Cush Jumbo is memorable as Hamlet.  She struck me less as the prince who hesitates and procrastinates but as one who is strong and angry from the off. 

The only cut in Greg Hersov’s production is of young Fortinbras so often left on the cutting room floor but denying us the sight of the new regime where a fresh start can be given to Denmark as none of the reigning family are left alive.  Fortinbras’s importance in the play is less fashionable – going to war over the principle of a small strip of land. 

Opening on the battlements of Anna Fleischle’s plain but imposing set of three hefty blocks of stone which later can turn transparent, as if they are of foxed glass, or of a darkened net, we see Horatio (Jonathan Livingstone) witness the ghost of the late king.  We switch to the court where Claudius (Adrian Dunbar) is demonstrating his benign nature and where his queen Gertrude (Tara Fitzgerald) seems in a dream.  Contrast Cush Jumbo’s Hamlet full of anger and resentment and this before Hamlet knows the full extent of the crime against his father. 

I was excited at the prospect of seeing Norah Lopez Holden’s Ophelia after her childlike Desdemona in Othello.  I wasn’t disappointed by her opening scene with Hamlet where she dances alone to a Latin American rhythm, her arms circling above her head. 

Polonius (Joseph Marcel) seems to have been blessed with two deserving children, Jonathan Ajayi as Laertes tries to listen to the old man.  Joseph Marcel’s Polonius is fussy and tedious but I did like his handing over the Gold American Express card to Laertes! 

The columns work well for the scenes on the cold ramparts of Elsinore, with swirling smoke, as Hamlet meets the ghost of his father but it isn’t terrifying. 

I wasn’t able to work out which one was Rosencrantz (Taz Skylar) and which Guildenstern (Josna Borja) until I looked at the pictures in the programme but their being sent for is an issue for Hamlet from the beginning of their entrance.  Mysteriously Taz Skylar is listed in the programme as playing Fortinbras too but I also missed that!  

The Mousetrap, the play within a play is a disaster in lingerie and writhing ecstasy as is the length of the Player King’s audition speech.    

The closet scene is limited by the space it has to take part in.  With just a chair and no bed and the arras these large cuboid columns, it isn’t intimate.  Tara Fitzgerald as Gertrude is memorable for her collection of silk pantaloons and matching turbans and for not rejecting Claudius at all, as if she is left unconvinced by her son’s pleas.  Neither does she seem particularly attached to Claudius but there are definite problems with Adrian Dunbar’s wooden charlatan.