“Remember me,” demands the ghost in Hamlet. It often feels as if it is remembrance, as much as revenge, that he is seeking from his son. The moment when we are finally forgotten is a second, arguably crueller death, and that is perhaps particularly true for great actors. Theatre is by its nature an ephemeral art form; the traces it leaves behind linger mainly in the memories of the living.
It’s an idea played upon in this remarkable show, created by Dickie Beau with director Jan-Willem van den Bosch, which uses the same stage and set as the Almeida’s current production of Hamlet, starring Andrew Scott. All theatre is a form of haunting, a means by which the dead are raised and ghosts conjured. None more so than in the works of Beau, the extraordinary lip-synch artist who, in shows such as Blackouts, blending performance with archive audio recordings, has breathed life into icons including Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. The dead are put back together and embodied in this form of “re-membering”, which often has the uncanny knack of heightening the sense of absence.
From its opening moments, when a muddle of half-heard voices conjure Hamlets from Peter O’Toole to Jonathan Pryce, Beau acts as a kind of medium at a wonky seance. The show is inspired by Beau’s realisation that he will never play Hamlet and will remain forever absent from the roll-call of actors who have played the part. He is dressed in shorts, like a runner, a reminder that playing the prince is a competitive sport in which some never get to the starting line, some win and some lose. Ian McKellen is heard mournfully and self-deprecatingly complaining that his Hamlet is never included in critical roundups of great Hamlets. His Hamlet is already just a ghost.
Beau’s garb recalls the great Ian Charleson, who played the runner Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, and died just weeks after playing Hamlet at the National, where he was by all accounts the sweetest of princes. Charleson’s memory is kept alive, while the show also points out how every actor playing Hamlet has a replacement lined up. In one of the filmed sequences, we see Beau lip-synching the words of Daniel Day-Lewis’s dresser who, even as he helped the weeping actor after Day-Lewis declared he could no longer continue in the role, was already removing bits of his costume and props so the understudy, Jeremy Northam, could go on.
The show is gleefully gossipy – Edith Evans tells John Gielgud that if his Hamlet “cried a little less the audience would cry a little more” – but it made me well up, too, as it magnifies the whispering ghosts of performance history and makes us contemplate our own mortality.
• At the Almeida theatre, London, on 26 March. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
