HAMLET
Women have been playing Hamlet for centuries. But not of late. Maxine Peake now plays the princely Danish ditherer at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. Bright, lively and heartbroken, she’s an even more affecting Hamlet than John Simm, her co-star in The Village, when he played the part in Sheffield. With cropped hair and a baggy blue suit, her prince is suspicious, caustic and terribly sad. While she is definitely playing a man, other roles have undergone trendy gender reassignment. Polonius is now Polonia, wittily played by Gillian Bevan who bears a resemblance to Home Secretary Theresa May. Further down the bill the Player King is also female – the commanding Claire Benedict – and Rosencrantz is a female tattooed punkette.
The evening, for all its modernity, boasts a lovely, word-perfect performance from stage stalwart John Shrapnel as both Claudius and a totally real, hands-in-pockets ghost. There’s a heart-stopping moment when Hamlet throws his arms around the living spirit of the old king. It’s the only time when this Hamlet is decidedly, to my mind anyway, female. It’s the hug of a daughter craving her dead father.
But although Peake’s Hamlet is totally alive and in the moment, occasionally the benign spirit of the recently deceased, ever-audible Donald Sinden hovers over the evening, harrumphing at her bloody awful verse delivery. Maxine gallops her lines and gobbles them inaudibly in the rush. Her great soliloquies have bags of passion but little music.
For the gravedigger scene, director Sarah Frankcom surrounds the pit in a pile of Oxfam cast-offs so that Yorick’s skull is now just a scrunched-up sweater. The play-within-theplay is staged as a slice of embarrassing community theatre with little children on stage. Why? There are enough mysteries in Hamlet without the director adding new ones. The whole emphasis here is on Hamlet as a domestic tragedy. Fortinbras has been entirely cut and with him goes the political side of this Danish thriller.
The chemistry between Horatio – a dignified Thomas Arnold – and Hamlet never quite cooks and Katie West over-eggs it as sad, mad Ophelia. Yet for all my carping, the show has a genuine sense of occasion and there’s no doubt that Maxine Peake is completely worthy of this mighty role, which she plays magnificently.
Until 25 October at the Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann’s Square, Manchester: 0161-833 9833, www.royalexchange.co.uk