The Play’s the Thing: A One-Person Hamlet review – soliloquies that make the skin tingle

Shakespearean performance has been a curse for Mark Lockyer. When he played Mercutio for the RSC in 1995, it began to feel like a “daily execution”, he wrote. That led to a long hiatus from acting – also brought on by alcoholism, bipolar disorder, imprisonment and homelessness. But in taking on this one-man vehicle about the melancholy Dane, he proves – perhaps to himself and certainly to the audience – that Shakespearean performance is his gift too.

It could have turned into a circus trick or feat of memory (as it did in the hands of Eddie Izzard) but, instead, the emotional clarity of Lockyer’s performance draws you in. Every character is made distinct, without recourse to broad characterisation. Whenever he is Claudius, Horatio, Hamlet’s father’s ghost or even the guards who see that apparition, he fully embodies each of them.

He is especially masterly with pace, creating a gothic tension alongside pools of meditative stillness for soliloquies that tingle on the skin. Lockyer delivers verse with an ease of expression and makes the switches between characters look effortless. It has the bewitching effect of a campfire story. Lockyer’s performance has less playfulness than Andrew Scott’s one-man Vanya and none of the hi-tech gloss of Sarah Snook’s one-woman The Picture of Dorian Gray, but dazzles just as much.

Shadow-play amplifies the intensity of a moment. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Director Fiona Laird has edited the text down to 100 minutes, performed straight through, although lights are dimmed at the end of each act while Lockyer wipes his face and sips water, like a boxer preparing for the next round.

The transitions from each scene to the next come rapidly, and some moments are lost: there is no dumb show to prick Claudius’s conscience, and Hamlet is not visited by his father’s ghost.

Lockyer’s Hamlet has an earnest anger but is not brattish or self-indulgent, and he does not camp up the antic disposition. He is something of a romantic too: he foregoes the crude pun on “country matters” with Ophelia and is brought to tears when she hands back his love letters. The set is an empty space in which Tim Mitchell’s lighting design evokes scenes with shafts of light and shadow-play that amplify the intensity of a moment.

As breathtaking as the show is, I would love to see Lockyer take on a single Shakespearean role in a production in which the drama takes precedence over the showcasing of a singular and remarkable talent. Because – of course – the play’s the thing.

• At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 12 April.