Hamlet, Young Vic

From 7.00pm onwards ticket holders are invited to walk to their seats through a back stage maze transformed into the corridors of a mental asylum. Past therapy sessions, gymnasium timetables and arrows to the canteen, and a blank faced janitor who barges past you with a floor polisher. Interactive theatre that I fell for so completely that I suspected the abandoned hairbrush in the toilet might have been consciously placed there.

The characters are the inpatients and doctors of an institution run by Claudius, who issues both the orders and medication. Ian Rickson’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is sometimes very clever, though often rather forced.

There is a lot of fresh humour found amongst the madness: Polonius recording their conversations like diligent shrink and Rosencrantz (female in this version) and Guildenstern are brilliant as foolish doctors, and Ophelia’s breakdown is very poignant. But this institutional setting is too prescriptive a form, and though Sheen is very brilliant (especially in the later scenes) it seemed as though he might have made a better Jack Nicholson than Prince of Denmark and some of the more provoking monologues are rather lost.

An amazing amount of people left during the interval. They were those, I assume, who had come to see Sheen and not Hamlet, and had found the two hours of the first half had been enough. I think they did not give this version of the play its due and they missed the final twist, which I wont spoil, but which left me feel a little crazy.