Hamlet is the premier play of English-language theatre, not because it’s Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy but because any classical actor worth his salt has the chance to shine in it. The title role is so open to interpretation that the actor can, if not quite play himself, at least exhibit his natural gifts without violating the characterisation.
So it was that Olivier’s first stage Hamlet was described by James Agate as the finest performance he had ever seen. Gielgud’s recordings suggest a Hamlet of lingering, meditative intensity and a wonderful glinting gift for high comedy. Scofield was pensive and uncertain, staring into an abyss. Richard Burton made the verse a weapon of his will and the comedy was like swordplay.
Derek Jacobi was the last big-time British actor to tour this country in the part, a couple of decades ago. But local Hamlets have cut their swathes: Robert Menzies, and more recently Richard Roxburgh, who had Cate Blanchett as his Ophelia and Geoffrey Rush as his Horatio.
Hamlet is not like Lear, in which only an actor or two every generation comes within cooee of the role. A new Hamlet need not worry about the looming memory of a Scofield or a Paul Robeson, a James Earl Jones or a Sean Connery. He can simply become one more bewildering element, in a play about the riddle of selfhood.
A histrionic prince who treats the world as his mirror and his rehearsal space, Hamlet has to imagine himself before he can find himself as an actor. The mask of the comedian and the mask of the magnetic actor, the prince of self-possession, derive their power from the fact that Hamlet is steeped in a desolation he cannot understand.
In his new production for the Bell Shakespeare Company, John Bell gives the role to Leon Ford—a young actor who plays the Prince as very young, looking like a homeboy, a nerd or some very contemporary incarnation of alienated youth.
You can’t object to the trappings of the conception. But Ford plays Hamlet as a kind of goblin boy, all cartoon hair and creepy, ethereal voice. In a slightly alarming way, the language is neither an approximation to standard English—the sort of high Australian Mel Gibson used —nor ordinary middle Australian. Instead, he uses a weird impacted voice that owes something to Bell’s own sub-Olivier mannerisms—the terrier-like barking and nipping round Shakespeare’s words—but nothing to his technique or mastery of