Luke Thallon Rides the Stormy Seas in a Maritime ‘Hamlet’

In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new “Hamlet,” the Danish royal court is all at sea — quite literally.

The set is a ship’s deck that tilts and creaks ominously while a screen plays eerily textured footage of a roiling ocean. At several points, the action pauses and an ensemble of actors in Edwardian dress scatters around the deck in panic, wearing Titanic-style life vests that foreshadow the play’s catastrophic climax.

It is a risky move to evoke a sinking ship: If the play falls short, the wisecracks practically write themselves. But this “Hamlet” — directed by Rupert Goold and running at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon through March 29 — proves seaworthy, thanks in large part to Luke Thallon’s psychologically absorbing turn as the embattled prince. Already grieving for his father and sickened by the recent remarriage of his mother, Queen Gertrude (Nancy Carroll) to his uncle Claudius (Jared Harris), Hamlet learns that Claudius had in fact murdered his father, and he is therefore duty bound to exact revenge.

This is always a lot for anyone to take in, and Thallon — a rising star with recent stage credits in “Patriots” and “Leopoldstadt” — portrays Hamlet’s anguish with a vulnerable, semi-abstracted candor. He delivers his lines in a pensive, haltingly conversational rhythm, as though feeling his way into them; we get the sense of a man continually processing his incredulity at the baroque predicament in which he finds himself.

Thallon also uses his body to good effect in a lithe, controlled display of nervous physicality. He is rag-doll-like, dynamic in his despondency. Now and then, he enlists the audience for moral support, throwing us a wry, self-pitying smirk, or striking ironically hammy poses.

Carroll’s Gertrude has a brittle standoffishness consistent with repressed shame, complementing Harris’s cagey Claudius. Anton Lesser’s incantatory declamations as the father’s ghost are genuinely spine-tingling, and Elliot Levey is endearingly funny as the sycophantic councilor Polonius, whose desperate desire to ingratiate himself to the royal household inadvertently results in the tragic demise of his daughter, Ophelia (Nia Towle). With his velvet dinner jacket, adenoidal intonations and shameless cynicism — at one point he shows off Ophelia like a calf brought to market — he is part smarmy salesman, part 1970s light entertainer.

The pivotal “Mousetrap” scene — in which Hamlet has a troupe of actors re-enact his father’s murder, so he can gauge Claudius’s reaction and confirm his guilt — is a crisply choreographed mime accompanied by creepily portentous singing. There was a ripple of audience laugher during the buildup, when a member of the troupe wearing a top hat performed elaborate stretches as though limbering up for a marathon. Small touches like this keep the show ticking along, and the two-and-a-half-hour run time flies by.

Not everything works, however. The presence of a large digital clock, which buzzes into life to indicate that the drama is unfolding within a compressed time frame, adds little. And the overt nod to the sinking of the Titanic feels contrived, since there is little obvious connection between the 1912 maritime disaster and the political intrigues of 17th-century Denmark. The tenuousness of the metaphor undermines its symbolic force. The maritime setting would have worked equally well without it, evoking a more elliptical sense of dread.

But whatever you thinks of the Titanic conceit, it is relatively unobtrusive and it doesn’t impinge on the story. The set, by Es Devlin, is gorgeous, and also has practical benefits. When the rear of the deck pitches upward as the ship begins to sink, the stage becomes a ramp, bringing gravity into play. In the gravedigger scene, the skull of the jester Yorick isn’t handed to Hamlet but rolled down to him. And during the famously bloody denouement — when all but one of the remaining characters are killed, in a matter of minutes — the bodies of Gertrude, Laertes and Claudius tumble down the deck and out of sight, one by one, leaving only the dying Hamlet, cradled by his friend Horatio.

It is an impressively clutter-free death spree, which ensures the tragic hero has our full attention in the play’s final moments. This is as it should be, given the virtuosic esprit of Thallon’s performance. Blending affable sincerity with restless, self-therapizing neediness, his is a fitting Hamlet for our anxious age. A London transfer surely awaits.

Hamlet

Through March 29 at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon; rsc.org.uk.