Hamlet 2008

This was the first of our productions to be directed by a guest director. We were delighted to welcome the internationally renowned opera and theatre Director, Jonathan Miller, to the company.

Jamie Ballard as Hamlet.  (Photo: Graham Burke)

Cast

Barnardo & 3rd Player Alan Coveney
Horatio Philip Buck
Marcellus & Priest Jonathan Nibbs
Ghost of Old Hamlet Andrew Hilton
Claudius Jay Villiers
Gertrude Francesca Ryan
Hamlet Jamie Ballard
Polonius Roland Oliver
Laertes Oliver le Sueur
Osric Nicholas Gadd
Ophelia Annabel Scholey
Reynaldo & Sexton Paul Nicholson
Rosencrantz Morgan Philpott
Guildenstern Russell Bright
1st Player David Collins
2nd Player & Fortinbras Oliver Millingham


Production

Director Jonathan Miller
Designer Chris Gylee
Costume Supervisor Rosalind Marshall
Lighting Designer Tim Streader
Sound Designer Elizabeth Purnell
Fight Director Kate Waters

Production Manager Tim Hughes
Stage Manager Jayne Byrom
Deputy Stage Manager Eleanor Dixon
Assistant Stage Manager Adam Moore

Oliver Millingham and David Collins as The Player Queen and King in Hamlet, by Graham Burke

Oliver Millingham & David Collins as Player Queen & King. Photo: Graham Burke

Reviews

The Mail on Sunday
* * * * *
Jamie is a prince among Hamlets.
Already this year, a handful of high-ranking Hamlets-to-be have hit the headlines: David Tennant for director Greg Doran and the Royal Shakespeare Company; Jude Law for Ken Branagh, who has firsthand experience in the role on stage and screen; and although there's no date yet, Nick Hytner has announced that he wants Rory Kinnear to play the prince of Shakespearean roles.
   Against such a starry backdrop, no one has noticed Jonathan Miller's fourth stab at Hamlet in a tiny theatre in Bristol, a city shamefully starved of serious theatre since the closure of the Old Vic, with a near unknownn actor in the lead. The outstanding performance of Jamie Ballard should change all that. He's an exceptional talent: the most moving, sexy and sensitive young Hamlet I've seen since Jonathan Pryce at the Royal Court in 1980.
   Ballard's Hamlet is the play's dynamo, forever running his fingers through the stubble of his numberthree cut and over his chin, bravely attempting to smile through his tears. His laddishness, his edgy mercurial energy and the way he claps a lot, as if to snap himself out of his misery, reminds me of a younger Gordon Ramsay on The F Word.
   We can see every thought reflected in his face just feet away: his sweetness, his forced jokiness and the fiercely intelligent method in his feigned madness.
   In spite of his Elizabethan costume, this prince is every inch a 21st Century chap, grieving over his father's death and disgusted at the spectacle of his mother snogging his smarmy new stepfather, Claudius (Jay Villiers). He is also somewhat spooked by the appearance of the ghost of his father, raving from the grave at twilight.
   When he longs for his ‘too, too solid flesh’ to melt into a dew, it's very much that youthful desire of wishing everything would go away, himself included.
   The focus of Jonathan Miller's admirably clear, minimalist account is the acting. There's practically no scenery; just costumes in grey, gold and black, until Ophelia (a superbly harrowing Annabel Scholey) appears in her bloodstained nightie, dishevelled, distressed and horribly disturbing.
   Shakespeare's play has rarely felt so urgent, so devastating. Tennant and Law truly have their work cut out. Georgina Brown

