Once you find the little doorway, negotiate a few stone steps and enter the chill, still vaults that will be your home for the next four hours, it’s easy to feel a sense of Elsinore’s cold, claustrophobic court and a portent of the madness and murder to come.
The Actors’ Temple have taken over St Andrews Crypt in the heart of the City of London for a promenade production of Hamlet (until 17 December). Guided by lantern-bearing ushers, you have to be prepared to get a bit of brick dust on your clothes and dodge a dancer or two, but it’s all worth it since you’re very much in the play, if just distant enough to avoid the clashing foils of Hamlet and Laertes, come the final reckoning.
Actors’ Temple founders Mark Wakeling and Ellie Zeegan play Hamlet and Ophelia as enraged and embittered – wild at heart and crazy in love. Wakeling's Hamlet is rational and remorseless, driven by the demand of his father’s ghost to avenge his death and only just held back by the request that his mother be spared – Hamlet as Terminator. Gary Condes’ Claudius struts about in robes and crown, but is as haunted as Hamlet by the knowledge of where ambition and lust have led him and as good as broken long before the deathly denouement, at one point lying prostrate on the floor to pray inviting pity for a monster. Amidst the murderous madness, the antics of The Players, led by Ben Joiner’s charismatic Player King, offer welcome relief from the all-encompassing intensity.
For a crypt, the acoustics are surprisingly good and the noises off from The Shadows behind crumbling walls lend a disorienting quality to complement the Court of Elsinore’s disintegration at the hands of Hamlet's vengeance. It’s a long haul at well over three hours, with perhaps 45 minutes spent standing, but this is a Hamlet that fits perfectly with its unique location and, with modern Europe’s democratic courts pulling themselves apart as they try to find ways to pay for the (financial) sins of their fathers, it’s a Hamlet that resonates amongst the Temples of Mammon glowering down on us as we make our way home.
The Actors' Temple run training courses for actors in London specialising in techniques created by Sanford Meisner.
