Commotion greets the arrival of the carriages carrying Madame Ranyevskaya (Francesca Annis) and her family. There are leather suitcases, trunks and hat boxes. The aged Russian servant Firs (Ian McKellen, playing a man five years older than his actual age) is seen with hairy dundrearies and a bald head but in formal wear.
& Juliet : a rock musical featuring the hit songs of Max Martin I can't stop the feelingSo just dance, dance, danceLyric from I Can't Stop the Feeling Miriam-Teak Lee…
Cush Jumbo's soliloquies are deep and thoughtful, every word heard as they should be. This is the third time I recall the Young Vic choosing an excellent Hamlet but giving him a problematic production. There was Peter Brook's curtailing Adrian Lester's Hamlet to just Hamlet's lines in the play. There was Ian Rickson's setting of Martin Sheen as Hamlet in a psychiatric ward with Gertrude as a fellow patient and Claudius as the consultant psychiatrist. We walked through an installation of the back of a hospital with a dispensary before seeing the play. The last really successful, all round Hamlet I remember at the Young Vic was Paul Rhys's 1930s European royalty in 1999.