It is a season of ghosts. They haunt Conor McPherson’s Shining City at Stratford East and Danny Robbins’s 2:22 in the West End. Now three plays with claims to conjure the spirit of the times do so by calling on phantoms for historical revelation, inner truth, prophecy.
Cush Jumbo is one of the best Hamlets I have seen: I reckon she is the 32nd I have reviewed for the Observer. There is no space between her and the words; they are what she is. Shaven-headed, twitchy-fingered and open-faced; at first loping and heavy-limbed with suspicion; later, dancing antically with Ophelia – for once, you can imagine the two of them getting it on. Always there is a fighter in her chest and a lover in her face, and I have never seen derangement and assumed madness more tellingly, ambiguously intertwined: the dialogue on the subject between Hamlet and Laertes is a revelation. Jumbo delivers surprises right up to the end, speaking her final words with a slow smile of relief. She is going to be out of it all, at last: “the rest is silence”.
It is a pity that Greg Hersov’s production is such a fitful affair. True, sparks fly in unexpected places. Joseph Marcell is a superb Polonius: precise and comic, making sense of each movement between himself and his children. As Ophelia, Norah Lopez Holden – in headphones and hot pants – refreshingly banishes limpness, being first earnest, then furious. Leo Wringer is unprecedentedly funny as the gravedigger.
Yet Adrian Dunbar is a rigid Claudius – he talks of “the hectic in my blood” as if he had a summer cold – and, stripped of its political and dynastic dimension, the play is more merely domestic. It is hard to manoeuvre around Anna Fleischle’s design of massive, tarnished towers, which suggest a monumentality lacking in the cut script. The killing of Polonius is staggeringly flat: Hamlet has to toil behind one of the towers to find him, so that the stabbing no longer seems instinctive, and the rest of the scene between Hamlet and his mother unfolds almost undisturbed, as if the old gent had just gone out for a pee. It is particularly striking when – for once – here is a Polonius who makes you want more, not less, of him.
Jumbo is the first woman of colour in the UK to take the role in a major production. She is neither a woman imitating male swagger nor someone being strenuously androgynous. She proves yet again that any good actor can be – or not be – Hamlet. Everyone must honour the fresh talent this brings to the part. Unless of course you think everyone should be typecast. In which case only a spectre should play the Ghost.
The West End stage is Tudor-heavy, with Six and, now, the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Not least perhaps because Henry VIII – a big chap with a lot of women, who wasn’t keen on the continent but was eager to dismantle institutions – has some topical resonance: “Breakfast in pomp and glory. Dinner in disgrace.” The Mirror and the Light, adapted by Mantel and Ben Miles for the Royal Shakespeare Company, traces the statesman’s downfall. It is an accomplished translation from page to stage, exemplary in its bold decision to lose some memorable passages to drive forward the action. The book’s opening scene, which gloriously, terrifyingly, renders the seconds after Anne Boleyn’s execution, is – well – axed: Jeremy Herrin’s elegant production begins in 1540 with Cromwell’s arrest, then tracks back four years to show his career unravelling.
Christopher Oram’s set evokes court, monastery and cell: overhung by an iron cage of scaffolding, lofty grey walls are speared by slanting shafts of shadow and light (the lighting designer is Jessica Hung Han Yun); at the end, they are broken at the back by a long red cross. Miles, who played the RSC’s Cromwell for two years, in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, continues his inflected, edgy portrayal of the commanding but fraying hero. No strain here; sinewed up in body as well as mind, you can see the blacksmith father in him.
It is a gliding rather than an urgent evening, with a few blots of obviousness in the portrayals of plebs and Frenchmen. Yet it carries lovely surprises. “I’ve not yet been able to write a singing book,” Mantel has observed. Stephen Warbeck’s music – moving through chorus and sudden solo female voices – steers the attention inwards. As do ghostly figures recalling Cromwell’s past. A subtle but strong feminist thread is woven into the mostly male action. There is a quiet disruption of the familiar legend in which Holbein so flattered Anne of Cleves in his portrait that Henry reeled back, disappointed, when meeting his about-to-be bride. The deep reds and golds and triangularities of Holbein’s painting are beautifully replicated, but in Mantel’s imagined but convincing version it is Anne who flinches, unprepared for the faded bloatedness of her future bedfellow.
Jo Herbert is outstanding as the insinuating Lady Rochford, who uses her height disdainfully, spreading around her rings of discomfort. It is one of the incidental pleasures of the evening that the play text becomes a small but substantial addition to the trilogy, with pungent encapsulations of “The Characters and their Fates” supplied by Mantel. Her note on Lady R – looking at you as “if she knew a secret about you”, and might tell it – made me long for her as the heroine of another volume.
What If If Only is less than 20 minutes long. Yet under the perfectly focused direction of her longtime collaborator James Macdonald, Caryl Churchill’s new play is so fully charged that it reaches further than most four-acters.
John Heffernan is sad. His most loved person – it is not immediately clear what relation she or he has to him – has died. He sits in Miriam Buether’s white box of a set, which lifts and lowers over him like the coming and going of grief. He longs for just “a wisp” – the language has a teasing echo of the play’s own shortness – of the one who is dead. And gets it in the shape of a spectral figure. The play – stately, for all that it is brief – develops gradually like a bruise, as individual sorrow shades into loss of hope for the future. The shadow of a human being appears on the back wall. It takes on the flesh of the least probable of ghosts: quizzical, down-to-earth Linda Bassett commandeers the stage with the might of her apparent ordinariness.
Not for the first time, Bassett is Churchill’s oracle. In 2016, in Escaped Alone, she was a woman who spoke of unforgettable dystopia; here – almost worse – she talks of better futures that may elude us, prospects of “movies and trees and people who love each other”, lively with “tigers and coral”, with resources that we may have “guzzled” away. Churchill is habitually thought of as oblique, spare, elliptical. That is true of the action of her plays, but it is hard to find a dramatist whose individual phrases are so rich and vivid. There is a beam of hope here, in the face of a child: radiant and confident, Jasmine Nyenya embodies another future possibility. “There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this,” says Horatio to Hamlet. But we audiences need this ghost.
Star ratings (out of five)
Hamlet ★★★
The Mirror and the Light ★★★
What If If Only ★★★★
Hamlet is at the Young Vic, London, until 13 November, and livestreamed 28-30 October
The Mirror and the Light is at the Gielgud theatre, London, until 23 January
What If If Only is at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London, until 23 October
This article was amended on 10 October. Cush Jumbo is not the first woman of colour to take the role of Hamlet in a major production; Ruth Negga played Hamlet at the Gate theatre, Dublin, in 2018.
