Excellent Hamlet at Glyndebourne

I did reasonably well in the ballot this year and got decent seats for all five operas that I applied for.

First up was Hamlet, a brand new opera by composer Brett Dean
and librettist Matthew Jocelyn. I was keen to see this because it was a new opera and, of course, with Hamlet at the core it was a dramatic story.

And Hamlet was the real winner here. I see a version of Hamlet probably at least once a year and some have been very different with, for example, a female lead or being set in a prison in Liverpool, and this version was as dramatic and as powerful as any of them.

This Hamlet, as many of them are, was somewhat abridged to fit into an opera a shade under three hours long and that produced a story with a succession of strong scenes with some of the frippery removed. Of course that frippery still works well in the spoken word through the poetry of the language but was not missed in a musical adaptation.

The strongest scene, and one of the most visually pleasing, was Ophelia's decent into madness as she sung of Hamlet's abandoned love while distributing flowers to everybody.

The music was as different and as startling as I had hoped, aided in no small measure by the unusual layout which included musicians on the top level who added both height and width to the sound. Sitting more-or-less in the middle I was impressed by the stereophonic effect of drum beats moving from left to right.

The tone was set at the very start with an abrupt opening, no promenade by the conductor first, that rumbled more than it sang. The music continued to be a succession of uncommon sounds and while it lacked the tunes that some may have been hoping for it carried the mood superbly and stayed well within the approachable limits of modern music.

The singing was exquisite as is the custom at Glyndebourne. Hamlet has a large supporting cast of strong characters including his father, Gertrude, Laertes, the previously praised Ophelia and, obviously, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who survived the English in this version. All of the soloists, were superb, not just the roles listed earlier. It was a beautiful performance.

Glyndebourne played its usual role in the excellent day with everything from a new pond in the garden, lots of new art and a jug of Pimms from the Long Bar.

It is precisely because of days like this that I keep going to Glyndebourne.

Well crafted and hilarious Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at The Old Vic

As the poster suggests, the main draw for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Old Vic Theatre‎ was meant to be Daniel Radcliffe but my main reason for going was that this was a play that I had heard of but had not seen and the name Tom Stoppard suggested that I should. I was in the queue for tickets promptly and so managed to get hold of Lilian Baylis Circle (the top level) B23 for £39 which was towards the top end of what I was prepared to pay.

The Old Vic is well situated close to Waterloo Station and so I was able to leave work soon after the end of the working day (5:30pm), but well before anybody else, to get to Culture Grub for 6:30pm where I am recognised as a regular. I went for the Chinese style curry with boiled rice, which I may have had once or twice before, and will have once or twice again.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead entertained from the very start as the two leads undertook the tasks given to them by King Claudius in Hamlet in a bumbling and uncertain manner. So uncertain were they that even they could not work out who was Rosencrantz and who was Guildenstern. Their Mr Bean like antics were a core of the play and that was a very solid core.

On a few occasions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern crossed into the world of Hamlet and we had some familiar scenes from that play embedded into this one. A simple device that was very effective.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern crossed paths a few times with The Player, a harlequin character played with great gusto and aplomb by David Haig, who will always be one of the marks in The Hustle to me. His performance had been described as show stealing in some reviews that I had seen and while I could understand why that had been said I think that the strongest performance was Joshua McGuire as Guildenstern (or was it Rosencrantz?).

The production did a lot to emphasise the fun of the story and the play was two hours of relentless light entertainment that brought many smiles and much laughter, the antithesis to the Hamlet that inspired it.

A different and daring Hamlet at The Cockpit

My Shakespearean encounters continued with another Hamlet, this time at the Cockpit and with a woman playing the lead role, though, unlike Lear, she was playing it as a man.

But first I had to get there. The theatre came at the end of a long day with an interview in the morning and a feast of wedding dresses in the afternoon. Getting from the V&A to the Cockpit, not that far apart as the crow flies, was not simple and I opted for the 46 bus which took me a lot of the way but left a reasonable walk at the far end.