Venue
Looking tetchy and impassioned at the SATTF season launch back in January, Jonathan Miller thundered about the need to keep theatre simple: to let the drama speak loud, unfettered by opulent sets, ponderous thespy diction or the various other evils of ‘stagey’ theatre. And this jabbing, quickfire ‘Hamlet’ shows us, lucidly and quite grippingly, what the old sage is on about. This is as unstagey an evening as you could hope for, and yet - or rather, as a result - it crackles with tension, fear, humour, madness and lust. Pace is a defining feature - scarcely has one scene finished than the actors are rushing on for the next, giving a constant sense of threat and urgency. Naturalism is another: lines are spoken for their meaning, rather than opportunities for theatrical grandstanding. Polonius (a jovial, pompous tour de force from Roland Oliver) delivers his farewell speech to his son Laertes like an overprotective parent sending his callow sprog off to university; Ophelia’s madness is brilliantly rendered, bipolar and lewd, by Annabel Scholey. Most happily, Jamie Ballard’s Hamlet  captivates. With touches of Rik Mayall or Ewan McGregor’s sped-up Renton in ‘Trainspotting’, he’s a young man losing the battle with his own overactive mind, constantly riddling and game-playing everyone around him yet unable to win a moment’s mental solace for himself. Through him, Miller shows us that ‘Hamlet’ is a story about the mind - and whether it is our greatest treasure, or cruellest torturer. Tremendous. Steve Wright.

The Sunday Times
30th March 2008
* * * *
This is the best and most thrilling production of this great play I’ve seen in years. Jonathan Miller’s production is based on a rigorous respect for the text, a masterful command of the narrative and a profound understanding of character that is ruthlessly accurate, deeply moving and entirely unsentimental. Little has been cut, and the performance, nearly four hours long, grips your attention all the way. Thank God we have grown out of worshipping Hamlet, the self-flagellating intellectual. Jamie Ballard plays him as a strong young man almost crushed by grief, anger and despair; his meeting with the Ghost is a kind of release, because it gives him a purpose. Now he can speak with a dangerous freedom, mock his own self-doubt and allow himself moments of touching immaturity. It’s a fiery, fearless performance, not of your “sweet prince”, but of a man fighting for and against his fate. This is a true company performance.  Every character has been thought through: observe how they listen and react to each other. The verse-speaking has a loving and intelligent precision, a true fusion of form and content. A master at work. John Peter

The Guardian
28th March 2008
* * * *
Almost uncut, costumed in Elizabethan dress, clearly spoken, and staged with three church pews and the minimum of fuss, Jonathan Miller’s Hamlet - his debut at the Tobacco Factory - follows very much in the tradition of Shakespeare at this address. There are plenty of familiar faces from the Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (SATTF) ensemble on stage, too. Artistic director Andrew Hilton is on hand; he plays the ghost, a reprise of the role he took in Miller’s 1970 production at the Fortune Theatre. Any production of this play stands or falls by its Hamlet, and in Jamie Ballard, Miller has a Hamlet who is never dull; in fact, he is often mesmerising. He begins as a bit of a crybaby - wrapped up in grief for his father’s death, with a hankie always at the ready - but turns into a sardonic joker who greets even his own death with cheeky smile. “I’m dead, Horatio,” he exclaims with a grin, standing bolt upright before expiring in what sounds like a fit of the giggles. This is a memorable performance - and it’s certainly an idiosyncratic one.  So quick-witted and mercurial is this Hamlet that you can well imagine him as a star pupil at the University of Wittenburg, making fellow students such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern look like the complete dullards they are. What is in rather short supply is any sign of princely virtues, and there are times when he does screech a bit. But, even at four hours long, the production never drags when he is centre stage. Jay Villiers, such a good Benedick in Much Ado last season, is an excellent Claudius: a man genuinely in love with Gertrude and satisfied with his life until the players’ enactment forces him to confront his own guilt. He meets his death with a little shrug of resignation, as if he welcomes it. Indeed, his sense of relief is so palpable, his murder almost counts as suicide. There is good support, too, from Annabel Scholey, who goes mad far less prettily than most Ophelias. Her sexual repression from being constantly under the watchful eye of her father turns to sexual hysteria as she repeatedly jabs a doll in a suggestive and disturbing way. It is only Ophelia’s death that wipes the smile off Hamlet’s face. Lyn Gardner

