| Due recensioni da The IndipendentQui la traduzione di entrambe le recensioni Ecco qui la recensione di Paul Taylor - The Independent
THEATRE / A miss, a very palpable miss: Paul Taylor reviews Alan Rickman's Hamlet at the Riverside Studios, directed by Georgian Robert Sturua, and finds a prince short of passion
PAUL TAYLOR
Thursday, 17 September 1992
Alan Rickman's Hamlet does the ' 'Tis now the very witching time of night' speech in cod cloak-and- dagger fashion, with a Richard III-style limp and a raised sword that ends up, like a flamenco dancer's rose, clamped between bared teeth. A witty way of signalling the mismatch between man and role, the speculative intellectual crudely cast as revenge hero? Well yes, but the self-conscious spoofing here is also one of several indications that Rickman is much more at home with the playful, sardonic side of Hamlet than he is with the confused, raw passions.
There is little sense of inner conflict in this performance, because it never properly convinces you that one part of Hamlet envies simpler natures and genuinely thirsts for his uncle's blood. At times, the staging only compounds this weakness. Rickman's Hamlet dangles from a balcony, for instance, over the praying Claudius. The sword he trails down towards him could just about manage nick his scalp but certainly couldn't get near enough to finish him off. In the stage picture this creates, revenge seems barely even on the cards.
With his famed talent for seductive menace, Rickman brings out all the tension, though, in Hamlet's toying manner towards Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His loungingly superior, smirking innuendo, punctuated with little disturbing laughs as if at some private joke, has a real edge of threat. These moments are far more powerful than the actual explosions, such as that in the closet scene, where he and Geraldine McEwan's Gertrude engage on all fours in what looks like a turtle race, while Rickman bawls abuse in her ear. A great deal of effort, but next to no oedipal charge.
'To sleep', interestingly, is the phrase this Hamlet most invests with voluptuous yearning. Making his way from Denmark, he intones the lines 'O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth' with an elegiac dying fall that indicates a detumescence of the will rather than the reverse. And, on his return, his new mood of resignation seems indistinguishable here from acute lethargy. But when Hamlet says 'the readiness is all', he is not just referring to an acceptance of death.
The production by the Georgian director Robert Sturua (working with an English cast) is not rich in fresh or illuminating touches, but a genuinely intriguing new angle is taken on Michael Byrne's shaven-headed, sinister Polonius. Before Laertes departs, this unfunny Polonius subjects his son to a joky, humiliating mock-coronation and then laughs half-maniacally at his handiwork. From this unsettling charade, you get the strong impression of someone with a dangerous hang- up about his own relationship to royalty, a condition that may help explain his ruinous, paranoid distrust of Hamlet's love for Ophelia.
Sturua swings to the opposite extreme from those East European directors who have used the tragedy (rather as Hamlet uses The Mousetrap) to comment codedly on abuses of power in their own countries and to point the finger of guilt. Indeed, with several characters in robes that are straight out of some intergalactic argy-bargy movie, and others in Edwardian or modern dress, it's hard to get any coherent sense of the political set-up in Elsinore.
David Burke doubles as old Hamlet and Claudius: as the one, he shuffles on more like an old tramp than a ghost and sneaks a cup of water from a barrel; as the other, he models a suit Comrade Stalin might have admired. Playing his guilty Queen, Geraldine McEwan starts off phenomenally nerve-racked, though those comically refined tones inescapably recall her Lucia (you half expect her to mop up her tears and exclaim brightly 'Un po' di Mozartino, Claudius?'). She later veers into madness more compellingly than Julia Forbes' Ophelia.
In spite of the loud prepublicity fanfare, the occasion did not rise to itself.
To 10 October, Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London W6 (081- 748 3354)
Ecco un'altra recensione, sempre su The Independent, di Irving Wardle
THEATRE / Enter the darkest Dane of all: Hamlet - Riverside: Medea - Almeida; Hecuba - Gate; It Runs in the Family - Playhouse; Valentine's Day - Globe
IRVING WARDLE
Sunday, 20 September 1992
IT WAS Charles Marowitz in the 1960s who first declared his contempt for Hamlet and made him the laughing stock of Elsinore. He has never been the same again. The Renaissance prince has dwindled into successive postures of alienated futility - though always retaining some of his old glamour. These last shreds have now been struck away by Alan Rickman in a production that comes close to elevating Claudius into the leading role.
The director is the Georgian Robert Sturua, known to British audiences for his ability to involve star actors in the surgical manhandling of classic texts. His Hamlet emerges shorn of many of its best-known lines, with some episodes (the play scene, the duel) drastically abridged, and actors doubling as Claudius and the Ghost (David Burke) and as the Gravedigger and Osric (Timothy Bateson in a bowler and spats). Giorgi Meskhishvili's setting comprises a T-shaped metal observation platform and a downstage burial ground. By such means Denmark becomes more than ever a prison. The East European classical fallout continues. Exactly the same atmosphere was evoked by Sturua's compatriot, Evgueni Arie, in his recent Tel Aviv production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: the morbid mistrust of the outer world, the portrait of a grim, secretive despot (no trace of the 'smiling' villain) with an ingratiatingly demoralised Polonius, chief spymaster, skittering at his heels.
Particular to Sturua is the notion that the past was no better than the present; and that the future - glimpsed in a loutish Fortinbras engaged in casual rape - may be even worse. It also appears from his games with the crown during the paternal leave-taking that the 'faithful and honourable' Polonius has covert plans to put Laertes on the throne. These are not just a director's bright ideas; they generate a pervasive dread (even Gertrude's late arrival throws the Court into panic); while Burke's spasmodically violent King and Michael Byrne's hyena-like Polonius establish an environment where power has displaced all sense of trust.
The obvious casualty is tonal variety. Not only laugh lines, but lightness of any kind is expelled - to the disadvantage of Geraldine McEwan's Gertrude, whose main energy goes into suppressing her high-comedy inflexions. For Rickman's Hamlet, however, the unvaried darkness is a native element. Not a trace remains in him of Ophelia's soldier, scholar, or poet; no flash of wit or good fellowship to suggest his former self. From the start he is devoured by self-loathing, and by a crippling insight into the futility of human endeavour. When he curses his fate after the oath scene, he knows for certain that he is not the man to carry it out.
There is not a single glib or unconsidered inflexion in the performance. Every line has been rethought and comes out of that curdled, feverish intelligence. 'He was a man,' Rickman states bleakly - from which you glean that the dead King was as worthless as the rest. Launching into 'To be or not to be' with a running entrance, he halts dead and then makes an appalled modulation into 'perchance to dream'. I had never thought to be so riveted by that speech again. Although he often overruns full stops, the pace is generally measured, and compels you into an almost physical contact with the sense. But not, alas, with the dramatic narrative; the spiritlessness that settles on Rickman and progressively enfeebles him, cuts him off from the action, turning him almost into a spectator of Burke's disintegrating Claudius, whose story does have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Edited by Arwen68 - 28/6/2022, 12:42
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i fans facevano a cazzotti per avere il biglietto! 
