What is it about depressive Dane princes with Oedipal complexes and unnecessary fuss? Whenever there’s a high profile production of Hamlet, off-stage drama seems to spring up all around.

The Donmar’s production of Hamlet starring Jude Law has been attracting harsh words since its inception in 2007. The Guardian’s Andrew Dickson suggested that Law’s casting was perhaps not the wisest, describing the actor as “at best, mediocre.”

That blog was written a fair old while ago, back in the heady days of 2007 but recently it’s been resurrected and it’s causing a whole new round of controversy.

According to a far more recent blog on the Guardian, Jude Law’s people contacted the paper and requested they take down their earlier blog which suggested that Law might not be all that good.

Does this strike anyone else as utterly ridiculous? Surely the good people at Premier PR are aware how freedom of speech works? Fair enough they did not demand the blog was taken down but even the request is pretty offensive. To me it basically translates as:

“We appreciate that you have an opinion but we’d be really grateful if you didn’t express it on the interwebs. People may read your opinion and lose their ability to form one of their own”

It’s insulting to Mr Dickson to request his work be removed and it’s insulting to the general public to assume that we are incapable of seeing that the blog was written years ago. Yes the offending blog was still rather high up on google but people are more than capable of discerning between a recent review and an out-of-date opinion piece regarding one particular actor.

Urgh, as if this little hiccup was not enough, who remembers the David Tennant using a human skull online drama? I’ll refresh your memories, when it came out that the skull of André Tchaikowsky may be used on-stage in the RSC’s Hamlet, a little flurry of very well timed publicity blew up around the production. The skull was never used in the end but ticket sales were incredible. Quelle surprise!

Well guess which other high-profile Hamlet now has its own human skull?! You guessed it, the Donmar’s version. Unfortunately being over the age of 7 prevents me shouting COPYCAT! all over the place. I’m sure the Donmar’s team have a very legitimate and arty reason to obtain their own former human bonce but it strikes me as borrowed interest.

I feel at this point that I should say that both of these problems have absolutely nothing to do with the artistic content of the show. My grievance does not lay with Mr Law, The Donmar or Shakespeare, it’s with the PR and marketing folk, surely the Donmar could do better?!

Let’s take a look at Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch.

Meticulously researched, the action focuses on a specific regiment of the British Armed Forces serving in Iraq. The play is moulded around interviews conducted with real soldiers and builds to give a personal and detailed view of what it feels like to fight overseas in an unpopular war

The House of Commons

“That”, as Mr Punch might say, “is seemingly how one does it”. You focus on something relatively small and fine-tuned, like the attitudes of certain real-life individuals, and you let their story dictate the action. Political theatre at its best. Unfortunately, political theatre doesn’t always scrub up so well. In fact, more often than not, clear-headed storytelling gets shouted down by poorly-researched, fashionable, studenty, preachy, hammy, flaming nonsense.

Take, for example, last year’s Edinburgh Fringe where political correctness had its self-important tentacles slithering all over the place. At The Pleasance Courtyard, for example, they decided to stage The Badac Theatre Company’s controversial drama The Factory. I say drama, I’m not sure it was a drama. It was dramatic, certainly, but not really a drama in the way that the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice is a drama.

The Factory is all about the Holocaust and consisted of having the audience line up, file into a cramped little space while the actors shouted at them for an hour. Intermittently, the cheery cast would bang on some big steel shutters with truncheons until everyone’s ears rang. The object was, it seems, to give the audience a feel of “what Auschwitz was really like”.

Reader: What?

Me: Yep, that’s right, to give the audience a feel of what Auschwitz was really like.

Reader: (with extreme sarcasm) So by charging people £9.50 to stand in a room and get shouted at for a little over an hour they were going to show what it was like being at Auschwitz?

Me: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that was their intention. Look at what David Laing said about it in The List:

“We learn more as the journey [of the play] progresses, each step becoming filled with dread, representing as it does a step closer to the gas.”

Reader: Woah, woah woah, hang on; now, please stop me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this all, I don’t know… monstrously offensive? How is shouting at someone really loudly, I mean REALLY loudly, even mildly reminiscent of the freezing death camps of Eastern Europe?

Me: Well, I mean, exactly.

Curtain.

Anyway, Brian Logan for the Guardian was evidently less mystified and entranced by the production than David Laing. He described The Factory rather deftly as: “a theatrical atrocity”.