The Times
* * * *
Jonathan Miller has performed some strange surgery on the Bard in his time – I still have nightmares about the colonial-era Tempest in which Ariel was an aspiring African dictator flourishing a fly-whisk - but his in-the-round revival of Hamlet in the West Country’s most enterprising theatre is a model for any director and a treat for any playgoer. Miller trusts the text, cutting little but some of the stuff about Denmark’s fears of invasion, a subject that Shakespeare anyway treats as cursorily as Jay Villiers’s Claudius does when he offhandedly drops the Norwegian king’s reassuring message on to the floor. He ensures that every line has its due meaning and weight. He even sets his production in the Elizabethan era. And is the result academic, pedantic or dull? Quite the contrary. This Hamlet is grippingly alive from the moment when Philip Buck’s initially scornful Horatio and the royal guards wait in the silvery murk for the dead king’s ghost to an ending in which the exhausted Claudius compliantly takes the poisoned cup and drinks from it, as at some hellish communion service. And, not least at the moment when self-slaughter seems a tempting escape from life’s “fardels”, Jamie Ballard proves well able to bear the theatre’s ultimate fardel, the role of Hamlet. At first he’s slumped, head hanging down, on one of the old pews that furnish an otherwise bare stage. He’s still in deep grief at his father’s death and shock at his mother’s remarriage and, at times, can’t quite stem his tears. So the meeting with Andrew Hilton’s ghost - impressively majestic but so lacking in horror-stricken intensity that purgatory might be the Athenaeum - is in a way restorative. Now he can feel what he feels without guilt, shame or a sense of being (Claudius’s word) “unmanly”. Ballard’s one fault is to get shrill when he rages, making you feel that his fury is coming from the throat, not the belly. But he’s intelligent, incisive, sentient and humorous, using parody gestures and comic voices when he’s disorienting others with what’s here is a mocking and self-mocking pretence of madness. His scenes with Annabel Scholey’s Ophelia are especially strong: he burying his head in her skirts as he seeks comfort, she pushing away the man she loves because she’s being watched by Roland Oliver’s gleefully busybodying Polonius. Scholey’s hyper-obedient, ultra-repressed Ophelia more than prepares us for the scene in which, dressed in a stained shift, she madly pokes sticks into her dolls’ pudenda. Likewise Villiers, who starts out smiling, confident and supremely rational, becomes tense and angry and ends weary, beaten and suicidal, and always seems much in love with Francesca Ryan’s Gertrude. Each of these fine performers makes a journey that’s logical, carefully charted yet emotionally true - and, as such, characteristic of Miller’s production.
Benedict Nightingale

The Observer
30th March 2008
At last there’s good news from Bristol, where the closure of the Old Vic has left the city theatrically deprived. Jonathan Miller’s production of Hamlet - his fourth - is robust, dynamic and bitingly clear: in the best tradition of the exemplary Tobacco Factory, it is intellectually high-vaulting and materially austere.
   The bare stage is full of shadows and glimmers; everything is grey and black and gold, until Ophelia appears with smudges of blood on her nightdress. Her mad scene is one of the most convincing ever staged: it has no decorative daftness - the herbs she dispenses are twigs - but nor is it all grunts and grovels: Annabel Scholey paws Claudius, rages, bursts into laughter, shies away alarmed when her brother approaches. Around her, the royal family stand dumbstruck - for once looking less as if they’re giving her a breather so that she can deliver her big speech, than as if  rooted by embarrassment and distress.
   The homelife of our own dear Queen is - unexplicitly - evoked: watching deranged Ophelia, with her supportive brother and scary prospective in-laws, is to see the Lady Di of the 17th century; Laertes’s warning to his sister that her beau is not free to make a love-match rings out with new force. A neat bit of staging shows Hamlet and Laertes squaring up from the beginning; their terminal duel is galvanic.
   This is a production full of reverberations: the Ghost, Hamlet’s dead dad, is played with impressive hauteur by Andrew Hilton, founder of the Tobacco Factory, who inhabited the same part more than 40 years ago. It is driven by an almost revolutionarily sane Hamlet. Jamie Ballard is flushed, disturbed, but clear-sighted: he debates like the philosophy student that he is; he’s clearly in love with Ophelia (that’s rare): he blubs like a man whose flesh - and whose substance - really is beginning to melt. Susannah Clapp