By ANNE McELVOY [Standpoint] – Nicholas Hytner’s Elsinore at the National Theatre is the surveillance state gone mad. It looks like the kind of place high-tech villains inhabit in BBC1’s Spooks, where every air vent conceals a camera and everyone is an informant. Court retainers lurk behind doors on designer Vicki Mortimer’s mock-classical set, while thuggish snoops whisper into the hidden microphones.
This brooding topicality is a mixed blessing. It makes the production feel genuinely menacing: however familiar you are with the great Dane, you somehow wish things would turn out better than we know they will.
It does however bear the curse of reworking Shakespeare to highlight modern political evils, as if Elsinore didn’t have enough of its own to keep us occupied.
Ophelia (played as uppity teen rather than sacrificial lamb by Ruth Negga) is co-opted into secretly recording Hamlet in their final encounter. Why? She’s then murdered by the court goons, evidently at Claudius’s behest. I do think if dear old Shakespeare had wanted Ophelia done away with he’d have written it like that, instead of giving us all that poetry about willow trees.
Continued at Standpoint | More Chronicle & Notices.
