Art Reviews

Poetry and politics. Subtlety and sorrow. Compassion and contemplation. Thoughtfulness and tenderness. Luxury of language. Pity, terror and even tragedy itself.

These are among the qualities not to be found in Calixto Bieito's production of Hamlet for Birmingham Repertory Theatre. And yet it is a remarkable demonstration of the richness of Shakespeare's play that, even in the absence of all of this and of much of the text, it is still such a compelling evening.

How is this is possible? What can be left over if you treat the poetry with relative indifference, virtually dump some key scenes, dispense with all sense of sympathy and ignore the wider world in which the play unfolds? What remains, in fact, is what is often crowded out by the play's teeming complications: action. By concentrating simply on making the action as vigorous and vivid as possible Bieito creates a production that ignores or distorts much of what the play contains but is utterly true to one aspect.

It blows away the image of Hamlet as a play about what is not happening - Hamlet's delay in killing Claudius - and reinstates it as a rip-roaring extravaganza of sex and violence. If Irish audiences who saw Bieito's controversial Barbaric Comedies at the Abbey three years ago didn't already know he is Catalan they would quickly guess that the director of this Hamlet is not from the English- speaking world. The actors are English and Scottish, but the production feels more like Shakespeare in translation, where the original text is a fuzzy presence and the story is what matters.

It's not just that Horatio is a lounge pianist, that the ghost is merely Horatio putting on a spooky voice and that the grave-digger is the same actor engaging in well-rehearsed repartee. It's not even that chunks of text are shifted from their original contexts and made to serve new purposes. It's also that the verse is spoken rapidly, with little respect for its internal rhythms, making it less a destination in itself than high-octane fuel for the plot.

If the poetry is given scant regard, so are the politics. The design is a self-conscious stage set, with three banks of seats at the back, a huge neon sign that says "Palace" and a white grand piano for Horatio. Nothing penetrates this enclosed world. Fortinbras and his wars have disappeared, as has the mob that howls at the gate. The travelling players are dumped - the play-within-a-play is staged by Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There is no outdoors: the graveyard scene is just another game in the hothouse of the court.

It's not terribly original to imagine the play as a gnarled, incestuous family psychodrama. Yet while this kind of approach usually makes the play small and static, with Hamlet becoming an ineffectual slob, Bieito sees incestuous families as the place where the action is. He injects a monstrous energy into the intimate confrontations that seem to interest him most. Although he may have little to say other than that there's something very, very rotten in the state of Denmark, he makes us smell the pungent odour of putrefaction.

The aggression of the conflicts creates a startling clarity in a number of scenes. George Anton's vitally dynamic Hamlet, after he tells Rachel Pickup's brilliantly dazed Ophelia to get to a nunnery, rapes her. The image is unsubtle and overly literal, but it cuts to chase, creating a visual equivalent of the psychic assault that has just taken place. Hamlet manhandles Gertrude in the bedroom scene as if he may well do the same to her.

He smashes Polonius repeatedly over the head with a bottle, a much more visceral presentation of the action than the usual stabbing behind the arras. The "to be or not to be" soliloquy is spoken to Polonius's bloody corpse, lifting it out of romantic cliché and reminding us that it is, after all, a speech about death. Ophelia chokes to death on rubbish, so that the queen's lush description of her drowning becomes a sardonic fantasy.

With George Costigan's wonderfully creepy Claudius and a superb reimagining of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as fatuous frat boys, the bleak, often grotesque world view on offer has a paradoxical vibrancy. The speed and momentum of Bieito's direction create the impression that the plot is playing itself out in real time, so it retains a fierce immediacy.

Huge tracts of ground remain unoccupied, but within its narrow confines this is a bracing and invigorating corrective to the long-established romantic pieties that surround the play. If anyone could keep that vigour and put back in some of the poetry and compassion, the resulting production would be an incomparable masterpiece. - Fintan O'Toole

Ends tomorrow afternoon; also in matinee today

Mythos

Tivoli Theatre

Acts of violence are always kept offstage in Greek tragedy, but this Israeli production ensures their bloody consequences are kept in full view. The cycle of revenge killings in the House of Atreus, the subject of many Greek tragedies, is presented by the Cameri Theatre and the ITIM Ensemble with a graphic emphasis on the human cost.

