Herald Sun
Edition 2FRI 22 SEP 1995, Page 081 
A PRINCELY EFFORT 
By CHRIS BOYD 


Hamlet
By: William Shakespeare
Production by: Belvoir Street (Company B) for the MTC Where and when: The Playhouse Theatre, until October 14

THE mark of a truly great director is the ability to approach a play, no matter how renowned, and produce it as 
if for the first time. And so it is with this Neil Armfield production - I could almost believe I was seeing Hamlet
for the first time.

Indeed, this is the most intelligible Hamlet seen in Melbourne since Derek Jacobi toured with the Old Vic in 1979.

It is a Hamlet that will appeal to Shakespearean fusspots for its devotion to the text; to young audiences for its
realism and genuine sense of horror; and to regular theatregoers for its impeccable stagecraft.

Although there is still a tendency in Australian casts to recite the famous words rather than speak them, to be dazzled 
by the burnished, metrical surface rather than finding the riches of meaning beneath, this ensemble does manage to find 
emotional truth in most scenes.
Ophelia's scenes, for example, are nothing short of devastating.

Watching Cate Blanchett (caked in mud and blood) shy unsteadily at the ground with one foot, like a newborn foal, was 
affecting beyond belief.

Richard Roxburgh, as Hamlet, struck a perfect balance between innocence and irony, intelligence and guilelessness, 
adolescence and adulthood.

Armfield turns a blind eye to Gertrude's adultery, making Hamlet's fixation on her hasty remarriage (rather than his 
father's murder) seem quite incongruous. Or more Freudian. He also makes the Elsinore Court seem strangely benign and 
clubby, even farcical, instead of malevolent.

Instead, Armfield draws out the threads in the play that are reflexive and self-consciously theatrical. He has Horatio 
(Geoffrey Rush) watch Hamlet soliloquise: "Now I am alone."

This, intriguingly, is far easier to watch than the earlier soliloquies, especially the first: "Oh that this too, too 
sullied flesh . . . "

Rory Dempster's lighting design, which uses discordant color temperatures, is chilling. So too is the music composed and 
performed by John Rodgers.

I missed the black humor normally provided by the second gravedigger, and David Wenham's Laertes struck me as being too 
diffident.

As well, some cast members haven't quite adapted their voice projection to accommodate the size and acoustical vagaries 
of the Playhouse Theatre, but these are minor failings in an otherwise superlative production.