The best thing about Sean Holmes’s chaotic production of Hamlet is that George Fouracres, of the sketch group Daphne, speaks with a Black Country accent (his own). Preconceptions about who is entitled to play the prince have been rapidly peeling away. Yet, as always in England, voice prejudice has stuck: the idea that RP is a default position – as if it were itself not an accent – has been hard to dislodge. A Brummie brooder is a good move.
The rest, though – pretty much all of it – is violence, to the play. In a visual muddle that overemphasises Hamlet’s isolation, Fouracres is in Doc Martens, Claudius wears doublet and hose and the Ghost is bare-chested in gladiator kit (glad rags?). Though there is some crispness from Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s Laertes and John Lightbody’s droll Polonius, most speeches are gabbled, squeaked or given bizarre emphases, as if the rhythm of the lines were something which needed to be clambered over.
The jumble might be justified by the idea that it’s important to punch an audience with the rottenness of Denmark and the raging danger of its heir apparent: Fouracres is furiously defiant, while using his standup skill to rouse the audience into pantomimic exchanges. The trouble is that absolutely nothing matters. The governing mood is of slack facetiousness. “O! That this too too solid flesh would melt” is delivered with the exasperation of someone waiting for British Gas to answer the phone – and was greeted with gales of laughter on press night. Claudius tells Fortinbras to fuck off.
Riffing in the gravedigger’s scene – playing his guitar, cracking telly jokes – Ed Gaughan congratulates the audience on sticking it out for so long. Have we, he wonders, in a line that is a true hostage to fortune, got “Stockholm syndrome”? More like Elsinore ennui.
Hamlet is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 9 April
