RSC HAMLET REVIEW: Luke Thallon is a revelation in Rupert Goold’s titanically brilliant Hamlet at the RSC

Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, until 29th March

FIVE STARS *****

To sea or not to sea – that was the question roiling around as the audience entered, the rumour rife that director Rupert Goold had dislodged our entertainment from Elsinore and set it afloat on the ocean waves aboard the Titanic or some other such unfortunate vessel. The nautical re-set turned out to be true and, beyond that, inspired – a tempestuous stage devised for Luke Thallon to create the RSC’s new Hamlet, surely one of the most astonishing reincarnations in living memory.

It is reminiscent of that risky but occasionally rewarding technique employed by some film-makers: where they deliberately don’t tell the actors anything about the plot beyond the scene they’re currently shooting. That way, it’s said, the action is natural because the actors aren’t harbouring any assumptions about a preordained ending and so stay blind to the future and perfectly in the moment. Astonishingly, this is exactly the impression achieved by Thallon’s portrayal of the titular Prince. Considering the plot is inescapably engraved in theatrical history, and everyone knows how it goes and what occurs, I’ve no idea how he has achieved this but I’m at a loss to recall Hamlet ever having been so thrillingly refreshed. Thallon’s every line – no, scratch that, every syllable – issues forth as if it’s the first time he's ever expressed it. There are moments when this is so kinetic, the audience and even the actor himself – let alone the rest of the cast – don’t really seem to know what’s coming next, each utterance not so much delivered as pulled from his existence in a truthfully reactive emotional manner. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if every single performance might well be different, varied to the vibe of the night so to speak.

Whether he’s internalising, erupting or coercing the audience with sardonic smirks, cracking-up or stone cold, Thallon’s performance is such that we are wholly convinced he’s not just playing the part. Thallon is Hamlet.

And his incredible achievement is to turn the very purpose of the play right on its head.

Let’s just say for the sake of argument that Shakespeare was bored out of his fertile mind with run-of-the mill revenge-by-rote tragedies. And so what he did was write Hamlet to mess with the formula. To this end he created a character in the Prince who won't do anything he’s told. He refuses to act in pretty much any which-a-way that the play wants him to. Given countless opportunities to do the right thing and do-in his wicked uncle, he demurs and misbehaves like a sulky kid burdened with a chore. All he has to do is kill the baddie but, oh no, he offs a couple of no-marks and acts mean to his girlfriend so she tops herself when they should have been riding off romantically into the sunset. He does anything, in fact, other than what the play and the audience expect of him. He's hyper-disobedient, the Bard's mopey Dane.

Of course, having had a couple of hours of naughty fun at the crowd’s expense, Shakespeare eventually bottled it and we get the required blood-letting of the dastardly unc – deny that to any Elizabethan audience and he’d never have worked again! But before he delivered on the play’s implied promise, he eked it out long enough to let everyone know that he could have had the Dane do whatever he chose. So, the great thing is that what should have been a straight-ahead play about settling scores and making sure all’s put to rights has been deliberately rendered a crowd-baiting exercise in procrastination. A little light on the usual gory fun and games, granted, but very clever and supernaturally ahead of its time.

But Goold and Thallon are having none of it, mixing up the medicine in completely the opposite way to how Shakespeare played his original hand. Back then the audience was teased and presumably somewhat frustrated in expectation of justice being served. Now, familiar with all the inactive wringing of hands and furrowing of brows, Thallon’s Hamlet just can’t wait to get the damn thing over with. He starts in angry and then gets really going. He wants it done and dusted, double-quick He’s never intent on not fulfilling the bargain. We’re never in doubt he’ll do the deed. Indeed, he’s twitching and writhing to do so, as if his body is accelerating faster than his mind towards the denouement.

And that’s where the ship comes in. Audiences are regularly confronted with Shakespeare being updated or shunted elsewhere or whatnot, sometimes to good theatrical purpose, mostly more for the novelty alone. But Goold’s idea to put the whole province on designer Es Devlin’s heaving liner adds real dramatic power and purpose. With the cast confined upon and below the monstrous, bucking deck and with nowhere else to run to, the play – smartly edited to enhance the action – unravels at a more welcome frantic pace that the usual plodder. Everything happens in close proximity on one stormy night, ominously marked by a digital clock bleeping as the hours speed by. Imprisoned by time, battered by the furious sea, no-one can nor will escape this hell in which all founder and fall. All-in-all, the cuts and rearrangements are judicious – happily all the Fortinbras stuff has been junked, the “To be” bit has been neatly shifted to prelude the interval in a gun-toting faux cliffhanger and, of course, poor old Yorick remains, though to no real purpose.

Thallon is so mesmerising, it’s easy but cruelly unfair to overlook all the others on stage. Elliot Levey’s Polonius plays it for fun as an annoying little man who means well and is continually mocked by Hamlet for his pliant servitude to his hated uncle. Perhaps to contrast Thallon, perhaps not, Jared Harris plays the fratricide villain old-school straight and out of the textbook, the part delivered perfectly (in)decently but more stolid than sinister, though fair dues, he’s pretty growly when he tries to drown Hamlet, plunging the Prince’s head in a bucket. Nancy Carroll squeezes a little more humanity out of Gertrude, her closet scene with her son – she cig-smoking and stressed – is unnervingly moving for a murder suspect.

Chase Brown and Tadeo Martinez are silly suck-up cartoon American Rosencrantz and Guildensterns, appropriately ineffectual. Their reluctance to answer Hamlet’s simple question as to whether they have actually been sent for by the new king to spy on him rather than arriving in friendship of their own volition leads to a flustered silence that lingers so long it grows pregnant with foreboding.

Anton Lesser rumbles through the dead king’s ghost bit – a part always more daft than scary – but it’s a neat trick to have him as the murder victim in the play-within-a-play which reveals the bro’s skulduggery and sets him off incandescent with guilt.

Nia Towle’s Ophelia is a more complicated creation. She’s not entirely sympathetic, unexpectedly haughty towards Hamlet and really only loses her mind when Hamlet shoots her father – a nicely messy reflection of her once-beau’s feigned insanity but some distance removed from the audience ever feeling as sorry for her as past productions might predict.

The rest don’t do a whole lot with what they’ve been given but that may well be the inevitable consequence of our dominant principal demanding so much of our consideration.

In the end they all skid down the upturning deck, slain or alive it hardly matters, to meet their end in the sea. Hamlet alone remains, upright and dying, reaching to the heavens. Then, as he says, all the rest is silence.

Ultimately, though, no-one’s attention can stray too far or too long from Thallon.

When was the last time you enjoyed Shakespeare really alive, true to the text yet as if made up on the spot in response to unfolding, unpredictable circumstance? Exactly! This isn’t just acting, this is nigh-on being. Brilliant.