'Dickie Beau’s arresting take on Hamlet doesn’t so much deconstruct the text as explode it before reassembling the pieces to create a work that’s as haunting as it’s ebullient. Whatever your take, this is bracingly, disconcertingly original: a meditation on mortality that includes mannequins and a glitter ball, a biting tribute to Shakespeare that starts with Withnail and I and climaxes with Chariots of Fire.'

'This show, which was performed at the Almeida in north London in 2017, on the same set where Andrew Scott played Hamlet, deploys loving irreverence to dissect the mythology surrounding the role and the way it’s affected the actors playing it. Jan-Willem van den Bosch’s spiky production presents us with a movie screen onto which four versions of Beau’s face are projected. Throughout the evening these projections enact lip-syncs of confessions from figures including the director Richard Eyre and Daniel Day-Lewis’s dresser; below them Beau himself ramps up comedy and tragedy with a puppetry of dismembered mannequin parts. There’s fizzing gossip but also tenderness as Beau focuses increasingly on Ian Charleson, the actor who replaced Daniel Day-Lewis after the latter quit his role as Hamlet in 1989 at the National Theatre. Charleson (made famous by Chariots of Fire) would die of Aids just two months after the production ended, throwing the play’s simultaneous connotations of mortality and immortality into stark relief.'

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'Beau’s calling-card is his lip-syncing ability, and that’s deployed to striking effect – as he opens and closes his mouth to recordings of big theatrical Ash in reminiscence mode, chiefly Ian McKellen and directors Sean Mathias and Richard Eyre, the latter recalling the formative experience of seeing Peter O’Toole in the part. There’s mischief in the air, if not the eye, of the performer, whose recorded visage is quadruply relayed on a screen, his look deadpan but thoughtful, while Beau himself tends to the strewn limbs of mannequins, like some mock grave-digger.'

If there’s humour at the expense of the interviewed old boys’ club – intakes of breath and forgetful hesitations tongue-in-cheekily preserved – it’s what’s not preserved that sharpens the montage into stabbing poignancy. Those invited memories cluster around the fleeting spectacle, and sensation, of Ian Charleson’s Hamlet, which followed in the wake of Daniel Day-Lewis’s distraught departure from Eyre’s 1989 NT production. Unbeknown to many at the time, though his ravaged face was its own telltale sign, the Chariots of Fire star was dying of Aids, which lent heroism to his performance and pathos to the play’s reckoning with mortality.

Some of that is reconstituted here, in McKellen’s description of those haunted, homophobic times, in a long review read by the late esteemed critic John Peter, and in the affected yet affecting sight of a dummy being put together on a hospital trolley, a disco-ball in place of a drip. Beau’s stratagem is high risk, but its dividend is a poignant requiem.

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