The Rest is Silence, Riverside Studios - review

Hamlet dragged into the modern world by the dreamthinkspeak company as part of the World Shakespeare Festival
29 June 2012

The company dreamthinkspeak is the brainchild of Tristan Sharps and makes theatre that responds ingeniously to unlikely locations. Here, as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, the focus is Hamlet and the production, originally presented in a warehouse in Shoreham-on-Sea, remixes the play to emphasise what happens at its margins.

This is a wraparound, modernist Hamlet, 90 minutes long, set in what looks less like a feudal stronghold than a suburban hotel with adjoining conference centre. The audience stands throughout in an artificial courtyard, swivelling and shuffling to gain a better view.

The action takes place behind huge glass panels, which can act as windows but also as mirrors — and as barriers keeping us from the characters but also separating the characters from one another. The rooms, some of them more like display cases, are connected. Yet at times they resemble spookily detached fairground stalls. The sounds are muffled, as if we’re listening to a dispute between our next-door neighbours or a secretly made recording.

The approach is episodic. Here’s Hamlet cradling a gun, here is Phillip Edgerley’s Claudius posturing in the bathroom, and here Ruth Lass’s Gertrude prays. We see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern picking through Hamlet’s notebooks and mockingly rehearsing his most famous speeches — parts of which are doled out to other characters. Edward Hogg’s tousled, pensive Hamlet does not have the luxury of grand soliloquies; he lives in a society where nothing is private, and that even goes for one’s thoughts.

The problem with this is that it reduces Hamlet and makes his plight seem almost banal. And while the plotting and narcissism of those around him are arrestingly conveyed, the idea of the play being about a surveillance society is hardly new.

Projections create the sense that we’re inside the dreams and troubled minds of the leading characters. The drowning of Ophelia is especially memorable; the footage shows her slipping away in a slick of bubbles and then appearing above us luminously, before being covered with earth in her grave.

Moments such as this will linger in the memory. But The Rest Is Silence requires one to know Hamlet pretty well: for those who do, it sheds little new light on the original, and for those who don’t it will surely be baffling.

The Rest is Silence until June 23 (020 8237 1111).

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