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The room is not really the thing in Aviva Studios' Hamlet greets the thiefThis merges uncomfortable Shakespeare with the Radiohead album in 2003. The joint is about as transparent as the clumsy title of production indicates: Jockey for the position, Radiohead, often presenting itself.
However, sparks fly from friction. Radiohead of Radiohead, Techno Techno Beats, which underlines a large part of the action, suggest that time outside the articulation and anxiety is getting closer in a state where a new ascending king acquired the throne and wife of his dead brother. While Prince Hamlet's suspicions on King Claudius get up, the songs burst into sudden frantic. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke orchestrated the album like a soundtrack that sends groans and groans through drama like sirens. The lyrics are admitted with the drama for echo in the Hamlet mounting mania, as in the opening “2 + 2 = 5” which announces in a disturbing way “It is the way of the devil now”, or “there will be no more lies” repeated in “where i end and you begin”.
Instead of the songs that were the play, however, it often seems that the atomized scenes are used as segues between music. Running to 105 minutes unusually lively, production offers a mixture of abbreviation Hamlet The greatest successes. Too insistent music strengthens each monologue with a background drone, the album rumbling impatiently, always trying to pass.
Claudius de Paul Hilton often changes on songs, at the center of the dancers' groups. He is a fantastically slippery and boastful suzerain, which slides on the stage like an oil gallery. He is also carnel caught, licking Gertrude's neck and opening his mouth as wide as a snake to kiss him.
Samuel Blenkin's hamlet is all that is “the poor miserable”. Pale and Gawky, in a trembling voice, he seems to be at war with his own body, torn between living and dying. When he says “what a work is a man”, he speaks as if he did not recognize himself by this description.
The jessica hung han yun lighting often frames the characters in boxes in the shape of a cage, but these more intimate scenes come up against the generally maximalist staging. Light dagger shards in darkness while smoke and dust cross the immense video projections of Duke. The scenography soaked in sorrow by AMP collective design and production creator Sadra Tehrani is all monochromatic and melancholic. And monotonous: oppressed, it rolls the richness of the room, so there are no subtleties or pockets of light.
Directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones telescop production on psychodrama between Hamlet and Claudius. But transforming the game into an impetuous and disjointed revenge thriller leaves several victims. Queen Gertrude almost disappears, as well as Hamlet's friendship with Horatio and romance with Ophelia. His descent into suicidal despair is rushed, although his repetition “to be or not to be” reminds us that his fate is attached to his nihilism.
The load through the plot creates a maniac rhythm that blurs clarity. Deaths in the final highest point become a blurred fight, without confessions and revenge clear. This could illustrate how catastrophic, but the sprint finish leaves us impassive. It is a vertiginously – rather than dazzling propulsion spectacle -. “The rest is silence,” says Horatio when everything is over. If only Yorke made us hear it.
★★★ ☆☆
At May 18, Factoryinternational.org; Then Royal Shakespeare Theater, Stratford-Upon-Avon, from June 4 to 28, rsc.org.uk
