What do you mean I have to play Hamlet? ... Jude Law in the Young Vic's Doctor Faustus. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
So it's finally happened. After assorted murmurings and rumblings - including a shameless pre-plug, as I recall, on the Today programme when the Young Vic reopened last year - Jude Law is finally to slip into tights and do what Uncle Monty in Withnail and I somehow never managed to: play the Dane.
I know it's happening under the brilliant Michael Grandage, I know he won award-nominations as a young thesp, I know he's a decent age for the part - but still my heart thuds instinctively to the floor. "Jude is a muscular, visceral actor who has a very direct connection with raw emotion," Grandage said yesterday, which sounds to me like a delicate way of acknowledging some things that might be wrong with the casting: Law's callowness, his shallowness, his sheer maddening inanity. Hamlet can be many things - sardonic or guileless, fey or brutish, heart-rending or clownish, emotionally transparent or impossibly remote - and in the best performances he (sometimes she) succeeds in being all of those things at once. One thing Hamlet can't be, though, is mediocre. Jude Law, as he demonstrated last time he was wheeled out at the Young Vic to do a big Renaissance play, is mediocre.
Jeremy McCarter wrote on this blog a few weeks back about why he didn't mind English actors showboating it on Broadway, on the basis that at least they disturbed the status quo, a ceaseless parade of ill-fitting celebs who fancy a pop at theatre. But in this respect, as in others, London is catching up with Broadway fast. The production will sell out, one supposes (they've moved from the Donmar to a larger space at Wyndham's to fit in as many people as possible), and although I'm told money really isn't the object, the revelation that the project is being done for artistic reasons, and by a theatre that made its reputation in intriguing, off-beat productions, somehow makes the whole thing more dankly depressing.
We're informed that ticket prices will remain at Donmar levels, which means a top price of £32.50 with most seats available for far less - but if it comes to the money why not just stay home, rent a DVD and splurge the rest on a takeaway? Tell me I'm wrong.
