The best thing about Sean Holmes’s chaotic production of Hamlet is that George Fouracres, of the sketch group Daphne, speaks with a Black Country accent (his own). Preconceptions about who is entitled to play the prince have been rapidly peeling away. Yet, as always in England, voice prejudice has stuck: the idea that RP is a default position – as if it were itself not an accent – has been hard to dislodge. A Brummie brooder is a good move.
The rest, though – pretty much all of it – is violence, to the play. In a visual muddle that overemphasises Hamlet’s isolation, Fouracres is in Doc Martens, Claudius wears doublet and hose and the Ghost is bare-chested in gladiator kit (glad rags?). Though there is some crispness from Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s Laertes and John Lightbody’s droll Polonius, most speeches are gabbled, squeaked or given bizarre emphases, as if the rhythm of the lines were something which needed to be clambered over.
