by The Royal Exchange Theater (on Kanopy)

I want to expand the scope of reviews on this site for a few reasons: 1) I have cut all my paid streaming subscriptions because fuck them; 2) I currently only stream on Kanopy through my library, which seems relevant to this site; and 3) I just watched the Royal Exchange Theater production of Hamlet starring Maxine Peake, and it is intense!

First of all, it is over three hours long, so I watched it over a couple of nights. It has a super pared down set, which I imagine was really intimate in person, but I worried the effectiveness was getting a little lost on the small screen. In the end, though, the acting, Peake in particular, is so combustive that it all hits stronger than any I’ve seen before.

Peake’s performance feels like the dark side of Mary Martin’s famous Peter Pan. With her blonde pageboy cut, Peake captures true teenage dirtbag, making her Hamlet an absolute disaster of a person. Most performances of Hamlet elevate it to an artistic but fairly straight-forward tragedy. Peake’s Hamlet is a very young man in a horrifying situation making everything much worse by his poor judgment and resulting terrible behavior.

I really love Shakespeare performances, but it has been too long since I’d seen one that felt like it brought a fresh approach to the text (shout out to Scotland, PA, one of my favorites, Rotten Tomatoes be damned). This one blew my hair back in a way that I expect was similar to the audiences at the Globe seeing Hamlet for the first time. It wasn’t always a fun experience (Hamlet really can be such a brat), but I was enthralled!