Hamlet

There can rarely have been such an angry young Dane. In Michael Grandage’s fast and filtered production of Hamlet, Jude Law is alight with ire. Thickened with disgust, he becomes almost ugly. He plunges in at full tilt; he jabs with each verb and gesture. At times he becomes a parody of his own vehemence: even ‘and’ can sound like an insult in his mouth. Yet, against the odds, by the end of the play, he has found another register. Law doesn’t have the sardonic wit of David Tennant, or the philosophical fluency of Jamie Ballard in Jonathan Miller’s recent Tobacco Factory production, but he makes a Hamlet who truly discovers himself. He delivers his anguished ‘to be or not to be’ in a literal blizzard of uncertainty, speaking amid a flurry of snowflakes, but when he comes to say ‘the readiness is all,’ he is steady: he is not merely parroting a proverb; he makes the words sound like the anchor of his being.

This week we had the great Hamlet bout. Could Jude Law be as good in the role as David Tennant was in last year’s Royal Shakespeare Company production? And the news from the West End ringside, so far as I’m concerned, is that it’s a squeaker- and that Mr Law is just ahead on points. That said, the Wyndham’s production is not a patch on the RSC show in several other respects. The company production has been strangely cast. Claudius, Ophelia, Laertes, Horatio, Gertrude and the ghost are all disappointing. Ron Cook’s Polonius is an almost embarrassingly bad stab at the part. He is more like a subservient waiter than a fruity old courtier. Still, the Ron Cook fan club seemed to be in attendance at Wednesday’s opening night. Polonius’s jokes kept getting wild laughs from one section of the audience. At times in this patchy show it is as though director Michael Grandage has not wanted to intervene on the text – or perhaps been too busy to tell his actors what to do.

Actor Jude Law was recently quoted in a newspaper as saying Hamlet was ‘a bit like a great song that’s been covered by a load of different singers’. If so, judging by the cheers at the end of his Hamlet debut last night, Law has a hit on his hands, despite a few off-key notes (more notably, in the production, itself). So it was, then, that Law took to the stage as the Prince of Denmark in the last production in the Donmar’s West End season, at Wyndham’s Theatre. As the second high-profile star to play the Danish prince in under a year, the comparisons with Doctor Who star, David Tennant, are inevitable. Both played Hamlet at roughly the same age and both are better known for their roles on TV and film, but it’s about there the comparisons end. While Tennant was a frenetic Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), switching seamlessly between sanity and feigned madness, Law was filled with ferocious anger, snarling and squaring up during the soliloquies, making more compelling viewing than Tennant, in the end.

‘Who’s there?’ The most exciting opening scene in all drama begins thus, but the phrase was lost last night as Jude Law’s Hamlet waited in the wings. At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford last year, it was Dr Who’s there, as David Tennant performed the role with scintillating astuteness. Jude’s sexier, though the hair line’s receding: at 37 years old and like Tennant, he’s a bit early middle-aged for the eternal student aspect of the role – and his voice is perhaps too huskily monotonous for someone who speaks almost half a play and over three hundred speeches. But we have to give the contest on points, if not quite a knockout, to Tennant. And Michael Grandage’s speedy production for the Donmar in the West End season – coming in at just over three hours with some clever cutting and hectic acceleration towards the end – is looking just a bit over repetitive in the Donmar style of black brick and musty lighting design, with a portentous sound track to match.