HAMLET: Untill 12 July

Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate
Presented by Wild Thyme Productions
Runs: 2hrs 45m: one interval: until 12 July
8pm (6 July: 4pm & 7.30pm)
Then International Shakespeare Festival, Neuss, Germany 15th-17th July
Review: Kim Durham: 3rd July 2003

This all-female production is workmanlike rather than illuminating.
It seems to be the season for all female Shakespeare productions. This Wild Thyme Hamlet follows hot on the heels of The Globe's Richard III and precedes that theatre's Taming of the Shrew.

What we are offered here is a workmanlike rendition rather than a particularly illuminating one, the problem lying less in the gender of the cast than it's relative inexperience. All too often text and situation remain insufficiently explored.

That cannot be said of Miranda Cook's Hamlet, whose palely androgynous Prince begins as a nervous adolescent, hovering uncertainly on the brink of manhood, but who is still enough of a child to crawl into the lap of his ghostly father and promptly fall asleep. Having to avenge a murder seems to be the making of him.

There's good work too from Julia Marsen, doubling as a dapper Laertes and a murderous Lucianus in the well-staged play within the play. Karina Fernandez offers a convincing Ophelia, though her playing of the flower scene as more sad than mad leaves us wondering a little at what, in the circumstances, seems excessive concern over her mental health.

Director Stephen Jameson gives us a contemporary Elsinor that is peopled by ghosts. Not only Hamlet's father, but also a recently deceased Polonius and Ophelia may be summonsed to drift across the stage by a mourner's imagining. With atmospheric music provided by James Waverley's subtle piano underscoring, this is a production suffused in melancholy.

It may be that cross-gender casting will become, in future, as unremarkable as colour-blind casting now is, at least in terms of classical theatre. If so, then this may well prove to have been a groundbreaking production, and all credit to it for that. However, whether such an approach leads to new insights, on the basis of this Hamlet, remains to be seen.

Hamlet: Miranda Cook
Claudius: Sinead O'Keeffe
Gertrude: Kath Burlinson
Ophelia: Karina Fernandez
Laertes/ Lucianus: Julia Marsen
Polonius/ Priest: Harriette Ashcroft
King Hamlet/ Player Queen/ Sailor: Linda Gathu
Horatio: Gemma Larke
Rozencrantz/ Marcellus: Emma Callander
Guildenstern/ Bernardo/ Osric: Kesty Morrison
Fortinbras/ Player King/ Gravedigger/ Doctor: Fiona Paul

Director: Stephen Jameson
Designer: Dora Schweitzer
Lighting: Rob Halliday
Composition & Sound: James Waverley
Fight director: Dan Llewelyn-Williams
Voice: Jane Vicary

2003-07-03 21:17:30