Hamlet (2024): Age cannot wither McKellen’s Great Dane (Review)

To quote that great authority on Shakespearian acting, Withnail’s Uncle Monty, “it is the most devastating moment in a young man’s life when he quite reasonably says to himself ‘I shall never play the Dane!’” Shakespeare might have ascribed seven ages to man in As You Like It, but as far as male actors are concerned there are only three: the age when you play Romeo, the one where you play Hamlet, and the one where you play King Lear. Except the roles are more flexible than that. Race-blind casting, which the internet would have you believe was invented by Disney because woke, is an uncontroversial norm in theatres. As for gender-blind casting, the original performances of these plays will have seen male actors in drag for the female roles, so anyone complaining about Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female productions of Henry IV, The Tempest and Julius Caesar is exposing nothing other than their own ignorance. And Hamlet himself has been Hamlet herself thanks to Sarah Bernhardt, Asta Nielsen and Maxine Peake.

So Ian McKellen’s decision, at the age of eighty-one, to play Prince Hamlet in a 2021 stage production aroused interest but no outrage. Aside from anything else, McKellen is the authority on Shakespearean verse-speaking for his era, the inheritor of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. Nobody would reject the chance to hear him deliver some of the Bard’s greatest soliloquies, ones he’d previously delivered in a 1970 production whose video recording is incredibly hard to find. And in any case, Sean Mathias’s film – showing at cinemas nationwide for one night on Tuesday 27th February – is not a standard recording of a theatre production. Despite reuniting Mathias with the cast he directed on stage, this is not one of those live event recordings that the National Theatre or the Royal Ballet put out. This is a movie.

Granted, it’s a movie that is set in a theatre, but then every film of Hamlet will have at least one scene that takes place there. But this is not a theatre production in the sense that the cast are clearly not running through the whole play without breaks while a camera crew record it. Those productions can be exhilarating in their own right, but they’re not cinema; you are very aware, particularly in the close-ups, that the actors are projecting to the back row of the audience. Whatever McKellen’s Hamlet looked like on stage, on film he is defined by a wounded quietness, the kind of fraught interiority that can only be captured on film. He takes the cast with him into this hushed realm. Actors like Steven Berkoff and Frances Barber, both of whom have given performances visible from space in the past, here give performances that are slyly, slightly stylised.

Presumably the theatre setting was dictated by necessity, but it plays as a clever in-joke about the play’s constant theme of performance and subterfuge. It’s a theme that registers particularly strongly in Alis Wyn Davies’s bohemian Ophelia, reimagined as a Joan Baez-ish protest singer. Indeed, there’s a lot of very impressive female performances here. Emmanuela Cole plays the traditionally male role of Laertes; she dropped out of the stage production amid rumours of disagreements with Berkoff, rumours that Mathias strongly denied. Whatever the truth, it’s a pleasure to watch them both return here. There is also a very imposing turn by Francesca Annis as the ghost, a figure whose usually-obvious connection to Hamlet’s father becomes stranger and more ambiguous with a gender swap.

Ultimately, these switches mean the film is best recommended to people with a working knowledge of the play’s plot. Shakespeare neophytes will probably be confused as to why Hamlet thinks this masked woman is his dad, not to mention why Hamlet himself is older than his parents. They may also be left at sea by the sheer pace of the production, under two hours where Kenneth Branagh’s full-text production famously went over four. This is something that I’m less precious about than others. Shakespeare probably didn’t intend every production of his plays to present the full text; we know he cut, rewrote and rearranged to suit different audiences, fashions and actors. Mathias’s Hamlet hits all the big scenes and a few of the smaller ones, and it gets something across of the soul and emotional power of the play.

That is, in large parts, attributable to McKellen. There’s a clever overture to Mathias’s film in which McKellen sits outside a theatre, shuttered by the Covid lockdowns the play was originally conceived during, and imagines himself inside playing Hamlet. It’s a nice way to defuse cinema’s usual insistence on naturalism, and justify the theatre production’s defiantly anti-realist casting. But by the time McKellen is asking whether ’tis nobler in the mind to etc. etc. or remembering Yorick at his graveside, you’ve forgotten all about this. These moments feel absolutely, painfully real, and the star’s own advancing years are undoubtedly part of the emotional effect. Orson Welles once described his Macbeth as a bold charcoal sketch of a great play, and Mathias manages something similar with his Hamlet.

Graham’s Archive – HAMLET (2024)