HAMLET. To 12 October.

Edinburgh

HAMLET
by William Shakespeare

Birmingham Repertory Theatre at Royal Lyceum To 30 August 2003

7.30pm except no performance 25 August, 30 August at 7pm Mat 24,27,30 August 2pm
Runs 2hr 5min No interval

TICKETS: 0131 473 2000
www.eif.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 August

There is good foreign-directed English language Shakespeare in Edinburgh, but you have to know where to look.Fortunate Edinburgh, to have an international festival that has, this year, brought a fresh look at Shakespeare through a foreign director's imagination, resulting in a telling, gripping production that speaks to all ages; one where stripping-down script and action reveals in bright clarity much of the play's heart.

This was, of course, the admirable Danish company's visit to the Bank of Scotland International Children's Festival at the end of May this year. Although it was performed in the Garage, all of 100 yards across the street from the Royal Lyceum, it doesn't rate a mention in the EIF programme's somewhat self-congratulatory but rather generalised article on foreign directors' work on Shakespeare in English within these shores.

In horrific contrast we have this lumbering, bull-in-a -china-shop account festering two weeks on the Lyceum's stage. No problem with the cutting - that's intelligently done. And the royalty's reasonably stripped away (along with the political dimension) to reveal a 'new money' celebration in a neon-lit Palace hotel, bar or club.

Karl Daymond's white-coated pianist (the Horatio identity doesn't truly register except in the cast-list) contrasts the dark-clad characters elsewhere and has a calm that both observes and contributes- amplified plucked piano-strings create a menacing rumble as Old Hamlet's Ghost 'appears'.

Except it doesn't, it seems broight on by Hamlet's heavy tipple, a final unbalancing of a mind o'erthrown by depression, one where original nobility is little-evidenced. Drink's one of the three key-points in this production. The others are sex and violence -often, violent sex. The trouble with Bieito, here more than in his mafia Macbeth recently at the Barbican, isn't the violence itself, but the gross-out way it smears over characters and production. Violence on stage is easy to do.

It's as if the director can see no further into human motivation than gonads and power-lust. You feel if Shakespeare had been around to write a play about Mother Teresa, Bieito would have turned her into a machete Madam.

Publicity quotes Hamlet's line 'The time is out of joint'. That's no excuse for this one-dimensionality; he goes onto regret the 'cursed spite, that ever I was born to put it right.' In this production's world there's no sense of right. Elsinore becomes a luxury pleasure-palace, the stage baring a huge glass drinks-table.

Polonius sexually abuses his daughter, teaching her that sex is the way to male approval - so she flies for Hamlet's flies when she wants to please him. Only to be raped by a bare-buttocked George Anton as the Hamlet who'll go on to claim he loved her more than 40,000 brothers (difficult to know how Ophelia's actual brother behaves, given Lex Shrapnel's overwrought performance). Fortunately Anton, beginning quietly and working to frustrated fury, shows there's far more than an active posterior to his Dane.

With a Hamlet so morally, and humanely, blind, you wonder if there's any point left- 'pint of nihilism all round, then we can all go home, sir?'. Having had a failed go at the real thing, Ophelia mad is left sexually stroking a bottle of mineral water between her thighs. It doesn't look to be sparkling.

Then there's Diane Fletcher's Gertrude, a performance that shows subtlety - her way of pushing behavioural suggestions at Hamlet within a polite-talk surface through word emphasis is a sign of the quality of acting potential on stage. But wait till the director gets his paws on it - soon enough, we have wild-woman Gert astride Claudius, whipping him for mutual sexual pleasure, recalling a similar scene between two upper-crust types in Steven Berkoff's Decadence. Berkoff used the idea aptly; in Bieito it's crude and derivative.

Brain-numbing as this all is, the pure violence - the Pianist shooting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet mashing in Polonius' head, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, at the OK from Claudius, battering Hamlet - who lets them, why not, he can always take it out on Ophelia? - is even more stupefying.

The pity is this comes under the name of Birmingham Repertory Theatre, a major regional house where directors like Bill Aexander, Anthony Clark , Gwenda Hughes and, I am sure, now artistic director Jonathan Church have produced a series of far more considered Shakespeare productions.

Less time spent looking up to the aartistic jet-set, more considering actual quality of work, could do wonders for the Edinburgh drama programme. This year's already seen the superbSan Diego and the fine Seagull. Somewhere there are directors who can bring genuinely fresh dimensions to Shakespeare. This director's half-loaf Bard is getting staler by the year.

Guildenstern: Nicholas Aaron
Hamlet: George Anton
Claudius: George Costigan
Horatio-Pianist: Karl Daymond
Rosencrantz: Matthew Douglas
Gertrude: Diane Fletcher
Polonius: Rupert Frazer
Ophelia: Rachel Pickup
Laertes: Lex Shrapnel

Director: Calixto Bieito
Designer Ariane Isabell Unfried, Rifail Ajdarpasic
Lighting: Rick Fisher
Music: Kal Daymond
Dance Tutor: James Cooper
Fight director: Nicholas Hall
Assistant director: Carlos Wagner
Dramaturg: Xavier Zuber

2003-08-24 11:48:33