So, the chaps behind The Factory got it wrong that time, fair enough, but theirs is by no means the only political dog-doo in the park. In fact, everyone seems to be asking for a slice of the pie (oh crumbs, that does sound disgusting after what I just said that about doo-doo. Oh well.)

So desperate for a political piece was artistic director at the Tricycle Theatre Nicholas Kent, that he approached playwright Abi Morgan and asked her for: “A half-hour play as part of a season of work about the last 100 years of Afghan culture and history”. Morgan claims that the brief allowed her to write about whatever she wanted, “as long as it’s after 2001. And not NGOs [Because] Richard Bean’s got that covered.”

Hardly waiting for the Muse is it?

Luckily Morgan is a talented writer and managed to pull The Night’s Darkest Before the Dawn out of her pencil case, but it’s not exactly what you’d call organic. It’s like political playwriting by numbers or something.

Still, I suppose the biggest hoo-hah in PC at the minute is to do with this bizarre little piece. Who on earth thought this was going to be a good idea needs some sort of coup d’état on their own noggin. Ready?

An Israeli Defence Force song-and-dance troupe is to perform in London at a show to commemorate the founding of Israel.

For those that might not have been aware, the IDF have been accused by several humanitarian groups of committing war crimes during their three-week invasion of the Gaza Strip. In fact, the UN are investigating them right now over claims that they were involved in the deaths of 400 Palestinian children.

Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, Chris Doyle told the Guardian newspaper: “This is akin to singing and dancing on the graves of the 400 Palestinian children that the IDF was responsible for killing in January,” He continued: “We should not be permitting a dance troupe from an army currently under a UN investigation for possible war crimes to be coming to the United Kingdom. It is sick.”

That’s not even it; the event organisers are even likening the IDF troupe to the hotch-potch gang of soldiers from the 1970s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

A new gold standard has been reached in political sensitivity.

Political theatre can be some of the most staggering and moving modes of artistic expression. For centuries people have known that the communal aspect of seating people together at playhouses and the electric atmosphere of live performance can lead to politically-charged theatre. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Lorca, O’Casey, Brecht: done right it’s amazing.

But like playing bulldog in the schoolground, it’s a dangerous game; and one that far too many people misunderstand the rules of.

For an actor, playing Shakespeare can be the defining peak of an illustrious stage career. However, if it doesn’t work out it can be a right gruelling ordeal. Show and Stay^® look through some of the Shakespearean performances we might wish never were…

With Jude Law and Lenny Henry about to attempt the supreme English poet, we have a look at some of the dud performances that have left the actors with a good deal of eggy-weg all over their Chevy-Chases. Even reputable actors like Law have come unstuck in the past, forsooth. Check out what Nicholas de Jongh made of luminaries Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren’s performance of Anthony and Cleopatra (respectably… naturally):

“They rose to erotic ardour last night with little more enthusiasm than a pair of glumly non-mating pandas at London Zoo, coaxed to do their duty.”

Not exactly earth shattering was it? One can’t imagine one being picked to play Her Majesty on the back of that one, could one? Well saying that, tell the Queen she’s approaching anything akin to ‘erotic ardour’ and you’re liable to get your head lopped off.

Anyway, as it turns out, there’s more. Highlighted in The Guardian last week, some of our most respected actors have received utter pannings when they’ve ventured into the Shakespearean realm. The loveable Richard Briers’s stab at Hamlet went down with WA Darlington as follows:

“Richard Briers last night played Hamlet like a demented typewriter”

Blimey.

Obviously Hamlet is a whole can of horribly indecisive, vaguely suicidal worms, but Macbeth has been a sticky wicket in the past too I’ll have you know. Take a look at how the following came a cropper trying their hand at the Scottish bloodbath:

Anthony Hopkins: “He gives the impression he is a Rotarian pork-butcher about to tell the stalls a dirty story.” (Felix Barker)

Peter O’Toole: “Chances are he likes the play, but O’Toole’s performance suggests that he is taking some kind of personal revenge on it.” (Robert Cushman)

Simone Signoret (as Lady Macbeth): “A concial bell-tented matron who moves on wheels like a draped Dalek surmounted by a beautiful Medusa head.” (Alan Brien)

And again,

Peter O’Toole: “He delivers every line with a monotonous tenor bark as if addressing an audience of deaf Eskimos.” (Michael Billington)

Well, well, well. Is this a dagger I see before me? No, just a bunch of hot, twisty knives stuck in your back!
So, Lenny, Jude, Listen up: don’t mess up or you’ll get slammed! No, that’s not the lesson; the lesson is: even the greats get it wrong sometimes.