This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
To kick off the autumn, two artistic directors are launching their first seasons at the South Bank: Indhu Rubasingham at the National Theatre and Nadia Fall at the Young Vic. It is bizarrely fitting that two of their opening productions both have Oedipal overtones, with Fall’s staging of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane coming just before NT Deputy Artistic Director Robert Hastie’s new Hamlet.
The one is supposed to be funny, and largely isn’t; the other is a tragedy played for laughs. Neither is wholly successful, although both have some interest.
Orton has proved increasingly unpopular to stage over recent years, with murmurs that his activities with underage boys in Tangiers have turned him from a respected, if edgy, Sixties playwright into a thoroughly cancellable paedophile. Both, of course, may be true.
Yet the one-time “Oscar Wilde of the Welfare State” wrote a series of brilliantly epigrammatic comedies during his brief lifetime that endured for decades, but now seem artificial and painfully mannered if not done in the right way. Unfortunately, Fall’s production, whilst sparky and amusing in places, ends up being a laborious chore.
It is tricky to make Orton unfunny, but this new production, pitched somewhere between sitcom brightness and Beckettian gloom, manages it. Under the glower of Peter McKintosh’s set design, in which wheelchairs and bicycles hang menacingly above the stage, a male-oriented spin on Pinter’s The Homecoming (which, to be fair, premiered the year after Sloane) unfolds as the enigmatic Sloane arrives at a grim house in the middle of nowhere, charming its inhabitants, the blowsy Kath and her deeply repressed brother Ed.
Only the pair’s Steptoe-esque father sees through him, and the consequences turn out to be both violent and blackly comic. At least, that’s the idea, and for the first half this is entertaining enough, helped by Tamzin Outhwaite’s superb work as Kath, skilfully combining pathos and comic lechery as the false-toothed spinster with designs on her handsome young lodger.
Yet Jordan Stephens, one half of the hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks, lacks the charisma and irresistible sexiness required for Sloane, instead giving an oddly tentative performance that reminds the audience that he is making his stage debut.
Daniel Cerqueira, as the apparently upright but creepy Ed, is even more of a disappointment, pitching his performance at the same low-key level throughout and throwing away some priceless moments of comedy.
The second act scene in which Ed reminisces about his youthful days of gay abandon with a friend — “I put him to one side which was difficult because he was alluring. I managed it though. Got a grip on myself” — should be properly hysterical, but Cerqueira plays it as if it were grimly naturalistic drama.
By the ironic end, I was bored, rather than titillated. Had the play felt like this when first staged in 1964, it’s doubtful we’d still be talking about Orton now. Some might even prefer it that way.
at the National Theatre (photo credit: Sam Taylor/National Theatre)
Hamlet, meanwhile, is the second production of the Rubasingham regime, after The Bacchae, and is a strange mixture of dark tragedy and high-energy comedy, which occasionally teeters into farce.
This is a bumper year for Hamlets, with Rupert Goold’s excellent shipbound RSC staging the pick of the bunch so far, and Hastie’s interpretation is distinctive both in its willingness to play for big, sometimes confusing, laughs and in Hiran Abeysekera’s quirky, decidedly antic performance.
This sweet prince isn’t just mad north northwest, but pretty much bouncing off the castle walls of Elsinore throughout. It’s a bold choice by both director and actor that makes this fast-paced romp through the play certainly unusual and entertaining, but which sacrifices much of the poetry and pathos in the process.
Set in some sort of Ruritanian palace, where Alastair Petrie’s strait-laced Claudius is less a wicked usurper and more the kind of king that Denmark should probably have had all along, this Hamlet boasts bold and highly original directorial touches.
I loved the device of having characters’ soliloquies overheard, and reacted to, by other characters on stage — which may have been pinched from Fleabag, but still works — and it’s a clever, poignant
idea to have Ophelia’s mad song sung by the company earlier, in the lusty aftermath of Claudius and Gertrude’s o’er hasty marriage.
The production also has a hilarious, poignant Polonius in Geoffrey Streatfeild, whose unusually nasty and protracted death scene carries real weight, just as his paternal love for Francesca Mills’s Ophelia and Tom Glenister’s Laertes is clear and reciprocated.
It’s Abeysekera, unfortunately, who makes this production interesting rather than brilliant. He’s more a Feste or a Fool than a Dane, gabbling soliloquies, leaping about the stage frenetically and undercutting the gravitas with incredulous faces.
Like so much of this staging, it’s unusual and original but doesn’t wholly work, meaning that by the time Hamlet is facing his end — “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” — it’s mildly diverting rather than tear-jerkingly poignant.
The National’s last Hamlet in 2010, with Rory Kinnear, may still be the greatest I have ever seen. This is no disaster, but I doubt it’ll be remembered in 15 weeks, let alone 15 years.
