Age is no barrier to greatness

The play’s the thing as Sir Ian McKellen gives his Hamlet and classic musicals are given enlightening new twists

- Michael Billington

OSCAR WILDE once wrote that ‘there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet’. His point was that the character, more than any other in world drama, depends on the actor’s individuality. You could hardly have better proof than Sir Ian McKellen’s performance in the current production at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. Sir Ian may be 82, but his Prince is full of physical energy, intellectual zest and vocal virtuosity.

His Hamlet has its oddities, many of which spring from Sean Mathias’s production. Given that Hamlet explicitly tells us he has ‘foregone all custom of exercises’, it seems bizarre that Sir Ian should interrupt his first soliloquy by leaping onto a gymnasium bike. And when he delivers ‘to be or not to be’ as he waits for a haircut, I was struck by how rarely one feels suicidal angst when visiting the barber’s.

These, however, are directorial eccentricities. The main thing about Sir Ian’s Hamlet is that you forget, after about two minutes, that you are watching a man in his eighties and that you realise the character’s hunger for revenge is outweighed by self-doubt. When it comes to the famous passage on ‘What a piece of work is man’, Sir Ian emphatically cries ‘And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’ as if personally exiled from an idealised humanism. Sir Ian’s ability to stress the unexpected word is seen in a later soliloquy when, astonished at the sight of the Norwegian army marching to gain a little patch of ground, he wonders why they should risk life and limb ‘even for an eggshell’. The last word leaps out at one reminding one of Shakespeare’s capacity to find cosmic significance in the commonplace.