ABSTRACT
Matthew Warchus’s production of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997, starring Alex Jennings, was one of those shows able to animate a familiar debate about how Shakespeare’s plays might or should work on stage. It was a controversial modern-dress production that made noticeable cuts to famous lines, speeches, and characters, with much of the material that remained boldly rearranged and intercut. Simon Russell-Beale, himself starring in the role three years later at the Royal National Theatre in London, describes this ‘extremely chic, exhilarating production’ as the best he has seen: ‘I remember at the end of the show muttering to a friend, with all the generosity I could muster, “Well, he’s cracked it”’. 1 Reviewers at the time, however, saw it as rather more problematic. Part of what interests me about this staging is precisely the way it exposed conflicting opinions among spectators about what they think Hamlet in performance should be. I return to a fuller discussion of this show in the second chapter, but for the moment wish simply to highlight the discourse of ‘survival’ which became something of a refrain in the commentary offered by the production’s supporters and critics alike. As David Nathan put it, ‘I liked a lot of it and Hamlet the play survives’. 2 Nicholas de Jongh, less enthusiastically and drawing on a metaphor that suggests that Warchus’s ill-advised choices amount in effect to an action of battery, granted that ‘the play will make a complete recovery’, while Charles Spencer, noting that this (in his opinion) flawed production nonetheless has its merits, took comfort from the realization that after all ‘[i]t’s not like defacing a painting, a permanent act of vandalism. The plays will always be there.’ 3 Even Jennings, speaking in an interview before the show opened, sought to counter public anxiety about a cut text – the cast had already received a letter of complaint from an irate local headmaster – by noting that ‘the play will still be there in four years’ time for somebody to do the full-length version again’. 4
