Before he even opens his mouth as Hamlet, Freddie Fox pulls off a mesmeric, show pony bit of acting. His deathly-white, spotlit face slowly creases into tear-raddled anguish as behind him, his father’s funeral cortege comes to rest. It’s a strong start for Tom Littler’s production, which plays out amid the crepuscular environs of Guildford’s Holy Trinity Church but it also sets out its intent: this is a Hamlet built to almost claustrophobic effect around its star.
Among the various successful scions of the Fox dynasty, Freddie is the most talented and least well known, having established neither the solid but unexciting TV career of his sister Emilia nor gone spectacularly off piste in the manner of his cousin, the actor turned political bore Laurence.
He’s a fizzy, febrile stage actor but it feels typical of his tangential career trajectory that he should be premiering his Prince not on a West End stage but for the Guildford Shakespeare Company. He also has the bad luck to be fourth Hamlet in a major production in about six months, although since Littler’s revival would have to go some way in sheer wacky incoherence to “rival” Sean Holmes’s current production at Shakespeare’s Globe, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Yet Fox more than rises to the occasion. Dressed in a black polo neck, he brings an effete grandeur to the Prince, knocking back whisky in the opening scenes with the ironic hauteur of an aesthete. Beneath the perfumed affectation, he’s visibly traumatised and unhinged from the off – when he encounters the ghost of his father, voiced, in a neat twist by his real father Edward, he responds to the news of his murder with a manic, almost ecstatic sense of purpose. Yet while Fox speaks with feverish feeling, he also has a haunted, hallucinatory focus. Perhaps it’s that pale face, but he seems eerily lit from within. There is the unusual sense of this Hamlet gaining a doomed sort of clarity as events unfold, rather than falling apart.
Littler’s modern-dress setting relies on perfunctory gestures – hi-vis vests for the guards, champagne flutes for Claudius and Gertrude, mobile phones for the kids. Denmark itself remains a yawning absence, with scant discernible political identity. Stefan Bednarczyk’s Claudius is less a calculating Machiavelli than a panicky weakling in way above his head. Karen Ascoe’s mousy Gertrude is tense and frightened. The vaguely resonant impression is of a state rotting away most of all from a lack of serious leadership, but also of Denmark as a place so fetidly grey and mediocre, it is indeed a prison to ambition.