Although the resonance of this theme for the Middle East is inevitably evoked, director Rina Yerushalmi avoids making explicit analogies. Unfortunately this restraint does not extend to other aspects of her production.

Loosely based on Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, with additions from Euripides's Iphigeneia At Aulis and The Trojan Women, Yerushalmi's adaptation, translated into Hebrew by Aharon Shabtai and Shimon Buzaglo, presents the tragic cycle as part of a larger cosmic pattern. Screen projections of the planets and skies dominate the stage while the text diverges into choral commentary on stardust and colliding asteroids. The stark emphasis in the original Greek plays on divine forces and the consequences of the gods' intervention in the lives of the Greek king Agamemnon and his children has been diluted to a woollier consideration of the human place in the universe.

The narration moves back and forth in time, opening with Electra's desire to avenge the death of Agamemnon, her father, a wish fulfilled when her brother, Orestes, murders their mother, Clytemnestra. This murder is revisited later as brother and sister are beset by the Furies, who punish them by leading them back to the Trojan War, to witness Agamemnon's sacrifice of their sister, Iphigeneia, and the horrors inflicted on the city of Troy by the Greeks. When the formal clarity is lost so is much of the drama, which is substituted here by an unmodulated intensity of performance.

Overuse of the chorus and the frequent eruption into music and dance routines reminiscent of 1970s rock operas combine to create a presentation that is simultaneously bland and overwrought. Fussy lighting and costumes, awkward choreography and overcomplicated stage manoeuvres involving the constant lifting and carrying of stage flats as props create a sense of visual clutter that matches the narrative and dramatic incoherence. - Helen Meany

Ends tonight; also in matinee today

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

Gaiety Theatre

The idea of bringing the Belgian composer Kris Defoort's operatic treatment of Roddy Doyle's novel to Dublin must have had an air of bringing coals to Newcastle. The creators of the stage

piece, which had its premiere in Antwerp two years ago, need not have worried, however. Their intention was to put their skills at the service of the text, and in that their enterprise has proved entirely successful.

The subject of the novel is the fate of the

human spirit in the face of destructive forces.

And although Doyle presents it in a way that

seems inseparable from its context of social deprivation in Dublin, it is, obviously, of

universal concern.

In writing the opera - with its double orchestra in the pit mixing classical and jazz musicians, its single character, Paula Spencer, played simultaneously by a singer (Claron McFadden) and an actress (Jacqueline Blom) on a stage dominated by video projections that feature images and text, including other characters and their statements - Defoort consciously set out to provide music that would be subservient to the words.

It's only very rarely after the opening that the music, however polyglot and graphic, steps into the foreground. Even the singing seems to have been conceived for the supportive, filling-out role that music is usually allotted in films. It's just one element among the many brought together to turn Doyle's book into an absorbing evening.

Blom and McFadden give performances that, especially in the haunted and haunting live video close-ups, are often astonishing.

The large team behind the visual feel of the production scores points on all fronts. And conductor Etienne Siebens deals sensitively and persuasively with the complexities of the mixed orchestra as well as the commonplaces and energetic drive of Defoort's music.

As an opera there's not much to savour in this work. As an evening of theatre there's quite a lot. -Michael Dervan

Ends tomorrow

Sudden Birds

City Arts Centre

The four characters in Sudden Birds aren't very likeable. Uncertain and controlling, they taunt each other, sneer and laugh when they get their way and constantly try to upstage the others. Bodies and faces are grasped possessively, and any solo dancing is attention-seeking.

The physicality of the four dancers - dressed in asymmetrical black dresses in a sterile white space - is somewhat stunted, and action takes place in small areas.

The dancers sustained the tension as they played out roles of submission and dominance to the gloomy sounds of an electric cello, but the emotional narrative spectrum promised in the programme is not delivered, and choreographer Yasmeen Godder constantly reiterates material with no real sense of development. Some moments of unison lifted the dynamic and kept you going for a while, but the result was fairly grim. - Michael Seaver

Ends today