Hamlet

Now in its fifth season, the Sydney Shakespeare Festival has already staged outdoors the more obviously suitable pastoral or elemental plays by the Bard.  They’re back in their favourite spot in Bicentennial Park in Glebe, with Sydney’s skyline as a backdrop, but this time with the normally claustrophobic, internalised tragedy of Hamlet.

Still, the last version I saw of Hamlet, at a Sydney Festival two years ago, sported German actors plunging about in mud and Hamlet following everyone with a cam-recorder.

Julie Baz’s production is here more conventional, staged on a tiered series of narrow courtly platforms, and making full use of the grass in front and the wide aisle between the audience of picnickers. Her actors are also well coached to beat the elements – and the distraction of raindrops, planes and the odd jogger - and project forward.  None however have discovered the full power of their chest register so, while we hear the shouted words, their delivery lacks the artful deceits and quicksilver nuance that makes this script so compelling.

As Hamlet, Richard Hilliar is engagingly dorky and pained, always real, at times commanding but also short on vocal variety. Christina Falsone is convincing as the late repentant Gertrude, as is Nicole Weinberg as the troubled Ophelia.

Baz’s production does deliver a clear and pacy storytelling of a great plot, and a sometimes thrilling urgency, well-driven with musical punctuation booming out from behind us.  

Set and costume designer David Jeffrey dresses everyone in a sophisticated 1930-40s world of smart dresses and black-coated military officialdom. It’s a setting left under-explored but this Hamlet remains well-staged entertainment ripe for summer nights (with the same cast playingThe Taming of the Shrew on alternate nights).

Martin Portus

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