| That Damn'd Dane! or, Best Thing About Reviewing Hamlet = No Spoiler Cut Necessary! |
[Dec. 31st, 2009|03:23 am] |
LOVED the new RSC/BBC Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart.
LOVED IT TO ITTY-BITTY BITS.
I thought the cast was fantastic. Everyone did such a great job speaking the lines with ease and feeling, as if they'd come up with them right on the spot. Beautiful. Denmark was done as a sort of modern police state with CCTV cameras everywhere, a conceit that was used brilliantly in the first ghost scene and later in Hamlet and Ophelia's harrowing scene and Hamlet's coward soliloquy, which was a thing of beauty in David Tennant's hands. It added a really nice subtext to the line about Denmark being a prison, too. Brought to mind the terrors of the Panopticon.
David Tennant did very well portraying how the sharp, bitter and destructive mess of a person Hamlet has become could have once been that man who Ophelia describes as someone of "noble reason," who was the "expectancy and rose of the fair state. . . The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / The observed of all observers." He really seems like someone whose "noble and most sovereign reason" has become "like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh." There's these gorgeous remnants of the brilliant, charming prince and loving son he must have been there in the performance. He embraces his father like that touch means more to him than anything and mourns so physically that he literally can't stand up under it. He calls out a childish cheery goodnight to his mother after the closet scene and we see in her face the memory of the dear son he was to her. His behavior with his remaining true friend Horatio reveals how betrayal and spying has so totally warped his relationships with everyone else.
Even though he puts on a good show, adroitly turning aside the plots against him, plotting in return as best he can, and ruminating on his condition with all the poetic eloquence of Shakespeare's brain, DT's Hamlet is a pathetic wreck. A broken, twitching thing sending out bright sparks from what used to be a steady, bright flame and inadvertently burning all the wrong people while Claudius remains untouched until the end. It's MANPAIN city--his pain is epic! It is so speshul that everyone should care about it! Because he's a really smart, hot, able-bodied, young white guy of the ancestral nobility!--but in a way that really worked.
On a more shallow note, DT was very HOTT in this. Elizabethean euphemisms themselves turn me on, but having David Tennant recline upon a woman's lap and speak of country matters or talk of being in the middle of Lady Fortune's favors takes the whole thing to another level. Despite the fact that Hamlet's a nasty little misogynist.
eta: Speaking of Lady Fortune's favors, it was a small moment but I loved how DT played Hamlet's reactions to that exchange. He did it as if Hamlet was playing along with the paint-by-numbers fratboy cunt jokes, but not half as into it as Rozencrantz and Guildenstern were. It was like, oh, yeah, must reference lady bits as part of the Wittenberg uni friend greeting. Yawn. Was I really all giddy over this shit like these idiots just two months ago?
I really liked the way people of color were worked into the story, so that the characters were an ordinary and integral part of the story's world. I really, really loved the actor who played Horatio. Horatio's always the one truly sympathetic person in the play, imo, but this actor gave him such a decency seeing him cast into sharp relief how messed up, duplicitous, vicious and insane everyone at Elsinore was. As the one person who has unproblematic affection with Hamlet, my eyes were just glued to him and them when they were together. There's not a lot of peace, companionship, or genuine human warmth in the play, and almost all of what there is of it belongs to their scenes.
Penny Downie, who plays Gertrude, blew my mind. The physicality of her acting, the way she told volumes outside of the words she spoke about this woman and her life made Gertrude real and deeply sad. Her work with David Tennant was amazing. There's a sense of a mother and her child and the bond of touch they share without it going directly into Oedipal territory, which I've always thought a really one dimensional reading of things.
Patrick Stewart is an effin' rock star, imo. He played both Claudius and the ghost of King Hamlet and he did very much like Ms. Downie with the role of Hamlet's father, fleshing out Shakespeare's words with his performance and getting across the whole sense of the king's relationship with his son. This is obviously a warrior king and father--total patriarch and hard man--who is commanding his due from his son without considering what it's going to do to the boy. But he loves his son, too. And his wife. It's just that he dealt in death as a man and as a ghost any ounce of care for destruction seems to have been bled away from him so that he can fashion his son into a dagger and aim him at Claudius and not care if the dagger breaks.
As Claudius, he's a sensual, humorous, intelligent man who can't repent his sin because he is so believably attached to the power, the woman, the life it has gotten him. In many ways he comes across as a far more attractive, enjoyable person than King Hamlet. I know which one I'd rather chat with at a party. Stewart's geniality, his deceit and ruthlessness veiled behind talk of doing what's best... oh, it really, really fit with the CCTV, modern police state thing they had going. His Claudius is so totally a modern politician, taking blood money and kissing babies. Especially in contrast to the traditional, militaristic, straightforward ways of the dead King Hamlet. Before sending Hamlet off to England and his death, Claudius here has him given a sedative. It made me think about pharmaceuticals as a tool of social control and fitted neatly with the CCTV stuff. Insidious violence instead of blatant violence, so that Claudius in a way plays neo-colonialism's smiling murderous wiles to King Hamlet's outright colonialism. To over-stretch a political metaphor. ;)
At times I felt how long the three hours were, but more often I was so drawn into it I didn't notice. The ending remains difficult for me to approach seriously, however. It is so very, very OTT and so dire--pretty much the perfect example of a story where rocks fall, everyone dies!--that every adaptation I've seen loses me right there and this one, unfortunately, was no different.
I've been doing some Googling about Hamlet and I found the funniest. thing. ever. "Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)" by Sarah Schmelling.
GENIUS.
And I've finally read "Skinhead Hamlet" after years of seeing the "I'm fucked. The rest is fucking silence" quote in people's sigs and such and meaning to chase down the whole thing.
I really want to try the online text based adventure game tomorrow! |
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