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The production's prime flaw is a failure at the top. Most of the figures in authority lack a compelling majesty and weight. For Hamlet's role wholly to succeed, his self-doubt must seem justified; he needs to be a worthier soul than anyone else on stage and yet something of an underling, with an intellectual's cowed nervousness in the presence of men of decisive action. His part demands august personages before whom he can shrink. But Hamlet's ghostly father, as played by Terence Rigby, wouldn't scare a puppy, let alone a prince. James Laurenson's Claudius has some fine moments, but they are rendered on too small a scale; he finally seems more a petty thief than the brazen usurper of a throne.
Yet when was there ever a performance of Hamlet one couldn't quibble with? Ultimately the play defeats its every interpreter-just as life itself does. This is a noble production in concept and execution, and it is hard to imagine how anyone could sit through it without getting the goose-bumpy feeling that here we may have the greatest drama anybody ever wrote. This play's the thing -- a work whose cadences are so peerless that phrase after phrase has infiltrated the language at large. Moliere once created a character who was thrilled to learn he had been speaking prose his whole life; someone ignorant of Shakespeare might stumble into a theater and be dumbfounded to discover that for years he had been speaking Hamlet.
For the audiences who fall under the spell of Fiennes and this new production, every other marquee on Broadway goes dark. Only one light remains, and the glow it sheds is harsh, scant and imperishable. ยน