RSC's Hamlet (touring) ★★★★

Opening with the body of the dead King wrapped in the Danish flag on the deck of a ship, it’s immediately clear that Rupert Goold‘s Hamlet has forsworn the familiar trappings of incestuous, claustrophobic Elsinore in favour of a more maritime milieu. It feels a bold but still credible relocation given the naval tradition of Denmark.

It’s certainly one that allows set designer Es Devlin and especially video designer Akhila Krishnan a canvas upon which they can go full cinema. The constant and ever-changing seascape evokes an eeriness and an elemental unease on which the drama will play out. It’s an innately dramatic feast for the eyes, but one that rumbles threateningly without ever upstaging the action.

The stage is set until the production throws in another twist – and it’s a big one. Against the waves of the video screen appears the legend “14 April 1912”. No mere random date. It was when the RMS Titanic struck the iceberg. Assuming this isn’t the literal Titanic, what benefit is gained by the production conjuring a metaphorical Titanic? Downscaling the events in the play to this single night, complete with 2:22: A Ghost Story-style digital clock flashing up from time to time, there’s no mistaking the unremitting momentum this artistic choice affords.

It has to be asked: Is there something too deterministic about using the metaphor of this doomed liner heading inexorably towards its tragic ending? Surely one of the narrative drivers in Hamlet is the Prince’s indecision. The will-he-won’t-he avenge his murdered father is the jeopardy on which the play balances.

Ralph Davis takes on the role of the tortured Prince here with some equally bold choices. There’s little of the shallow, mopey, indecisive youth in his portrayal. Whilst his Hamlet gives good angst and even swagger as he sets out to avenge his murdered father, he never seems broken or truly vulnerable. Often the Dane can be infuriatingly wet, but here this nautical Prince ironically keeps his powder dry.

Nor is there that sense of the mournful outsider within the new court of Claudius and Gertrude. Raymond Coulthard casts the new King of Denmark as a slippery, manipulative politicker, quietly eliminating dissent. But unusually, this take has Hamlet as something of a mirror image of his uncle, with the same ruthless, determined trait that will brook no opposition to his ambitions.

While this is dynamic and refreshing, it does leave certain swathes of the text all at sea. The “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying” when he debates killing Claudius suddenly lacks credibility. He has too much agency and conviction as the character to pass up the opportunity.

There is one transcendent moment of vulnerability in the closet scene. Davis and Poppy Miller’s Gertrude bring out such an unexpected intimacy and pain together here, it’s as if the wave of surface behaviour has suddenly ebbed and exposed what has lain just below the surface. It suggests a vivid sense of human connection that is otherwise mostly occluded by the spectacle of the production.

Davis adopts an almost conversational style, which really offers genuine accessibility to newcomers to Shakespearean text. It feels contemporary and graspable. But what this gains as a jumping on point, it also diminishes in terms of the poetry of the piece. The inherent beauty of the iambic pentameter rhythm in the soliloquies is made inconsistent by unexpected pauses, rendering the text choppier than the tidal video background would suggest.

There’s no doubting the dynamism of this production of Hamlet. Brisk is rarely an adjective associated with this, Shakespeare’s wordiest play, but pacy doesn’t even begin to cover the rate of knots this production speeds through the action. There are Netflix movies sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought by comparison to this RSC production ploughing full steam ahead. Naturally, excising an hour and a quarter from the regular, uncut running time has its consequences. Poor Ophelia (Georgia Mae Myers) is less the victim of Hamlet’s antic disposition and more the main casualty of the drastic textual pruning. She has to go from loved up, oppressed, abused, driven mad in the space of an evening, without a willow true to call her own.

The daring artistic choices are not to be sniffed at. Thrills are to be had. The stunning visuals are an evocative treat for the audience, one that will fix a place in its memory for a long time. Remembering that the play’s the thing just about stays afloat.