Hamlet (Young Vic Theatre, London)
Rating: 
Verdict: Sassy Dane, sluggish show
What If If Only (Royal Court Theatre, London)
Rating:
Verdict: Sketchy
No one ever needed extra time to ponder whether Hamlet should bump off the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother. It’s already built into Shakespeare’s drama, with Hamlet’s famous ‘to be or not to be’ procrastination.
But extra time is exactly what we get in the Young Vic’s frustratingly ponderous new revival of the play starring Cush Jumbo and Adrian Dunbar.
Cush Jumbo? Yes, it’s what’s known in the trade as gender-blind casting, with the actress playing our anguished young prince. Jumbo is best known from TV’s American legal dramas The Good Wife and The Good Fight, but she’s got oodles of experience in Shakespeare, too.
Extra time is exactly what we get in the Young Vic’s frustratingly ponderous new revival of the play starring Cush Jumbo and Adrian Dunbar
She has played the wronged Kate in The Taming Of The Shrew, tomboy Rosalind in As You Like It — and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar.
To her credit, Jumbo carries the show and the company for more than three hours, with a performance that’s thoughtful, streetwise and fitfully magnetic.
Nor is there any question of turning Hamlet into a princess. She’s more like a disaffected teenage boy in loose jeans, leather jacket and shaven head.
There is tenderness, and a sense of guilt at the collateral damage heaped on Ophelia during Hamlet’s forever stalling mission to take revenge on his evil uncle (Dunbar).
At times, Jumbo seems hollowed out by the task in hand. At others, she springs startlingly to life.
It’s an absorbing display, worthy of livelier acting around her.
Unfortunately, Greg Hersov’s production
