The National Theatre’s Hamlet is pretty good, and Rory Kinnear’s very good indeed. Lucid, clear, funny, eccentric. Ever since David Warner for the RSC in 1965, it’s become conventional to play Hamlet as a rebellious student, and it’s a good time for rebellious students and do a good time for Hamlet. Rory Kinnear’s student is stifled by living with his parents, longs for the companionship of his student friends, plans to travel in his gap year and rages blindly at authority. The production’s nicely updated to, to, to, well I suppose some kind of contemporary Eastern European state, stuffy, over-decked out in palaces, television coverage and security detail.

Not for the first time, I’m struck by what a weird and shapeless play this is. Tons of it is incoherent and implausible; there’s really no clear answer to why Hamlet treats Ophelia the way he does and his plan to catch the conscience of the king is rubbish. It’s a mystery why the king fails to spot the depiction of his crime when the players do it in dumbshow and I always feel his treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is pointlessly cruel.

Now, I’m not dumb. There are reasons one can concoct for all these things, but the play doesn’t seem overly concerned about answering them. It’s a clotted play; clotted with language and with the complexity of human motivations. It is striking how obsessed the play is with the idea of human beings as rational animals, whether it thinks this is right or wrong. Perhaps in the very confusions of the play lie a vision of human thought.

The thing that always surprises me in performance is the fourth act. The first act is battlements and the ghost; the second and third takes us through the actors and then the two failed murders of Claudius - one when he mistakenly thinks the king is at prayer and the other when he kills Polonius. The fifth act is Hamlet’s return and the duel. The fourth act is close to farce, with Hamlet hiding Polonius’s body around the palace, being sent to England and returning, Ophelia’s madness and drowning.

It’s a very difficult act to get right. It both broadens the play out - it’s an act about intrigues and power play, about authority and chaos, Hamlet as a kind of Fool. In David Tennant’s version, the last I saw, the political dimension was less to the fore than the idea of Hamlet as a zany pricker of pomposity (from memory, they may even have cut his encounter with Fortinbras’s army?). In this, it’s very much about an authoritarian state coping with a rogue element (in Hytner’s production, Ophelia is clearly killed by agents of the state, giving Gertrude’s narration of it a horrifyingly disingenuous quality).

Those like Hytner who want to tell us a story about power and its instabilities will find plenty here; those who find Hamlet to be a play about Hamlet, his intensity, his brooding, his anguish and indecision, will enjoy this act too. The only people I can’t imagine getting much out of this act are those who want the play to be in any sense a classical tragedy. In some productions - like Greg Doran’s - the farcical aspects are brought to the fore, but they’re impossible to entirely dismiss. The speed at which we find Hamlet dismissed to England and then returned to Denmark tends towards funny. I have never seen a production that makes Ophelia’s mad scene genuinely moving (I would love to have seen Glenda Jackson play Ophelia to David Warner’s Hamlet, though; the pictures are so astonishing).

When I think of Hamlet I generally forget this act; in my memory the play goes pretty much straight from the death of Polonius to Hamlet’s exile. But whenever I see it, it’s this act that strikes me anew. It’s where the play’s fascination with what makes a person, what the springs of action are, the unfathomability of the self to itself is turned outward into a vision of the state and the precariousness of political power.

Act IV of Hamlet

Dan Rebellato