Theatre: Hamlet
Having collaborated on a triumphant Richard II, the same actor-director team of Samuel West and Steven Pimlott now give us a strikingly similar Hamlet : cliche-free, anti-romantic, visually spare and politically vivid. Played on a thrust-forward stage, complete with Japanese-style walkway, it runs for four hours and is totally gripping.
What is startling is Pimlott's ability to create a plausible Elsinore through the simplest means. Alison Chitty's set is a white box that takes on contrasting colours through Peter Mumford's superb lighting. But we instantly know what kind of world we're in - an elective tyranny - when Larry Lamb's glad-handing Claudius is greeted with volleys of sycophantic applause by his name-tagged acolytes. And it's a measure of Pimlott's avid eye for detail that when, four hours later, a bandolier-bedecked Fortinbras claims "I have some rights of memory in this kingdom", he is greeted by the self-same Voltemand earlier despatched as ambassador to Norway.
Defining Elsinore instantly throws Hamlet 's dilemma into sharp relief: you don't just rush off and kill a protected presidential figure like Claudius. And the keynote of West's fine Hamlet is a mordant intelligence and sense of political impotence. This Hamlet has a built-in bullshit detector that enables him to see through his own, and other people's, rhetoric. And if he packs a pistol, he is more likely to use it against himself than Claudius: indeed, he points it at his own temple before invoking the divine injunction against self-slaughter. Effectively marginalised by Claudius, West's Hamlet turns inwards at one point he even shares a spliff with his old mates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Each actor creates his own Hamlet and West's is sardonic, clever and cruelly aware of his own powerlessness. When the First Player describes the immobilised Pyrrhus confronting Priam, West brilliantly echoes the phrase about the way Pyrrhus "did nothing". If I miss anything in his performance, it is the youthful sexual confusion vividly highlighted by Stephen Dillane but that is partly because Kerry Condon's slight, fey Ophelia seems an unlikely lover for this Hamlet , who would obviously be doing his PhD at Wittenberg.
It is, however, a rare piece of undercasting in an ensemble that bats all the way down. Lamb's Claudius is a brutally charismatic strong-arm politician Marty Cruickshank's Gertrude is a disenchanted sensualist who looks meaningfully at her husband when she makes a coarse joke in the midst of her threnody over Ophelia and Alan David's Polonius is a pompously nasty piece of work.
We have lately had a rash of depoliticised Hamlets. Pimlott puts power back at the play's centre and, with West, makes it enthrallingly clear that Hamlet 's tragedy is that he is the paralysed individual conscience in a world of realpolitik.
Until October 13. Box office: 01789 403403.