Poisoned Love at a Troubled Court
OVE?" snarls David Burke's Claudius, marching on to the stage.
"His inclinations do not that way tend." But he is mistaken. The
emotion Alan Rickman's Hamlet has just revealed may be a poisoned
love, but it is love nonetheless, assuing forth under cover of hatred as
he pulls Ophelia to a rain barrel to drench her painted face in water. The
Ghost (Burke again), a matter-of-fact old chap in a bathrobe, quenches his
thirst with the same water, and thus sets up what becomes a visual connection
between father-love, mother-love and disgust for women.
One of the strengths
in this production by Robert Sturua, artistic director of the Rustaveli
Theatre in Tbilisi, is the inter-connectedness of parts. Scenes overlap,
Geraldine McEwan's Gertrude stays hunched in misery, although her own scene
has ended and the dialogue has moved on to the next. This troubled court's
inhabitants find themselves concerned onlookers, even when they have nothing
to say.
Gertrude's decline
illustrates another aspect of this connectedness. McEwan's trembling voice
suggests a woman who had supposed life would be a comedy, perhaps by Wilde,
and thoroughly awful things were happening. She does not know where to put
her hands. "Did you assay him to any pastime?" she enquires, like
a society lady recalling the duties of a hostess. The interpretation does
not quite work, but as the awful things get worse, she, like Ophelia, lets
her wits go straying. This is then seen to affect Claudius. They are altered
not simply by Hamlet's behaviour, but by each other's, a feature other productions
ignore.
But the great strength
and fascination of the production is Rickman. Grey-faced and monkish
in his long black gown, he makes the familiar speeches sound newly-minted
from his brain. His tone is conversational, sometimes eliding or eliminating
words to make it so. "Very glad to see you," he murmurs to Marcellus.
Having sussed the flaseness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a creepy pair
in matching beige mackintoshes, his voice goes prancing off into the "I
have of late" speech as tough those words, too, are false.
Giorgi Meskhishvili's
set, a T-shaped metal balcony across the rear of the stage, gives Rickman
further conversational chances. With Claudius praying down below, he walks
aong the balcony, commenting lightly, "Now might I do it pat,"
and has almost vanished at the other side before realising that yes, why
not?
These humanising
details accompanying the suspicion of rhetorical flourish, make the epileptic
outbursts of the last scene harder to integrate. In other respects, too,
after returning to Denmark, Rickman's Hamlet, like Sherlock Holmes
after the Reichenbach Falls, is not quite the man he was. When not writhing
on his back beside the grave, he is sunk in torpor, and Sturua's drastic
telescoping of the duel allows no time for him to gather his energy. The
director's intention here baffles me: is the climax of Hamlet's experience
sending his two companions to their death in England? The mad scene, with
Julia Ford a hurried Ophelia, does not work well, yet the scene of Polonius's
humility before his king, comes powerfully to life as Michael Byrne suffers
himself to be flung to the floor.
The play ends with
Timothy Bateson's mould-breakingly sombre Osric, in bowler hat and spats,
picking up the boots discarded by his new sovereign. Bateson played in the
British premiere of Waiting for Godot and it looks as if his Godot has come
at last. Daniel York's boorish Fortinbras suggests the future will be grim
indeed.
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