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MAYER WAKEFIELD is chilled by the co-dependency of two lost souls as portrayed by German communist playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz
Against a sea of troubles
GORDON PARSONS is bowled over by a skilfully stripped down and powerfully relevant production of Hamlet
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JESSICA WIDNER explores how the twin themes of violence and love run through the novels of South Korean Nobel prize-winner Han Kang
SARAH TROTT explores short fictional slices of life in the American midwest from a middle-aged and mostly female perspective
Hamlet
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
THERE are as many Hamlets as there are actors who play the part or directors who shape the play. Rupert Gould’s two-and-a-half-hour production has skilfully stripped down Shakespeare’s longest play to its essentials. In doing so he has delivered the most powerful production of the many I have seen since Buzz Goodbody’s with Ben Kingsley’s tortured prince in 1975.
Here Elsinore’s battlements have been translated into the forecastle of an ocean liner. The published date, 1912, and the Edwardian-costumed passengers only need the atmosphere of gnawing depression of Luke Thallon’s grieving Hamlet to conjure up the folk memory of the Titanic disaster.
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