It was a tiring walk on a tiring day so I rested for a while at the Lord High Admiral at the end of Church Street Market which was at the final stage of closing for the day. This was one of those pubs that time forgot and had been unchanged for decades. There was no chance of any food or even of real ale. I had a pint of keg Worthington Smooth, territory I had not trodden for many years, not since beer was re-invented.

I was resigned to surviving the evening on peanuts (not for the first time) and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Cockpit had some Lebanese vegetarian pasties so I had a couple of those. And a Budvar.

When summoned by the bell I went for my usual spot in the front-row on the right side of the entrance. This cost me £29.50 which, by my standards, was a little on the high side but anything under £30 required little justification.

This Hamlet was set in a school and that reminded me of Rinaldo at Glyndebourne. Hamlet was one of the school boys in an small class and Horatio was a teacher. The other classmates were Laertes, Ophelia and Rosencrantz. The only other members of the cast were Hamlet's mother and stepfather.

This Hamlet was also heavily abridged and one of the victims of the cuts was the opening scene with the ghost of his father. That took a little getting used to at first but did nothing to harm the flow or coherence of the story.

As with the adaptation of Hamlet that I saw at the Riverside, this version focussed on one aspect of the play and this time it was the core theme of Hamlet's thirst for revenge and the violent consequences of that. Even strimmed down to this core, this Hamlet ran for over an hour and a half so it was by no means slight. The bits of the play that were left were thick with emotion, both Hamlet's and the other people's reacting to his.

The staging was physical without being distracting. The movement flowed across the full gamut of the stage making the most of staging it in the round. The movement also climbed on to the tables and chairs to give height as well as width and depth. Apart from the furniture, sparing use was made of props so when they did come into play they made more of an impact. There was a memorable scene where large red, blue and white handkerchiefs (the sort magicians have) were used in quick succession to represent blood, tears and semen. That got a laugh; one of the few.

It is hard to go wrong with Hamlet and they didn't. The drama built solidly towards the known tragic ending that managed to remain dramatic despite being known. It was a thoroughly engrossing and imaginative production that was delivered assuredly.

I hung around the bar for a little while afterwards hoping to catch a quick word with some of the cast (I love theatres where you can do that) and was delighted to speak to Hamlet him/herself who looked very different in her post-show shocking red lipstick. A perception testing end to an intelligent evening.

Brutal and brilliant Hamlet at the Riverside

Something about this production appealed to me from when I first saw the listing but it got caught up among many other things and I was only able to see it in the last week of its run and then I had to escape from work in Reading promptly to see it.

It had been a busy week with a heavy commute and come late nights (and early mornings) and I was a little worried that I might struggle to pay full attention throughout. How wrong I was.

This was a brutal and brilliant version of Hamlet that ripped the guts out of the original, trimmed them a little, moved it to today's Liverpool and added some colloquial language. That may sound like a strange thing to do but it was pure genius and I loved every second of it.

The tone was set from the beginning with Hamlet being strip searched on entry to prison. The language was modern day and even made reference to England's elimination from the World Cup that had happened that day. Reclotherd in prison greys Hamlet then spoke of his mother's quick marriage to her brother-in-law on the recent death of her husband, Hamlet's father. This was told in Shakespeare's and a Scouse accent.

Setting the play in a prison made the violence (there was a lot of it) more natural and also more brutal.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were a particularly nasty pair filling the stage with swagger, violence and strong language.

The villain of the piece, Hamlet's uncle Claudius, was equally superb in his suave malevolence. He was every inch the criminal big man from something like Layer Cake.

And Hamlet (Adam Lawrence) was everything that Hamlet has to be, moody, vengeful, loving, violent and despairing. It was a masterful performance.

Everything about the production was wonderful and made the familiar story even darker and more visceral. But this was not Scum because it was still very much Shakespeare.

This is the sort of Shakespeare that school children should be encouraged to see.