My cousin Christine has a theatre blog; she is an aficionado of London theatre…
The Almeida Theatre, London
The play’s the thing and never more so than in Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest play.
Here murder, death and deceit; love, loss, what is real and what is imagined; the very meaning of life and life’s consequences are confronted in Hamlet’s struggle against his fate. His is a fight to the death and death is part of the Dane’s journey. Hamlet’s is a disappointing world: ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’.
In Act I we confront a dispossessed, poisoned king, poisoned politics and a prince devoured by grief. Hamlet is haunted and prompted by his father’s ghost to avenge his ‘foul and most unnatural murder’ at the hand of his uncle, Claudius, newly installed as his mother’s lover and husband. Robbed of his sovereignty and his wits, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Elsinore is a veritable castle of doubt and double dealing.
Robert Icke…
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A Classicist Writes... 