A DAMNED FAMILY'S VALUES
Author: PAUL McGILLICK
Date: 30/06/1994
Words: 680
Publication: The Financial Review

IT GOES without saying that Hamlet is rich with interpretive
possibilities. So, presumably, the ideal production has all those possible
meanings without pushing any one in particular.
I am not sure what Neil Armfield's line is meant to be, but I found myself
responding to his production as a very political reading of the play.

Like a wounded animal, the corrupt state invites predators. Incest is a
metaphor for a state feeding off itself, and a state in which power is
held in perpetuity by a few leads to a sense of impotence and
self-questioning along the lines of: "Am I mad or is it the world?"

Dan Potra's set is cold grey, flanked by a wall of funerary repositories.
The air reeks of death and the mood throughout the play is mordant - the
black humour of people so distanced from their own evil they can laugh at
it.

Richard Roxburgh's Hamlet is a compelling contrast to this. A sunny blond
with a boyish grin and schoolboy naivete, he gives the role a refreshing
mix of educated intelligence and unworldly confusion.

But this Hamlet is a part of the whole sorry mess. When he kills Polonius
in a fit of righteous passion, Hamlet's remorseful tears come laced with
the wicked laughter of someone who actually enjoys killing.

So when Laertes (David Wenham) spurns Hamlet's plea for pardon, we can
fully understand that Laertes can forgive Hamlet but not the act of murder
and the way Ophelia (Jacqueline McKenzie) has been manipulated.

When the play opens, Denmark is under threat from Fortinbras and things
are like a pressure cooker.

Armfield's cast convey very well this sense of everything and everyone
being a time bomb. A large carpet serves as a key prop to identify the
interior court scenes and the way characters obsessively lay it and re-lay
it, working out the crinkles, becomes a leitmotiv for how on edge they all
are.

The threat from Fortinbras (Steve Vidler) appears defused during the play.
But when he aggressively takes control at the end, not only does evil seem
to be perpetuated, but we have the nagging suspicion that Fortinbras may
have somehow actually engineered the catastrophe in Denmark to further his
own ambitions.

Armfield's production, like most of his work, is simple in its staging,
relying instead on his actors' ability to portray rounded characters.

For Hamlet he has assembled a generally excellent cast, most of whom are
regulars in the Armfield club.

One who is not is Jacek Koman from Poland via Melbourne who gives us a
dark, yet somehow vulnerable, Claudius - shaped up against the febrile
Gertrude of Gillian Jones. With both Koman and Jones, Armfield shows his
knack for using to advantage the idiosyncrasies of particular actors.

On the other hand, it is a more restrained Geoffrey Rush than we are used
to seeing and his Horatio is a sober ray of rationality in what is a kind
of dark fairy tale.

Speaking of which, Keith Robinson and George Washingmachine make
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into disconcertingly absurd refugees from
Alice in Wonderland. Australia's finest anti-actor, Max Cullen, produces a
fascinating Polonius - an intelligent man, frustrated (we suspect) to
distraction by the way in which all values in Denmark seem to have been
subverted.

The strength of this production is the clarity with which characters
communicate on stage. The verse as usual goes for a Burton most of the
night except when the gifted Ralph Cotterill (Ghost, Player King etc)
demonstrates conclusively that you can speak the verse trippingly off the
tongue and still make sense.