The week in theatre: Hamlet; Much Ado About Nothing; Richard II

The Guardian

23-02-2025

In an extraordinary week, three of Britain's most authoritative male directors make Shakespeare quake and reverberate.
Rupert Goold commands the Stratford stage with a maritime Hamlet. A broiling sea. A tilting deck down which bodies slide on a fast chute to hell. Swirling darkness and glaring, blue-tinged light. A mesmeric prince in Luke Thallon.
Goold has set the action in 1912, compressed the timescale and made Elsinore not a castle but a boat. Illuminated by Jack Knowles, Es Devlin's magnificent design sets the action under a wooden ceiling like an elongated shield; Akhila Krishnan's videos of unremitting waves and ship machinery roll in the background; Adam Cork's soundscape booms mournfully.
The transplantation is not such a huge stretch. A few words – references to sea, instead of earth – are shifted, but Hamlet, in part the tale of a ship of fools, is in any case a play of ocean expeditions, meltings and drownings: 'too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia…' There are overeggings: some nudges towards the Titanic – lifejackets! – are distracting, and onstage digital clocks are now so familiar they look like a nervous tic(-tock). Jared Harris should listen to the players's speech and become a less expostulating Claudius.
Yet the great sweep of the evening, on a stage that tilts more and more vertiginously, is not merely bold: it pushes excitement into importance; it does not cramp its cast. I have long admired the way Thallon disappears, chameleon-style, into his parts: skittering in Present Laughter; inscrutable in Patriots. He offers a Hamlet dismantled by sorrow, constricted by thought – though I wish he would not occasionally shout isolated words. He is truly complicated, both open and mysterious. He seems not to be putting his stamp on the part but to be emerging from it. It is as if his character is swimming up into his face.
Thallon is amid a finely inflected cast. Elliot Levey is a subtly weaselling Polonius. As Gertrude, Nancy Carroll is denied the speech about Ophelia's drowning (Goold is no shyer with his cuts than his additions) but gains one from Richard III: finely detailed in her maternal irritation, she is heart-shaking when her poise becomes tremulous. As both Ghost and Player King, the beautifully modulated Anton Lesser drifts through the tumultuous evening like a sea mist.
After the grey shipwreck of his Tempest, Jamie Lloyd continues his Drury Lane season with confetti and clubbing and pink pink pink. His production of Much Ado About Nothing – set in an approximate late 1990s – does not touch every note of melancholy that can be heard in this comedy of sparring lovers, but it seizes almost every opportunity for joy.
Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston have long been stage performers as well as Marvels. Cardboard cutouts of their movie characters are winkingly wheeled on at one point, but their performances as Beatrice and Benedick are full-on fiery and fleshy, making sexy sense of a couple who are often more shrivelled and sour, moving easily from wildness to serious romance without dropping a beat of the verse.
Atwell – who proved herself commanding just before lockdown in Ibsen's Rosmersholm – is candid and clever, roaring in a tawny jumpsuit. Hiddleston, who I first saw 18 years ago in Chiwetel Ejiofor's Othello making the small part of Cassio remarkable, and who was subsequently a blazing Coriolanus, startlingly expands his Shakespearean range. He persuasively cajoles the audience, lollingly unbuttons his cerulean shirt to seduce his Beatrice, proves a swivel-hipped executor of embarrassing dancing and a nimble physical comic.
Soutra Gilmour's design opens up the capering possibilities of the production, which is invitingly fuelled by Mason Alexander Park's throaty disco singing. The stage is dominated for long periods by an enormous rose-coloured balloon in the shape of a heart, an apparently useless object that turns out to be a handy hiding place for our hero, who also apparently vanishes through a trapdoor (hard to see from the stalls) and is certainly buried in a mound of rose-coloured confetti. Even Hiddleston's doggy carnival disguise (big furry head on one side, lolling tongue) is disconcertingly expressive.
Lloyd has ruthlessly excised the comic subplot involving Dogberry the bumbling constable, and instead suffused the entire stage with humour: Tim Steed is particularly funny as the pissed-off villain. Here is a buoyant lesson in how to put on popular Shakespeare: clear, noisy, direct and infectious. Even the ushers are raving in the aisles.
Sleek and tailored as one of the dark suits worn by its plotters, Nicholas Hytner's production of Richard II moves steadily across the stage to minatory music by Grant Olding, which evokes the theme tune of Succession.
The parallel with Jesse Armstrong's lethal Roys is neat but not finally resonant. True, the man who pushes Richard off the throne is his cousin (Royce Pierreson is a steady, persuasive Henry Bullingbrook); true, in one of the most tellingly staged episodes, the two men engage in a bitter, nursery-style fight, tugging on the crown like toddlers on a teething ring. Yet Bullingbrook, a more or less accidental regicide, looks like a reasonable claimant, given the title-holder's vacillating unfitness. Unless of course you believe in the divine right of kings. Shakespeare probably did; on the whole, most British citizens probably don't – though who else but He can sanction the position?
Richard II is one of Shakespeare's richest plays, enclosing both nationwide despair at the condition of 'this sceptr'd isle' and intricate meditation as the king moves from self-absorption to reflection. Our Richards – who have included a mercurial David Tennant with frightening hair extensions and, groundbreakingly, 30 years ago, a riveting Fiona Shaw – are as significant as our Hamlets. Jonathan Bailey, who, post Wicked and Bridgerton, has been instrumental in selling out the production, is elegant and lucid but overdoes the antic volatility at the beginning (would he really push poor old John of Gaunt off his walking frame?). His big speeches seem to jet in from nowhere, at first to rending effect but strangely flatly in the crucial prison scene.
Not for the first time, the political weight of the play is carried by an apparently subordinate role. As the Duke of York – a more nuanced character than the present incumbent – Michael Simkins intricately mirrors conflicting loyalties, wanting to cleave to the king, but maddened by his frolics: he draws his hand across his face in the age-long despair of experience looking at youth blowing it.
Star ratings (out of five)
Hamlet ★★★★Much Ado About Nothing ★★★★Richard II ★★★
Hamlet is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 29 March
Much Ado About Nothing is at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, until 5 April
Richard II is at the Bridge, London, until 10 May