THEATRE

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THEATRE

Imogen Stubbs and Ben Whishaw

An unforgettable and most lovable Hamlet

This is the kind of evening of which legends are made, one of those rare first nights that those who were present are never likely to forget.

Photo: Ben Whishaw as a raw and vulnerable Hamlet with Imogen Stubbs as a sex-obsessed Gertrude

No theatre has boasted a more illustrious line-up of Hamlets than the Old Vic, among them Gielgud, Olivier, Burton, Guinness, Redgrave, O'Toole and Jacobi. Last night,23 year old Ben Whishaw spectacularly earned his place in such distinguished company. Ben who?, you may well be asking, and you would be entirely within your rights to do so. Whishaw only left RADA last year and was last seen playing bit parts in the National Theatre's Christmas production of His Dark Materials. Trevor Nunn spotted his potential, and signed him up for this thrillingly youthful production, in which all the younger roles are played by actors in their early twenties. His Ophelia is still studying for her English degree at University College London. It is a far cry from the days when actors carried on playing Hamlet into their fifties, though Sarah Bernhardt trumped them all, playing the sweet prince at the age of 70 with a wooden leg. Nunn's daring modern dress production works superbly. Hamlet's youth is mentioned repeatedly in the play, and he has interrupted his studies at university to attend his father's funeral and his mother's "o'erhasty" remarriage to his uncle. Whishaw, with his light, tremulous voice, painfully thin body, and the kind of cheekbones that will have adolescent girls swooning in the stalls, presents the most raw and vulnerable Hamlet I have ever seen. He has all the gangliness of adolescence and the unbearable pain of a once bright and happy scholar who returns home to find that his family has imploded and nothing makes sense any more.

No wonder that this inadequate prince finds it so hard to revenge. Whishaw brilliantly captures an adolescent deep in the depths of clinical depression, whose feigned madness sometimes slips terrifyingly into the real thing. Yet he is also the most lovable of Hamlets. During the soliloquies he genuinely seems to be confiding in us, the audience, with a rare, bruised candour that catches the heart. "Oh that this too solid flesh would melt" is delivered through tears and snot and I have never heard "To be or not to be" - during which he contemplates knocking back a bottle of sleeping pills - spoken with such freshness and depth of feeling. You seem to be hearing it for the first time. The whole production is filled with Nunn's usual detail, assurance and intelligence. My only real cavil is that the monumental castle design seems out of keeping with the modernity of everything else, in a production in which Samantha Whittaker's infinitely touching Ophelia is first discovered bopping along to The Strokes in her school uniform and Tom Mannion's Claudius seems like a slicker and more odious version of President Clinton. Imogen Stubbs is outstanding as a glamorous, sex-obsessed Gertrude who cracks up completely in the confrontation with Hamlet in her bedroom and ends up on the bottle. Rory Kinnear is the most intense and anguished Laertes I have ever seen, while Nicholas Jones offers much-needed comic relief as a delightfully fussy Polonius. This old, and perhaps over familiar, play suddenly seems wonderfully fresh, urgent and young again. -Charles Spencers.

boys

School's back with Bennett at his best

Photo: Class act: The History Boys is one of the finest plays Alan Bennett has written

It is getting on for 40 years since Alan Bennett made his wildly entertaining debut as dramatist with Forty Years On, set in a minor English public school. Though Bennett has described the play as "an elaborate life-support system for the preservation of bad jokes", it was also a notably ambitious piece that wittily refracted key events and personalities of 20th-century England through the dramatic prism of a chaotic end-of-term revue. In this eagerly awaited new drama, he returns to the themes with which he began, in a play that, as the title suggests, has schoolboys and history at its centre. Appropriately enough, last night's press performance of The History Boys began like a scene from Forty Years On. Just before the show was due to start, a small fire broke out in the lighting rig, setting off the sprinkler system and drenching the stage.

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