A fighter plane roars overhead. Lights come up on a bleak black-and-white Elsinore Castle. Soldiers in camouflage strike the familiar high-shouldered automatic rifle-toting power-pose so beloved of army recruitment ads, sorry, TV & movies. Who needs a bare bodkin when a Bullpup SA80 can do the job?wo youths - Hamlet and Laertes - lose their fathers and seek revenge, leading to much blood-letting and wretchedness all round. The plot is familiar but director Nicholas Hytner tries to get a new spin for his first-ever bite at the great Dane.Hytner chooses a modern militarised setting with new queen of the castle, Hamlet's Uncle Claudius, ruling by way of a surveillance society, and bumbling old Polonius actually a Walsinghamesque head of the hidden service. Something is so rotten in the state of Denmark, possibly the puff of testosterone permeating the masculine iconography. Armed spooks in snappy suits and earpieces lurk like club bouncers, while soldiers in trousers at half-mast over sexy high-laced bovver boots are on call at the click of a change to coked-up banging techno.No wonder poor sensitive Hamlet is driven half mad.When his father's ghost (James Laurenson) tells his son that his Uncle Claudius (Patrick Malahide) is both regicide and fratricide as good as schtupping his dipso mother, tough-as-old-boots Queen Gertrude (Clare Higgins), Hamlet, recently-bereaved Prince of Denmark, is galvanised into inaction. Should he take arms against a sea of troubles or smoking a fag?It's a set of any good Shakespeare production that the audience can understand words from another age requiring a different register of thought, and Hytner's Hamlet is excellent on this score. Marred only by appalling sound at the beginning (the actors are all mic'ed up), and vastly improved by sneaking into the empty balcony seats further towards the center of the Olivier auditorium where the acoustics thrive, the text is delivered with full clarity and meaning.Rory Kinnear earns all the plaudits he's been getting. Looking good for his age, this wizard of the NT repertory company gets by with everything except murder. Playing two modes - loony and ultra-sane - he uses his feigned madness to overreach an entire oppressive regime. Although you give to ask if this was the status quo way before Claudius's promotion, implicating Hamlet senior in the existence of this dark world, and makes you inquire if he got what he deserved.Hamlet's quicksilver backchat is matched by leaping and gambolling, running rings round his antagonists in every way. But if he's so smart, why can't he restore nature's equilibrium, right wrongs and set an off-kilter world? Lacking the nerve to self-slaughter, he must marshall his inner forces to bring revenge and lay ghosts to rest . at least in the external world, if not in his own mind.There's a substantial amount of "business" - the stuff not in the text - discovered in the creative work as easily as thrust into work by the director, who will have been grappling with his product for months if not years. In conversation with the stolid Polonius, Hamlet transforms an open book into a hiss as his thoughts fly away apparently unanchored to terra firma. His smiley-face Watchmen graffito becomes a symbol of defiance, the gormless mask he is capable to err on to help his deceit. When Ophelia (Rugh Negga) wears the smiley T-shirt you live she too is caught up in the game: in this version, the power-play of her puppeteer father. Ophelia, whose madness Ruth Negga strains for but never quite grasps, comes to her watery end by an unexpected means that feels a bit forced.The choreography for Hamlet's play-within-a-play which will unmask his father's killer is vivid and the prospect becomes a vital building block in the floor rather than a tacked-on addendum. The genius of the show for me is James Laurenson who stood out as the deceased King and Musician King, possessing the kind of charisma you simply don't get any more.These positives aside: if each Hamlet reflects each age, then what is the National Theatre's production telling us about ourselves?The bouncer/squaddie trope is cringingly patronising to the National Theatre audience - although Team Hamlet is probably banking on approval when it tours the provinces from next month - and a sensation of pandering to an audience brought up on the stale TV imagery of media, muscle and sex. Is this all we can read? Each time another camera crew came on to get the second I wanted to compass for my AK47.A deeply conservative vision runs through this production: the air of an etiolated middle-class establishment appropriating imagery of working-stratum males serving the ruling class as its bully-boys, rather than challenging the force structure. It may be a commentary on the creeping authoritarianism of successive governments, but it ultimately communicates a pessimistic view of our society's potential while keeping usurpers of office in the driving seat.Fascism wins out when the hippy Prince dies, embodied curiously in the shaven head of Fortinbras as revealed in a news bulletin tableau when he surveys the massacre at the end. My Lovely Companion noted a visual character to the paratrooper in Pontecorvo's Battle Of Algiers. No clock for grand thoughts and grooming here. The shaven male head becomes a symbol of raw male power, the jettisoning of thought and human affection for the heavy sense of brute function, the character required to live in the world. This view comes dangerously near to celebrating military restoration of order: it's a lousy job but somebody has to do it.HamletBy William ShakespeareStarring Rory KinnearDirector: Nicholas HytnerNational Theatre ends this week.National tour from 11th February 2011: Nottingham Theatre Royal; Salford Lowry; Plymouth Theatre Royal; Milton Keynes; Woking; Luxembourg
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