The festival, hit hard by the Covid pandemic, is back with a vengeance. Mark Lawson chooses this year’s highlights
In April 1971, when the 31-year-old Ian McKellen played Hamlet in Edinburgh, dramatic and rheumatic logic made it unlikely he would resume the same part in the same city 51 years later.
But, after warming up in a recent age-blind production at Windsor, he has a third go in Hamlet With Ian McKellen (Ashton Hall), a drama-dance concept hybrid, directed by Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss.
McKellen delivers the soliloquies and other key speeches, his intelligently probing baritone as pleasing as ever, while an identically dressed dancer, Johan Christensen, performs illustrative pas de deux with hoofers cast as Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia. The Hamlets sometimes steer each other’s shoulder, like the seeing guides that some visually impaired Paralympians use.
Schaufuss’ cue seems to be the mime prologue in “The Murder Of Gonzago”, Hamlet’s play within the play, as the movement favours rhythmic charades, telegraphing the familiar narrative: when clown-like dancers pogo on with boing-boing steps, we know they are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or possibly the other way round. McKellen doesn’t dance but has a number of sharp Pilates moves.