Hamlet starring Luke Thallon at the RSC review – Shakespeare meets Titanic

What? You thought Hamlet was the most sublime meditation on the nature of humanity and death ever written, all wrapped up in a taut political thriller? Wrong! Apparently, it’s a would-be Hollywood blockbuster about a ship that hits an iceberg and sinks, complete with tilting deck, tanks of water and a string quartet.

And if you think that sounds like a Titanic recipe for disaster – well, you’ll just have to judge for yourselves. I’m confident there will be plenty of people who will tell you this is the most refreshing, exhilarating, vibrant take on the Danish play in years. Safe to say, it isn’t my cup of tea.

Which is odd, given that the director is Rupert Goold, returning to the RSC after a 14-year absence since his triumphant Las Vegas-set Merchant of Venice. But where that concept was revelatory, this one is impenetrable. He recasts the Danish castle location as a ship named Elsinore – no, really – with all the action taking place against a black, unforgiving sea (courtesy of Akhila Krishnan’s epic video design). The aesthetic owes everything to the 1997 Oscar-winning movie and all it needs for James Cameron to be demanding royalties is for Ophelia to turn up wearing a Heart of the Ocean necklace.

Designed by Es Devlin, the entire stage is a vast wooden deck, dotted with trapdoors to allow the occasional dancing Jack Tar to emerge with a girl on his arm and swirl around a bit for a scene change. It tilts fore and aft to vertiginous degrees, culminating in a ludicrous finale that would be hilarious but for the fact that you spend your whole time worrying for the actors’ safety.

Given that Goold’s trademark is spectacle, this is all understandable – except when it isn’t because the actors are drowned out by a soundscape of waves, or facing upstage and speaking into a wall of wood, or simply gabbling their lines incomprehensibly. What’s more bewildering is the contortions to which Shakespeare’s majestic text is subjected in order to make the conceit work. Most of the action is forced into a single night in April 1912 – no, really – presumably to compress and heighten the drama leading up to the sinking, but the notion renders senseless Laertes’s departure and almost immediate return, the inexplicable arrival on board of the players, and Ophelia’s apparently instantaneous descent into madness, among many other things.

Elsewhere, Gertrude seems to show no real remorse for her part in Hamlet’s tragedy, the gravediggers have no graves to dig because we’re at sea, while Hamlet shoots Rosencrantz and Guildenstern himself before the camp American duo can cart him off to England. Plus, this ship is palpably sinking and nobody even mentions it.

As for the much-vaunted Luke Thallon’s interpretation of perhaps the greatest role ever committed to parchment, his tricksy, angsty, fidgety Goth channels all the facial and physical tics of Rik Mayall’s Young Ones character and never comes close to delivering a line without faltering, hesitating or otherwise trampling all over it. To be fair to this Shakespearean debutant, and to use another nautical pun, he has rather been thrown in the deep end.

Honestly? There’s a chance it might be me and this Hamlet is actually the iconic one of its generation – hence the unashamedly equivocal three-star rating. On the other hand, the emperor might just be in need of a new wardrobe. No, really…

Listen to an episode of the WhatsOnStage Podcast with two of the production’s stars: