance with his post-Celtic Tiger audience even if a scholar had not just traced his name to Irish origins.
Madden’s Hamlet, in jeans and T-shirt, is no bit of rough, downplaying his limber physicality to create a pent-up would-be avenger, forever amping himself towards action but never finding an outlet. His energy explodes in self-reproach and, more controversially, in violent exchanges with Anna Sheils-McNamee’s Ophelia.
Spillane-Hinks wisely introduces more women to Danish politics, with Noelle Brown appearing as an amalgamation of apparatchiks (and one of the gravediggers), but it makes Ophelia a more stubborn problem.
Sheils-McNamee’s sensibility is as contemporary as her costume, never quite squaring with her supplication to Darragh Kelly’s mild Polonius. Here the contemporary presentation brings great clarity to the play, only to discover less sense.
Where Ophelia has no one, Madden’s soliloquoys make the audience his confidants, where his witty stress on “That is the question” knows just how familiar we are with his existential quandary. (Discuss.) The consequence of his eye-contact though, for which he must look down, is that it saps his stage presence. When Frank McCusker’s nerveless, menacingly graceful Claudius finally unspools his conscience it is to himself and it is magnificent. To usurp the throne and the affections of Jane Brennan’s Gertrude is bad enough. To supplant Hamlet in rhetoric must really hurt.
The question of agency is essential to Hamlet, so when Spillane-Hinks gives an astounding (but completely justified) final moment to Claudius, it diminishes Hamlet's actions and emboldens her own. So it goes for the production, one that makes decisions – clear, considered and bold – while remaining alive to their consequences. Hamlet, that tormented avenger who is always with us, could learn something from it.
Runs until March 19 at the Helix, then tours
