Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama, Cardiff
Fri 8 Feb
words: BILL KNOWLES
★★★★★
“No false beards”, they wrote. It’s an all-female cast, yes, but there will be no drag. No pretending to be men. No beards. I wondered, as I took my seat, what the bard would think.
Two minutes in I knew. It didn’t matter. Of course it didn’t matter. I was a fool to think otherwise. The players were themselves – characters that they inhabited so well – and that was the only thing that mattered. Two minutes in, you no more questioned Caludius’s gender than you did his feelings about becoming king.
Hamlet herself was fantastic: a truly anarchic, adolescent Hamlet, back from Wittenberg – home from uni – and fuming at her stepdad’s usurpation. She ran round the stage accusing everyone, fighting with anyone for some reasons that she articulated clearly and others, you felt, she could not.
And this was the key to the performance. The play felt right in this skin. Through Hamlet’s eyes we felt her frustration acutely – if nothing else, felt the frustration of being young in a world that is governed by the old. We understood the ridiculousness of her seniors – their inability to understand her, or quite grasp her ‘madness’.
The stage itself was pared-down, enunciating the few props that were used – in particular, a set of hand lanterns which toyed with light and darkness onstage to an eerie effect. The music, too, underlined the action perfectly, growing in intensity as the play crackled to its nail-biting crescendo.
In all, Jamie Garven’s Hamlet proved to be a superbly captured interpretation, showcasing a cast of extremely talented young actors from the Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama.