Hamlet has come in many forms of the last 40 or so years at The Citizens Theatre. This week’s announcement of the Gorbals based emporium’s forthcoming autumn season, announced exclusively in today’s Herald, finds it’s centrepiece in illustrious company. Because, while a main-stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under The Elms and touring revivals of TAG’s production of David Greig’s Yellow Moon and, in association with The National Theatre Of Scotland Ensemble, Gregory Thompson’s acclaimed production of Molly Sweeney, starring Cara Kelly, are serious enough fodder for theatre aficionados, Hamlet has even more history.
Because, while Guy Hollands’ new production, featuring the brilliant young actor Andrew Clark in the title role, will be the first under the current artistic regime of Hollands and co-artistic director Jeremy Raison, each look at the play over almost 40 years has left a memorable legacy of concept and controversy in their wake. Hollands, however, isn’t fazed.
“I originally had the idea of doing Hamlet with only people who’d ever played him onstage,” Hollands says of what would undoubtedly be a fascinating if overbearing take on things. “Then I realised it would be too much, and, although I’m still at the very early stages, the more I looked at the play, the more I realised I didn’t need to impose anything on it.
With only a cast of eight to work with, Hollands’ casting of Clark as the troubled Danish prince is crucial.
“I’m not saying he’s unconventional,” Hollands says of Clark, whose previous Citz appearances include a stint as Carry On actor Sid James, “but he’s probably not an obvious choice. I want to get away from the idea of Hamlet as an aesthete, and make him a man of action who can look after himself. You need someone with drive and energy for that, and Andy has a very vibrant stage presence. There’s subtlety there, but he’s got an edge as well.”
In terms of edge and mould-breaking charisma, David Hayman made a mercurial Hamlet both in 1970 and again in 1975. Somewhere in-between the two, The Citizens artistic triumvirate of Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse had defined a house style of sumptuous visuals illustrating and often leading provocative, expectation-confounding reinventions of classic plays formerly considered untouchable. It was the 1970 production, though, which first threw down the gauntlet.
Havergal’s production, designed by Prowse, was all male. As if such a whiff of danger wasn’t enough, two of his actors opened the show by indulging in some form of sexual congress beneath sheets of black parachute silk. Only when the pair came up for air were the full home-erotic, and indeed incestuous, overtures of the piece made clear.
It caused an outrage, not least in the pages of the then Glasgow Herald, where the paper’s drama critic denounced the production, and the portrayal of Gertrude in particular as being “got up in inky drag as if for a pantomime designed by Aubrey Beardsley or perhaps Charles Addams.”
Even the ferocious performance of Hayman, just out of drama school and effectively doing his growing up in public, was dismissed as being “virtually inarticulate, gasping and shrieking.”
The public furore that followed, solidly defended by the theatre board’s Chair, Bill Taylor, split audiences down generational lines, and effectively put The Citizens on the map. As Cordelia Oliver notes in her biography of the Citz, Magic In The Gorbals, “The end of that first night is unforgettable; how the young people in the audience rose to their feet and drowned with their cheers the sounds – and there were plenty – of adult displeasure.”
Half a decade on, Hayman returned to the role, older, wiser, and a good deal calmer now he was something of an elder statesman of the Citizens company. Indeed, Prowse’s first stab at the play was an altogether statelier affair than one might have expected from a company then at the top of their classicist game.
Prowse chose to set the play in the midst of the Prussian empire, allowing for near Wagnerian operatic conceits such as having Jill Spurrier’s Ophelia resembling Brunhilde, and all manner of what The Evening Times called “stylish heel-clicking and duelling scars on almost every face.”
The Jewish Echo went further, their review headlined ‘From Prussia With Love.’
Christopher Small, recalling in The Glasgow Herald what he called “the rough-and-tumble” of the 1970 production, somewhat conversely described Hayman’s second stab at the play as being “almost reduced to a military automaton, shouting his agonies in a harsh monotone, sneering, angry, suffering more boredom than torment.”
If Hayman’s first appearance as Hamlet can be defined as The Citizens ‘black production’ of Hamlet, then MacDonald’s 1981 take on it, with Andrew Wilde playing the lead, can be regarded as the ‘white production.’ Here further radicalism abounded, with the director not only returning to the rarely performed First Quarto of the play, but setting it, by way of Prowse’s institutional design, in a mental hospital, awash with men in white coats as a fierce and disturbed Hamlet letting rip his soliloquies as if in therapy.
In these pages, an initially cautious Mary Brennan predicted the voguish 60s hangover of something akin to “Marat-Sade does Hamlet,” but was relieved to find that “The seemingly unpalatable metaphor of psychiatric cases enacting ‘Hamlet’…unlocks unexpected, enlightening dimensions of meaning.”
