‘More matter, less art’ says Gertrude to Polonius (both sensitively performed here by Terry Diab and Richard Ings respectively) – Get to the point! Not an approach that should work with Hamlet – we think we need the ‘art’, the soul-searching, the ‘Alas Poor Yorick’. But somehow Stern Alarum’s stripped-down, 80-minute version works and works incredibly well.
This is a bold debut from an extremely promising company.
Henry Douthwaite leads a strong cast as a properly grown-up Hamlet – stripped of the longer passages of doubt that imply youthful self-obsession , he’s a terrifying figure, raging against his madness and the world around him. Manic in the company of friends, screaming at the walls when alone, throwing Ophelia around like a rag doll; every bit of his performance is dynamic and utterly engaging – taking you with him so thoroughly that I actually lost my breath during ‘To be or not to be’, whilst Hamlet’s breath gently clouds in the freezing World War II bunker.
Whilst I’m not sure I buy the stated premise that the Danish court is trapped here in some post- apocalyptic world, the site allows director Andrew Shepherd to add some beautiful touches. Hamlet chalks off the days since his father’s death on the rotting walls, for the ghost’s scenes we’re plunged into complete blackness with the actors torches eerily following its path. When Hamlet speaks to his dead father it’s blackness again, with only the sound of chalk across the walls scratching the ghost’s message. It’s red chalk – giving his hands an increasingly bloodied appearance as the death-toll rises.
With a trimmed down cast (there’s only nine, and no doubling) the play within a play is wonderfully handled – the court apparently indulging Hamlet in a bit of self-produced drama therapy, with him dragging Gertrude and Claudius onto the make-shift stage to read the lines of their counterparts, stumbling over those that reveal their guilt. Ophelia’s death is heralded by a huge bang from god-knows-where inside this underground labyrinth – rendering the description of her drowning draped in flowers a poignant and melancholy metaphor.
The final duel between Hamlet and Alex Gatehouse’s beautifully exuberant Laertes becomes a prisoner of war-like game with disturbingly real-looking Rambo knives drawn at speed over a wooden crate. Then everybody’s dead – and before 9pm.
Despite the cold and the damp, I could have sat through more, but the cuts are well done enough to add a paranoid pace to proceedings, and detract nothing. This is a bold debut from an extremely promising company.
