Rendering 8

The article "Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon" was published by Charles Spencer on March 27, 2013. It discussed Jonathan Slinger's Hamlet at the RSC.

In addition, he was enjoying a ruminative roll-up outside Vauxhall Tube when a diminutive chap bounced up to him. Irritating, very irritating indeed, but it is just as well he didn’t punch him on the hooter because he realized it was David Farr, the director of this new RSC Hamlet.

Speaking of his production, It is annoying, too. Farr is the kind of director who has 20 bright ideas before breakfast and bungs them all on stage to prove how clever he is. Sometimes it works but a show-offy approach to Hamlet strikes me as verging on the obscene.

In fact the defining notes of Jonathan Slinger’s Hamlet are relentless anger and withering sarcasm, a reductive view of the character that becomes decidedly wearing. At one point he even starts singing Ken Dodd’s Happiness in a mocking way and, with his piscine features, thinning hair and ill-fitting suit he looks more like an embittered low-rank civil servant than a prince.

It’s necessary to point out that This Hamlet becomes psychotically violent towards Pippa Nixon’s touchingly vulnerable Ophelia, and at one point he strips off her clothes and holds a knife to her throat. The closet scene with Gertrude is almost equally ferocious but misses the residual tenderness that should underlie the raw encounter.

It’s important to point that Only rarely does Slinger do justice to some of the greatest dramatic poetry ever written. You ought to feel that you are looking into Hamlet’s mind, heart and soul during the great soliloquies. In Slinger’s sneering performance such moments are rare. There is too much fury (despite his own advice to the players, this Hamlet constantly “tears a passion to tatters”), too many ironic funny voices, too much business. When he learns that he is to be sent to England, Slinger even does a little Morris dance.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that The quality the actor fatally lacks is warmth, though he does strikes some gentler, quieter notes at the end which hint at what might have been.