In Wilde, Brennan saw “a lean prowling Hamlet full of lurking.” Of interest too was the presence of Jill Spurrier, who had played Ophelia six years earlier, was now cast as Gertred, while Johanna Kirby picked up her baton to play Ophelia.
Of the 1970 production, Christopher Small’s review punningly suggested that Havergal had been “at his Marowitz end before he is fairly started.” The reference was to Charles Marowitz, the controversial counter-cultural American director who had spent much of the 1960s himself reinventing the classics in punchy, post-modern versions that presaged the way for other enfants terribles such as The Wooster Group (whose own Hamlet is rumoured to be visiting Glasgow in 2008) and Calixto Bieito, whose sleazy nightclub-set take on the play dazzled the Edinburgh International Festival a couple of years back.
It wasn’t until 1993, in the theatre’s bijou Circle Studio, that The Marowitz Hamlet was finally produced by The Citz. Clocking in at barely an hour long, director Malcolm Sutherland cast Henry Ian Cusick, now a star of TV drama, Lost, as the Dane, and a young Helen Baxendale, another future small screen regular, as Ophelia.
Sutherland approached an already cut-up up affair with a hi-tech array of TV screens, prompting Joseph Farrell to comment that “Nothing dates like yesterday’s avant-garde. Of his near Freudian approach to the play, Sutherland himself commented in The Evening Times that “Hamlet is a neurotic, paranoid character and the real tragedy surrounds Ophelia.”
In 1996, Philip Prowse returned for another look at Hamlet, with Sophie Ward as Ophelia, and Cal MacAninch as the Prince in a production that got back to black, both sartorially and in its mood. It was, according to Herald arts editor Keith Bruce, “shocking – particularly, it might be said, coming from this theatre – in its directness.” Not only was this evident in Prowse’s direction, but in MacAninch’s portrayal of “the only one who knows the truth,” who was likened to David Thewlis’ Johnny in Mike Leigh’s film, Naked, and who was revealed as “a tortured and thwarted Hamlet for the nineties.”
Eleven years on, and two thirds of the way through the nineties, Hollands and Clark’s Hamlet will no doubt be different again. As Hollands points out, “It’s easy to be cool with Shakespeare, but I’d like people to think here that there’s been a commitment to the emotional nature of the tragedy. If anything, I want this Hamlet to wear its heart on its sleeve a little bit.”
Hamlet, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, September 21-October 13. Tickets for Hamlet and the rest of The Citizens autumn season are on sale from July 3rd
www.citz.co.uk
The Herald, July 5th 2007
ends
Because, while Guy Hollands’ new production, featuring the brilliant young actor Andrew Clark in the title role, will be the first under the current artistic regime of Hollands and co-artistic director Jeremy Raison, each look at the play over almost 40 years has left a memorable legacy of concept and controversy in their wake. Hollands, however, isn’t fazed.
“I originally had the idea of doing Hamlet with only people who’d ever played him onstage,” Hollands says of what would undoubtedly be a fascinating if overbearing take on things. “Then I realised it would be too much, and, although I’m still at the very early stages, the more I looked at the play, the more I realised I didn’t need to impose anything on it.
With only a cast of eight to work with, Hollands’ casting of Clark as the troubled Danish prince is crucial.
“I’m not saying he’s unconventional,” Hollands says of Clark, whose previous Citz appearances include a stint as Carry On actor Sid James, “but he’s probably not an obvious choice. I want to get away from the idea of Hamlet as an aesthete, and make him a man of action who can look after himself. You need someone with drive and energy for that, and Andy has a very vibrant stage presence. There’s subtlety there, but he’s got an edge as well.”
In terms of edge and mould-breaking charisma, David Hayman made a mercurial Hamlet both in 1970 and again in 1975. Somewhere in-between the two, The Citizens artistic triumvirate of Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse had defined a house style of sumptuous visuals illustrating and often leading provocative, expectation-confounding reinventions of classic plays formerly considered untouchable. It was the 1970 production, though, which first threw down the gauntlet.
Havergal’s production, designed by Prowse, was all male. As if such a whiff of danger wasn’t enough, two of his actors opened the show by indulging in some form of sexual congress beneath sheets of black parachute silk. Only when the pair came up for air were the full home-erotic, and indeed incestuous, overtures of the piece made clear.
It caused an outrage, not least in the pages of the then Glasgow Herald, where the paper’s drama critic denounced the production, and the portrayal of Gertrude in particular as being “got up in inky drag as if for a pantomime designed by Aubrey Beardsley or perhaps Charles Addams.”
