Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Theatre - Luke Thallon triumphs as the state succumbs to storms

The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.

Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles, as Denmark’s ship of state is battered by storms, literal and metaphorical, in a roiling Atlantic. After a fortnight in which that ocean has never looked wider nor choppier, a three hour examination of how a psychologically unstable man could eviscerate a polity seemed both timely and scarily portentous. But that, 425 years on, is why the play continues to speak to us with such jabbing urgency.

At first, Luke Thallon (pictured above), pleasingly young enough to play the mardy Prince, gives us a clever, angered but often playful Hamlet, the grinning and gurning inviting us to share the absurdity of his predicament, a father lost and gained so quickly, as his mother Gertrude (an icy Nancy Carroll) lost and gained a husband rather more happily. There’s something of the young Rik Mayall in Thallon, his early soliloquies capturing the manic energy and charm of Mayall’s incomparable storytelling on Jackanory, alongside the need to be liked. 

Relaxed a little, primed to be sympathetic and complicit, we’re initially uneasy with the turn to feigned madness - “Is this guy actually for real?” - is the insistent question, as an undestandable grief-laden disappointment turns pathological.

At this pivotal moment, Rupert Goold’s staging comes into its own. This is not just another gimmicky, partly updated version of Elsinore. With its familiar solidity comprising ramparts, walls and fortifications transformed into a tight and tilting deck offering no escape, no respite from the lashing waves, a false peace only accessed via stairwells leading to other levels of hellish confinement and an engine room’s noise and heat. And we know, unseen but out there like the shark in Jaws, the iceberg is lurking, ready to finish off the job Hamlet’s psychosis has set in train.

There isn’t much room for “... not to be” when Hamlet ponders his next move with a gun in his hand, but Thallon has already made his plans clear by that point, so the most famous speech in English Theatre becomes a chilling affirmation of murderous intent. Crucially, such is Thallon’s charismatic presence, we still warm to this man-child, the procrastination less irritating than it often is. After all, the waves keep hitting the ship as his righteous thirst for revenge keeps chipping at his conscience - both seem inevitable. a condition of nature. Perhaps this Hamlet works best for those who are not new to the text, especially its traumatic denouement, which is likely to be a majority in most houses.

The not entirely expected burgeoning empathy for Hamlet is fostered further by Jared Harris dialling up Claudius’s smug obnoxiousness to 11, brandy in one hand, cigar in the other, besotted queen at his side, impervious to the elements and to the boy prince’s moody miseries. You can all but hear, “We won - get over it!” underpinning his every word and deed. But, alone in his state room with his thoughts, doubts and guilt creep past his carapace of arrogance, prompting prayer - this usurper may be lustful and ruthless, but he’s not blessed with the iron-clad certainty of the narcissist. Impossible to like,  but just a little less hard to hate.

Elliot Levey’s obsequious courtier, Polonius, is his enabler, the apparatchik not without a superficial wit, but a condescending fool all the same, his accidental death wholly unregretted by Hamlet and barely mourned by Gertrude. Such men are always crucial to any tyrannical regime - until they’re not.

Nia Towle can’t do much with Ophelia, struck dumb by the cruel instruction to get to a nunnery, Hamlet revelling in what appears to be a new and gleeful embrace of misogyny provoked by his mother’s leaping from one brother's arms to the other. Both women in the play (as is true for the women in The Godfather, another reference point for problematic transfers of power) are short on agency, passive, trapped until the younger takes her own life and the elder does the same, inadvertently or not. Maybe that’s just in the play, but it’s a jarring note in so slick and relevant a production that offers such riches to the male roles.

Amongst a supremely gifted cast, Anton Lesser is magnificent as the Ghost of Old Hamlet, giving a masterclass in excavating the poetry of Shakespeare’s verse in the cadences and rhythms of his line reading. The words, as they should at this venue above all others, sound fresh and vital, supernatural, yet persuasive in their present quality. 

For all the spectacle and thoroughgoing commitment to Goold’s vision, dazzlingly realised on Es Devlin’s pitching, yawing, rolling set that sends man after man to their sliding doom in the climactic finale, it’s Thallon’s Hamlet that will live longest in the memory. Three years on from The Stage naming him amongst its 25 theatre makers of the future, the part he was always destined to play has found him at exactly the right moment, compellingly hovering on the edge of fully realised potential. 

The iceberg wasn’t seen until it was too late and there’s no Fortinbras riding in to comfort us with the message that the state survives its catharsis - in wholly fidelitous Shakespeare productions, states always do. Doomscrolling through the day’s news on the way home, I couildn’t help feeling that the Norwegian’s absence from this production might be the most pointed takeaway of all.  

• Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre until 29 March
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk