Last week, Indhu Rubasingham launched her inaugural programme as the National Theatre’s director with a modern revision of a Greek classic. This Shakespearean classic now marks the maiden voyage for Robert Hastie as the venue’s new deputy artistic director. His production is elegant, fluid and full of clever ideas and updates. Hamlet (Hiran Abeysekera) wears a cool black suit or leisure wear, addressing the audience directly in his soliloquies, sometimes sitting at the edge of the stage to implore and make eye contact.
But the most unusual twist to this modern-dress version is its comedy. The usually morose Dane is anything but in Abeysekera’s hands. He draws out the physical humour of his part, seeming already antic before he assumes that disposition. It is as if he has been ascribed the job of Shakespeare’s universal wise fool, complete with ruff collar when the Players arrive.
Abeysekera is no stranger to this stage (he performed at the National in Rubasingham’s The Father and the Assassin in 2023) and he has a sure, limber presence, making for a cocky young prince. He jumps and whoops when he sees the vision of his dead father, who commands him to avenge his murder (the opening few scenes are brilliantly ghostly), he jiggles on the spot and makes guns with his fingers.
He also speaks at a rapid-fire speed. To undercut the too famous soliloquies? To create bathos? Sometimes, the words and meanings get swallowed up and his meditations on life, death and revenge are lost in the jumble.
Polonius (Geoffrey Streatfeild) mines his part for more overt comedy, his children, Laertes (Tom Glenister) and Ophelia (Francesca Mills), even joining in with the speech in which he imparts life advice, as if he has said it too many times before. Rosencrantz (Hari Mackinnon) and Guildenstern (Joe Bolland) are satirised preppy types.
Hamlet has been played as an outright comedy before, in Sean Holmes’s 2022 production at Shakespeare’s Globe. That was audacious and flawed. This seems more like a halfway house, tonally, and when it swings to seriousness the drama begins to carry you. Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia feels charged and when Abeysekera slows down his delivery, such as in the “quintessence of dust” speech by the graveside, he is magnificent, but these are glimpses of a slower – better – pace.
It is Mills who steals the show with her astonishing portrayal of Ophelia, which is a feat given her dearth of lines. Mills maximises their effect, bringing strength, sarcasm and her own intelligent brand of comedy to one of the play’s most emotionally fragile characters and the scene in which Ophelia unravels with grief feels truly dangerous in her hands.
You wish for the same bolshie intensity from others. Claudius (Alistair Petrie) and Gertrude (Ayesha Dharker) do not have enough of a frisson between them. There is an emotional vacancy when Hamlet urges her to turn away from her murderous husband; the scene is played neither for its oedipal undertones nor its aggression.
The framing of the story contains no wider politics either, or real-world resonances. So it seems simultaneously modern and unrelated to our world. Most of the action takes place on a single set designed by Ben Stones – an opulent room which gestures towards the past with a backdrop of Renaissance-era angels and cherubim, but marking the present, too. It is ingenious and ravishing, as is Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design.
So, a well-put together, beautifully choreographed production but one with a frustrating emotional vacuum at its centre.
• At the Lyttelton theatre, National Theatre, London, until 22 November and in cinemas from 22 January
