Review: HAMLET, starring Giles Terera, Chichester Festival Theatre

A friend remarked to me that the most radical thing you can do with the classics is to play them dead straight. No listing ship to send Hamlet toppling towards us, no cook out on the lawn, no swingeing cuts to accommodate the Tik Tok generation’s attention span. Perhaps heeding such voices, Chichester Festival Theatre’s first trip to Denmark under their own steam, is about as orthodox as you’ll find in 2025.

Justin Audibert, Artistic Director of CFT, uses The Minerva, his smaller house, to create an intimacy, just us and the actors and the words with little in the way of a set to distract us. (Though Lily Arnold’s curious mix of Elizabethan and Victorian costumes did take my mind off the madness at one point). 

Of course, you soon snap back to the action, and inaction, that drives Shakespeare’s most celebrated protagonist to the play’s dreadful conclusion. As Hamlet, Giles Terera cannot and does not moon about like a bedroom-bound teenager, since, at 48 years of age, he presents as more of a direct rival for the throne of his usurping uncle and for the affection of his mother. Ariyon Bakare is a thuggish king and, like all bullies, he’s insecure, and aware that, while Hamlet has the charisma to make the court love their Prince, they’ll only ever fear their King.

That balance by dint of age is carried further in casting Eve Ponsonby as Ophelia, also long out of her teens. The impact of a woman in the role rather than a girl proves less on her character and greater on her father’s. Polonius’s (Keir Charles) often somewhat endearing buffoonery is buried under his coercive control of his adult daughter, little more than a bargaining chip in his ambitious maneuvering. Hire staff on the basis of loyalty not talent and you’ll be lucky to find even second raters - a lesson leaders need to learn, and usually more than once.

It’s not just the state of Denmark that has something rotten in it, it appears to be rotting in real time, the earth turning to dust, the split level set falling towards us like a sand dune failing to hold back erosion. Sliding disintegration is usually a fair description of Hamlet’s state of mind, but Terera is one of the most knowing Princes I can recall, weighing his words, spoken with the clipped efficiency of a man who knows his mind, and strategising how best to get what he wants from his ‘acting mad’ schtick. 

But, while he knows the sham is more than enough to fool his bullish king and his absurd chief courtier, he’s less sure of his lover. That may be the driver of a vicious “Get thee to a nunnery” scene, the impact of those words on a woman who has been forced to wait so long only to be met with shocking rejection barely imaginable. Would the sweet prince, who inspires such loyalty in Horatio (a fine, understated turn from Sam Swann) really be capable of that were he not losing his mind for real? It’s a sharpening of a question that always clings to the play.

It takes three hours to get to the cathartic final scene but the clanging of sword on sword has us sitting up straight. Ryan Hutton’s Laertes is so convincing in his wild-eyed lust for revenge that I can’t have been alone in feeling the urge to tell him to calm down a bit and remind him that it isn’t real. 

Sara Powell, until then a rather passive Gertrude, leaps to imbibe the poison, seeing that her son and her husband will never be reconciled and they will bring down the state with themselves. One of the many mysteries of the play is why she couldn’t see that earlier and done something about it. There must have been a bit of “To be or not to be” in her mind at one point surely?

Especially seen soon after the RSC’s vivid and inventive Fat Ham, this Hamlet is a kale smoothie compared to a vodka and Red Bull. There are times when it feels unpalatable, when you question whether it’s worth the effortful concentration the slew of ideas and the intensity of the playing demands. But, like the smoothie, it does you good, the authenticity of its flavours and the impact of its astringency cleansing the palate. Nothing is contrived, nothing is fake, nothing is ultra-processed in this production. 

As institutions of state are challenged home and abroad and wobble under the strain, this is a serious Hamlet for serious times. 

Hamlet at Chichester Festival Theatre until 4 October

Photo images: Ellie Kurtzz