Jonathan Miller has performed some strange surgery on the Bard in his time - I still have nightmares about the colonial-era Tempest in which Ariel was an aspiring African dictator flourishing a fly-whisk - but his in-the-round revival of Hamlet in the West Country’s most enterprising theatre is a model for any director and a treat for any playgoer. Miller trusts the text, cutting little but some of the stuff about Denmark’s fears of invasion, a subject that Shakespeare anyway treats as cursorily as Jay Villiers’s Claudius does when he offhandedly drops the Norwegian king’s reassuring message on to the floor.
He ensures that every line has its due meaning and weight. He even sets his production in the Elizabethan era. And is the result academic, pedantic or dull? Quite the contrary. This Hamlet is grippingly alive from the moment when Philip Buck’s initially scornful Horatio and the royal guards wait in the silvery murk for the dead king’s ghost to an ending in which the exhausted Claudius compliantly takes the poisoned cup and drinks from it, as at some hellish communion service. And, not least at the moment when self-slaughter seems a tempting escape from life’s “fardels”, Jamie Ballard proves well able to bear the theatre’s ultimate fardel, the role of Hamlet. At first he’s slumped, head hanging down, on one of the old pews that furnish an otherwise bare stage. He’s still in deep grief at his father’s death and shock at his mother’s remarriage and, at times, can’t quite stem his tears. So the meeting with Andrew Hilton’s ghost - impressively majestic but so lacking in horror-stricken intensity that purgatory might be the Athenaeum - is in a way restorative.
Now he can feel what he feels without guilt, shame or a sense of being “unmanly”. Ballard’s one fault is to get shrill when he rages, making you feel that his fury is coming from the throat, not the belly. But he’s intelligent, incisive, sentient and humorous, using parody gestures and comic voices when he’s disorienting others with what’s here is a mocking and self-mocking pretence of madness.
His scenes with Annabel Scholey’s Ophelia are especially strong: he burying his head in her skirts as he seeks comfort, she pushing away the man she loves because she’s being watched by Roland Oliver’s gleefully busybodying Polonius. Scholey’s hyper-obedient, ultra-repressed Ophelia more than prepares us for the scene in which, dressed in a stained shift, she madly pokes sticks into her dolls’ pudenda. Likewise Villiers, who starts out smiling, confident and supremely rational, becomes tense and angry and ends weary, beaten and suicidal, and always seems much in love with Francesca Ryan’s Gertrude. Each of these fine performers makes a journey that’s logical, carefully charted yet emotionally true - and, as such, characteristic of Miller’s cigarettes production.
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