One of my most recent sightings of the play was the filmed version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production starring David Tennant, a mercurial rendering of the Prince. Act One, Scene Two often presents Claudius and Gertrude regally enthroned, but in Greg Doran’s imaginative staging they ingratiate their way through a cocktail party, as though they knew they needed to get the court on side. I quote this detail only to suggest how each production can – maybe has to – offer some new insight, whether in overall concept or in such detail.

Left: David Tennant as Hamlet, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2008 (photograph by Ellie Kurttz/RSC) — Right: Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet, Barbican Theatre, 2015 (photograph by Johan Persson/ArenaPAL)

Croall’s book embraces an extraordinary range of directorial and acting approaches to the Himalayan challenges offered by the play. As might be expected in light of his magisterial biographies of John Gielgud and Sybil Thorndike, Croall’s account of the phenomenon that is the play is superbly researched. This is the case whether in relation to a panoramic view of its history from its origins in an Icelandic poem of the eleventh century, through its significant Shakespearean texts, to a 2017 production in London’s West End, or in its dealings with individual performances.

Such research never becomes just a series of factual findings but provides the basis for how any one production or performance has stamped its individuality, how those involved came to terms with the text in the light of changing times, and how audiences and critics received it. As to the latter, Croall has a rare gift for creating a sense of drama from often conflicting views.

The book’s structure embraces a brief stage history, a decade-by-decade survey of the crucial Hamlets from the 1950s to the 2010s, followed by a detailed account of the National Theatre production of 2000, from inception to reception. It is astonishing to see what a history of British theatrical talent has been brought to bear on revivifying, almost yearly, the tale of the tormented (or was he?) Dane. In the 1950s there were Alec Guinness, sporting moustache and goatee, ‘deeply hurt and shaken by the opening night and negative reviews’; Richard Burton, who wrote of ‘the series of quotations that Hamlet now is’ and who often moved close to the wings to catch the score of a rugby match on a portable radio playing there; Paul Scofield’s second Hamlet, this time under Peter Brook’s direction, which also performed in the Moscow Arts Theatre as the first English production since the 1917 revolution; and two Hamlets from Michael Redgrave, one in 1950 and the other in 1958. In the latter, at age fifty, Redgrave was one of the oldest Hamlets ever, nine years older than Googie Withers’ Gertrude.

Paul Scofield, in Hamlet at The Phoenix Theatre, 1952 (photograph by Angus McBean)

As Croall documents the performances, we get a fascinating sense of the kinds of changes wrought in production and of what makes Hamlet so rewarding and daunting to actors. Hanging over each new aspirant are the ghosts of past triumphs, perhaps most notably Gielgud’s, but some of the actors quoted and interviewed have resolutely sought to avoid such influences, and are found in detailed discussion with their directors as they seek to create something new and personally felt. There are some highly articulate reflections from Rory Kinnear and director Nicholas Hytner as they quarry their way into the text for their 2010 performance, which Hytner saw as taking place in ‘a very modern, post-Soviet world’.

The book offers a stimulating sense of production protagonists, both onand off-stage. Croall has talked to some of the most illustrious recent exponents of the title role, across a gender and racial range, and to some of the most critically acclaimed directors. Among the actors, Maxine Peake and her director Sarah Frankcom didn’t go into the 2014 production ‘with some feminist agenda’; rather, Peake claimed, she played the role as ‘a man trapped in a female body’. British-born black actor Adrian Lester was praised by director Brook as being ‘so at ease with this complex language that he can make you feel he is inventing it’. Though the book focuses mostly on actors playing Hamlet, there are also provocative new insights into Claudius, Ophelia, and Gertrude, into how lighting and music directors view their contribution, and how understudies are kept at the ready.

The most substantial study, among many such, is that of John Caird’s 2000 National Theatre production starring one of the greatest of all Hamlets, Simon Russell Beale. Croall’s almost fifty-page account of the production, the casting, the rehearsal period, and the touring lead-up to the London opening reads like a remarkable journey, as those involved come to terms with their function in reimagining what may well be the world’s most famous play.

It is hard to do justice to such a rich pot-pourri of viewpoints in a short space. I can only say that I hope Croall is now working on ‘Performing Macbeth’.