Hamlet on the Titanic

This 15th April is the 113th anniversary of the night RMS Titanic sank. My great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, was, ‘One of the lucky ones’, as she wrote three days later. Lucky not only because she survived, but because none of her beloved menfolk had sailed from Southampton with her. If they had, they would have died in the freezing waters of the north Atlantic with so very many others on that fateful night.

T9JXJJ White Star Line. Titanic. Alamy Stock Photo

Titanic lives on in our imaginations all these years later for so many reasons, not least for the mistakes and miscalculations that caused so many to die, even though the White Star Line, Titanic’s owners, advertised her as ‘unsinkable’. If she’d left Southampton with enough lifeboats for every single human being on board, it’s possible no one would have died. They would’ve had a frightening freezing night in tiny lifeboats until rescue arrived, but they might not have died.

This month, until 25 April, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet is playing at Stratford. It’s set on board Titanic. The director, Rupert Goold, and the lead actor, Luke Thallon are quoted in the programme as being interested in:

Setting the action within the context of a catastrophic event where the outcome is already known to the audience; we know that the Titanic sank … [so] how do questions of life, death and human agency resonate within this heightened environment?

I wasn’t at all sure that setting Hamlet on board Titanic heightened the play (although the set tilts and lists more and more worryingly and the red digital clock counting down the days and hours concentrates the mind) but Luke Thallon’s Hamlet is magnificent and would have been if he’d been on a bare set. His performance touched me deeply: I cried several times (I’ve never cried at Hamlet before) but Thallon engaged me so completely that the reality of Hamlet’s grief-fuelled depression and confusion broke my heart. His anguish and his indecision, his hesitations about taking revenge and his externalised soliloquies that became conversations with us, pleas to us for understanding, even for conversation so that when he asked: Am I a coward? I wanted to say, No! You’re brave for wondering if you are … . I was so engaged and absorbed that I forgot I was watching a play. I was just a woman watching a man in great distress, with no agency to help him.