At South Coast Repertory, Hamish Linklater knows Hamlet
By Cornel Bonca

When we first get a look at Hamlet in the new production of the most famous play in the world at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, he’s squished off at the side of the stage, a little nobody, legs squeezed together, arms held tight to his body, his voice as soft as a child’s as he answers the new king that he, Claudius, is “a little more than kin and less than kind.” This Hamlet, played with an unusual gentleness of spirit by the charming and inventive Hamish Linklater, is desperate for kindness in the wake of his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to the new monarch, but is instead beset by a ghost who tells him “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown.” Hamlet promises, in a fit of outrage, to revenge his father’s murder, but can’t sustain his focus, distracted as he is by his budding philosopher’s sense of wonder and his own desire, as Linklater plays it, to hold close the joys of comradeship, theater, love . . . kindness. This is Hamlet as Holden Caulfield might have played him: diffident, ingenuous, vulnerable in the face of betrayal, and tender-hearted.

It’s a robust, emotionally improvised performance: Linklater starts soliloquies not knowing where they will take him—you can see him acting into the language, finding new meanings as he speaks. Despite his initial innocence, he convincingly matures as the play careens to its horrid end.

The rest of the production, directed by Tony Award-winner Daniel Sullivan, is patchy. Sullivan wisely indulges Dakin Mathews’ Polonius so he can milk his time on stage for maximum laughs, but seems to have paid no attention to the women’s roles, and he inexplicably rushes the final scenes as if he had some curfew to make. Hamlet’s “the rest is silence” comes and goes without us getting the chance to appreciate that this astonishing voice has slipped away forever.

HAMLET SOUTH COAST REPERTORY 655 TOWN CENTER DR | COSTA MESA 92628 | 714.708.5555 | SCR.ORG | WED-FRI 8PM | SAT 2:30 & 8PM | SUN 2:30 & 7:30PM | TUES 7:30PM | THROUGH JULY 1 | $20-60

Tags: Theater