IT HAS been 23 years since they offered Shakespeare in the annual summer season at Britain’s most northerly repertory company. (“Stay six days, see six plays” remains the proud slogan.) If the thin turnout on Monday night in the hills of Perthshire is anything to go by, it might be another 23.
That would be scant reward for John Durnin, the director, who has done just about everything he can to avoid the dreary introspection fest that Hamlet can be, and was, he candidly admits, when as a student he directed a production featuring one Hughie Grant as a floppy-haired Prince of Denmark.
His Actors’ Cut is the rare and much criticised First, or Bad, Quarto edition. This is the one that, as theatre lore has it, was written down in the wings by the actor playing Marcellus (one of the guards on the battlements of Elsinore) in the original production.
If the legend is true, then those 17th-century thespians knew a thing or two about pace and plot and what worked for an audience. In the first place, it is about half the length of the more familiar First Folio. It is faster, the plot is clearer. Hamlet is less racked with indecision and a lot easier to like, there is more work for the Ghost (always a crowd-pleaser), and those familiar soliloquies, so beloved for their poetry and philosophy but, arguably, such roadblocks in performance, are either much shorter or left out altogether.
On the other hand, Marcellus was either a poor stenographer or just cloth-eared. “To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all./ No, to sleep, to dream; ay, marry there it goes” is what we get here, not quite the same as “To sleep, perchance to dream/Ay there’s the rub”. Some of it sounds, at best, like a very ropey first draft.
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Durnin has had the courage of his convictions. He stages the piece as if it were a workshop production, on a stage bare to the back wall (hard to convey just how radical this is for Pitlochry, where audiences are accustomed to applauding the often lavish sets).
Actors not “on” sit on plain chairs around the edge watching. The darkness is broken with shafts of light rather than a general flood. The costumes are contemporary — the king in combats, the guards in Secret Service suits and earpieces. The final duel is a fencing match. The playing is generally fast and light on its feet.
Not everyone understands what they are saying and the court wants a sense of politicking and powerbroking. It is far from perfect but it is more than just a curiosity.
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