Hamlet
Young Vic, London
“I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you,” cries the anonymous character at the heart of Caryl Churchill’s new play What If If Only. He could be speaking for many on the London stage this week.
In three major openings — Hamlet (Young Vic), What If If Only (Royal Court), The Normal Heart (National Theatre) — individuals grapple with the scale of grief. In each production, lost loved ones haunt the action, spectral presences that on stage take physical human form, reflecting the way absence can be so acute it feels like presence. In all three, alternatives gnaw at the living: the sense of a future altered, of a conversation ended. And in each play, private grief spills over into something bigger, requiring action, galvanising change.
To Elsinore first, where Cush Jumbo’s Hamlet is clenched tightly in the grip of loss. The Young Vic’s staging has long been anticipated and Jumbo doesn’t disappoint. Her prince of Denmark is electric: a shaven-headed, androgynous figure whose world has been upended by the loss of his father, by a gathering sense of being trapped in a nightmare and by the urge to escape his inherited history without knowing how.
Jumbo’s Hamlet first appears dressed sleekly in black, sulking and sniping at his smooth, usurping uncle (Adrian Dunbar, Line of Duty’s Ted Hastings). This Hamlet is young, impetuous, divided from himself and, in Jumbo’s hands, often unkind. His cleverness becomes cruel, his grief self-absorbed: he lashes out viciously at Ophelia, toys sarcastically with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and his callous reaction to killing Polonius is breathtaking.
But Jumbo shows us the pain tangled up in that behaviour: the unhappiness and chronic lack of trust, the desire to break free of expectation. And every now and then we see a flash of what he must have been before: a dance with Ophelia; the easy affection with which he greets Horatio (Jonathan Livingstone: good, kind, concerned); the initial joy at seeing his university friends; their genuine alarm at his mental state. Anna Fleischle’s set of rotating turrets places us both in the corrupted court and in Hamlet’s mind. It’s a place of monoliths and mirrors, where pillars that seem dense and solid suddenly become translucent or reflective, a place of slippery uncertainty.
Meanwhile, Greg Hersov’s staging reminds us that grief and madness destroy more than Hamlet alone. Ophelia and Laertes are both casualties of a toxic situation. Norah Lopez Holden is heartbreaking as Ophelia, creating an impromptu shrine in an effort to comprehend her father’s death, as is Jonathan Ajayi as Laertes, spontaneously lying down beside her to try and comfort her. The impression is of a younger generation lost to a power struggle beyond their control, disconnected from their remote and preoccupied elders.
Elsewhere, however, it’s a more fitful production. It is peppered with lovely performances — Joseph Marcell’s droll fusspot Polonius, Leo Wringer’s drily funny gravedigger — with bursts of comedy and great ideas: the players’ shock when their performance is cut short, for instance. But too many scenes feel static and underpowered and the political import is muted. There’s no Fortinbras here, no sense of a bigger picture or a wider society hanging on events in the royal household, no real mooring for Claudius’s ambition or his ruthless desperation as things start to unravel. The ending feels curiously abrupt. This Hamlet is often vivid and fresh but feels held back somehow.
★★★☆☆
To November 13 (livestreamed October 28-30), youngvic.org
What If If Only
Royal Court, London
At 20 minutes long, Caryl Churchill’s What If If Only would almost fit into the interval of Hamlet, yet, in a sense, it picks up the baton. Again we are in the presence of someone derailed by grief and again the playwright rolls from this into huge metaphysical and political questions.
As with so many of Churchill’s plays, it’s also impishly playful. Sitting at a table, a character identified simply as Someone begins lightly, nattering away about an artist painting an apple. It seems inconsequential. But it soon becomes clear that he is talking to a partner who has died.
So intense does his longing to see that partner become, that he does eventually conjure up a presence — but it’s not the one he was hoping for. Instead it’s a droll, demanding, sometimes scary individual who manifests paths not taken — other pasts, presents and futures; an individual who exists in the realm of “what if” and “if only”.
This is a play that dwells in some twilight space between what happens and what might happen or could have happened. Like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it bends time and challenges conscience. Like Nick Payne’s Constellations, it plays with metaphysical speculation, but does so wittily and uses the space of theatre to make ideas concrete. That early monologue about art’s relationship to reality has a bearing. Churchill works, in part, like a visual artist, using live theatre not to represent ordinary life but to expand it, creating worlds that relate to ours but which can only exist in the stage space. And she’s always mischievous.
James Macdonald, who frequently collaborates with Churchill, directs with deft and often comic precision on Miriam Buether’s white cube of a set. John Heffernan’s Someone is raw, washed-out, febrile; Linda Bassett is mercurial, capricious even, as the various spectres. It’s a play that ties the personal desire for change to a greater sense of responsibility and loss. But it also ends on a note of hope, with the entry of a young child who demands to exist. Sharp as a diamond, it reminds us that Churchill, now 83, remains a unique voice.
★★★★☆
To October 23, royalcourttheatre.com
The Normal Heart
National Theatre, London
In 1981, a rare lung infection was reported in five previously healthy young men in Los Angeles. By August that year, writer Larry Kramer was holding meetings to discuss a disturbing rise in illness and death among gay men in the US.
That was the beginning of the Aids epidemic and Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart, though fictionalised, has the sting and force of documentary. We watch, with rising panic and fury, as its central character Ned (based on Kramer) battles for support to tackle the developing crisis.
More than 30 years later, it still shocks. There are lines that resonate strongly in the current pandemic. But our own recent experience sharpens the contrasts too. Here, as young men die, the rest of the world carries on as normal, newspaper reports are minimal, funding remains elusive.
The shame of this response, and the prejudice that drives it, is distressing and sobering. But Kramer has the honesty and courage to show internal divisions too: for some in the movement, Ned is too rash and argumentative; some see his campaign as alarmist and liable to play into the hands of bigots. Occasionally the arguments and debates become a bit stilted or verbose, but Dominic Cooke’s excellent production balances this with raw emotion and a vibrant sense of the people involved, his superb cast drawing the characters with wit and sympathy.
Ben Daniels is terrific as the terrier-like Ned: wiry, raging, driven, but also agonised by the pain he is witnessing, and by indifference to it, and touchingly astonished by falling in love with quietly devoted newspaper reporter Felix (Dino Fetscher). There are particularly lovely performances too from Danny Lee Wynter as camp, silver-tongued peacemaker Tommy and from Robert Bowman as Ned’s loving, but cowardly, straight brother.
Hovering above Vicki Mortimer’s set is a flame, keeping the torch burning throughout. And haunting the action is Craig (Elander Moore), an early casualty — a constant reminder that too many young men died. The huge Olivier Theatre at its best.
★★★★☆
To November 6, nationaltheatre.org.uk
Cush Jumbo is an electric Hamlet at London’s Young Vic
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