So finally saw Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet at the NT, well half of it to be exact as other commitments called. And what to say? It was a good half - solid, energetic, competent. Kinnear’s performance far outshone the mania of Tennent and the langours of Law, more controlled than the former and more precise than the latter. There were traces of Brannagh in the emoting RSC clipped quality, and a couple of self-conscious adoptions of Larry Olivier’s legs; betighted, angular and much admired by Tynan despite, or probably because of, their looking like an eroticised faux-naïf pigeon.
Polonius was particularly good, he left big spaces with which to darken the bluffers guide to life, a sense of deep and cleaving regret. Ophelia, God bless her, was the facile punchbag Shakespeare wrote her to be. We know Shakespeare encountered young women, away from his wife in Southwark and Shoreditch. TS Eliot once wrote of Henry James that he “had a mind so fine no idea could violate it”, Peter Ackroyd riffed, writing of Shakespeare “he had a sympathy so fine no belief could violate it”. And this nicely encapsulates Shakespeare’s uncanny ability to render another’s interiority in vivid flesh, and his mobile, often contradictory sense of withholding judgement. However his gifts do not extend to the subjectivities of young women, something those Shakespeare scholars who bend him to every conceivable progressive angle should probably admit.
A not unrelated failure of theatre was also in evidence today – the use and abuse of pop music. Theatre is roundly dreadful at presenting the meaning of pop music to be anything other than that of “young people”, an unexplained, generally inexplicable phemomenon of some half-remembered land. Today we had Ophelia sitting curled on the Olivier floor doing her homework next to a beatbox playing The xx. Laertes even spoke his lines over the music which was a brave move.
It’s hard to know what the show’s various minds were believing The xx meant in this context. If they wanted currency then there is a measure of it, but in this regard the NT are at least a year further behind the zeitgeist than a BBC nature programme. The xx probably mean “doomed youth” here, because they’re, y’know, sparse and introspective. The song was ‘Islands’, a numbed love song with an edge of eery clarity, about the compromise of a relationship; it’s a nerveless settlement, and so utterly wrong for the abusive blankness and torment of Hamlet and Ophelia it’s almost tragi-comic.
Anyone under 25 in todays audience is going to relate to The xx more widely as laconic irony, the quiet toughness, the introspective determination. I wish theatre would learn that pop music is as packed with meaning as any text, and treat it with due intertextual reverence. The less said about the clattering junglism which marks Hamlet’s patricidal incursions the better.
A much nicer touch was the delivery of the King’s initial state-of-the-nation address to camera, a camera which took centrestage, and drew focus when the producer’s circular wave of the arm towards it dictated the rhythm of the actor’s speechifying.
It was a neat way of dislocating those relentless aristocratic interiors that Shakespeare inherited from the Tudors, but I only mention it because of stumbling across Mark Lawson interviewing Jimmy ‘Cracker’ McGovern on the beeb, who weighed into theatre acting for being deeply inferior to its televisual cousin.
“Always shouting at the Gods” means for McGovern, there is no “truth” in the acting of the theatre. This strikes me as a literal naturalism that even someone working in the aesthetic confines of “television drama” might think to move beyond. The very heightened delivery of a theatrical performance (which let us remind ourselves can also include naturalism, projecting a voice is not as McGovern contends a constant reaching but the exact hiding of that reach) allows a particular kind of truth which is often more revealing than the simple truth of a well-narrated emotion, what Brecht called the Gestus or the moment where all the implications of an utterance are conveyed, where emotion and social relations are crystallised together in perfect transparency. This analytical elegance is something that for all the medium’s positive virtues (and I love telly) is rarely found there.
