Something Rotten or One Hundred Days of Claudius: The Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond

'IF brevity (truly) is the soul of wit" – Robert Cohen’s portrayal of Claudius, succeeds the quote with flying colours, single handedly summing up the entire production of Hamlet in an hour-and-a-half.

Cohen deftly lifts the text off the page undressing the facts with such believable charm, going on to present an entirely different perspective of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy.

His Claudius pushes a royal nose into the dark corners of play finding motivation and justification for his own villainous acts. His excuse for marrying his dead brother’s wife is that she was his first. It was he, he moans, who first brought Gertrude to court only to have his father choose his brother, The King, for her husband. Now as the new King, married to Gertrude, the woman he truly loves, Claudius accepts Hamlet as his step-son, hinting at the possibility that he could be a little more than kin than he’d like.

Claudius even gets a few laughs out of Ophelia’s madness and describes Laertes and Hamlet physically scrapping in her grave over who loved her the most. Cohen’s repeated use of spoonerisms for Hamlet's childhood school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, got a few laughs too.

Good old Yorick, the King’s Jester, gets a few lines (an authentic looking skull), and the poor gravedigger gets it in the neck for not digging the graves deep enough and mixing up all the bones.

Cohen’s knowledge of the play is enviable; his skill as a writer, observer and performer is without question truly masterful.

Helen Brown