Even the ferocious performance of Hayman, just out of drama school and effectively doing his growing up in public, was dismissed as being “virtually inarticulate, gasping and shrieking.”
The public furore that followed, solidly defended by the theatre board’s Chair, Bill Taylor, split audiences down generational lines, and effectively put The Citizens on the map. As Cordelia Oliver notes in her biography of the Citz, Magic In The Gorbals, “The end of that first night is unforgettable; how the young people in the audience rose to their feet and drowned with their cheers the sounds – and there were plenty – of adult displeasure.”
Half a decade on, Hayman returned to the role, older, wiser, and a good deal calmer now he was something of an elder statesman of the Citizens company. Indeed, Prowse’s first stab at the play was an altogether statelier affair than one might have expected from a company then at the top of their classicist game.
Prowse chose to set the play in the midst of the Prussian empire, allowing for near Wagnerian operatic conceits such as having Jill Spurrier’s Ophelia resembling Brunhilde, and all manner of what The Evening Times called “stylish heel-clicking and duelling scars on almost every face.”
The Jewish Echo went further, their review headlined ‘From Prussia With Love.’
Christopher Small, recalling in The Glasgow Herald what he called “the rough-and-tumble” of the 1970 production, somewhat conversely described Hayman’s second stab at the play as being “almost reduced to a military automaton, shouting his agonies in a harsh monotone, sneering, angry, suffering more boredom than torment.”
If Hayman’s first appearance as Hamlet can be defined as The Citizens ‘black production’ of Hamlet, then MacDonald’s 1981 take on it, with Andrew Wilde playing the lead, can be regarded as the ‘white production.’ Here further radicalism abounded, with the director not only returning to the rarely performed First Quarto of the play, but setting it, by way of Prowse’s institutional design, in a mental hospital, awash with men in white coats as a fierce and disturbed Hamlet letting rip his soliloquies as if in therapy.
In these pages, an initially cautious Mary Brennan predicted the voguish 60s hangover of something akin to “Marat-Sade does Hamlet,” but was relieved to find that “The seemingly unpalatable metaphor of psychiatric cases enacting ‘Hamlet’…unlocks unexpected, enlightening dimensions of meaning.”
In Wilde, Brennan saw “a lean prowling Hamlet full of lurking.” Of interest too was the presence of Jill Spurrier, who had played Ophelia six years earlier, was now cast as Gertred, while Johanna Kirby picked up her baton to play Ophelia.
Of the 1970 production, Christopher Small’s review punningly suggested that Havergal had been “at his Marowitz end before he is fairly started.” The reference was to Charles Marowitz, the controversial counter-cultural American director who had spent much of the 1960s himself reinventing the classics in punchy, post-modern versions that presaged the way for other enfants terribles such as The Wooster Group (whose own Hamlet is rumoured to be visiting Glasgow in 2008) and Calixto Bieito, whose sleazy nightclub-set take on the play dazzled the Edinburgh International Festival a couple of years back.
It wasn’t until 1993, in the theatre’s bijou Circle Studio, that The Marowitz Hamlet was finally produced by The Citz. Clocking in at barely an hour long, director Malcolm Sutherland cast Henry Ian Cusick, now a star of TV drama, Lost, as the Dane, and a young Helen Baxendale, another future small screen regular, as Ophelia.
Sutherland approached an already cut-up up affair with a hi-tech array of TV screens, prompting Joseph Farrell to comment that “Nothing dates like yesterday’s avant-garde. Of his near Freudian approach to the play, Sutherland himself commented in The Evening Times that “Hamlet is a neurotic, paranoid character and the real tragedy surrounds Ophelia.”
In 1996, Philip Prowse returned for another look at Hamlet, with Sophie Ward as Ophelia, and Cal MacAninch as the Prince in a production that got back to black, both sartorially and in its mood. It was, according to Herald arts editor Keith Bruce, “shocking – particularly, it might be said, coming from this theatre – in its directness.” Not only was this evident in Prowse’s direction, but in MacAninch’s portrayal of “the only one who knows the truth,” who was likened to David Thewlis’ Johnny in Mike Leigh’s film, Naked, and who was revealed as “a tortured and thwarted Hamlet for the nineties.”
Eleven years on, and two thirds of the way through the nineties, Hollands and Clark’s Hamlet will no doubt be different again. As Hollands points out, “It’s easy to be cool with Shakespeare, but I’d like people to think here that there’s been a commitment to the emotional nature of the tragedy. If anything, I want this Hamlet to wear its heart on its sleeve a little bit.”
Hamlet, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, September 21-October 13. Tickets for Hamlet and the rest of The Citizens autumn season are on sale from July 3rd
www.citz.co.uk
The Herald, July 5th 2007
ends
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