Hamlet Review For Real (now with 50% less squeeing)

So, I've had 6 hours of blissful sleep and am feeling slightly more able to form coherent sentences (slightly).

Firstly, poor Jude Law. He's going to be starring in the Donmar Warehouse's production of Hamlet in a few months, and I am sure that it, and he, will be very good. Perhaps even excellent. The Donmar is a Very Important Theatre Company and Jude Law has the stage chops. However, honestly, he's going to inevitably be compared to Tennant and that is a really unenviable position to be in.

That's because I'm now convinced that David Tennant is a certified genius. And I say that as a fan of Shakespeare more than a fan of him (though I like to think I am a fan of him because he is so unswervingly excellent at whatever he does).

I do believe this may go down as this generation's definitive Hamlet. Not becuase it was so extremely good, but because of the style of it. Every generation takes Shakespeare in a new direction--that's why when we go back and watch, say Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar, it looks and sounds funny to us. Acting styles have shifted and changed since then, even though at that time, it was Brando who was doing the new thing. And in general the progress with Shakespeare has been towards more naturalism and less Declaiming and Proclaiming. Which is perhaps a bit odd becuase the text does sort of cry out for that style at first gloss so you'd think the Declaiming and Proclaiming would be the best way to approach it.

That is, until you see someone who has so conquored the text and made it his own that he speaks the words legitimately as if they were all popping in to his head right at that very second. And then it makes everyone else on the stage look like they are the ones who are doing it wrong, and that this is the way these lines were meant to be performed. This way and no other.

If there was one flaw in the production, that was it: While everyone else was very very good, there was a whiff of that somewhat more "traditional" manner of performance that was brought all the more in to sharp relief by the wholly new spin on it given by Tennant. I could kind of tell that the whole company was trying for that same style, but some were just not able to achieve it. Unfortunately, Patrick Stewart was one of them. I was not overly impressed by his performance. It would have been a standout performance in any other production I think, but he was not able to match a couple of the other performances. Aside from Tennant, Oliver Ford Davies was magnificient as a surprisingly sympathetic Polonius, and Ed Bennett (David's understudy who had been playing Hamlet for three prior weeks) was really very good as Laertes. I think his time as Hamlet perhaps deepened his performance once he got back to Laertes.

But Hamlet is on stage so much, and he's got so much to say, everyone else is sort of inevitably a supporting actor for that role and they kind of fade in to the background.

So, a few points of squee:

First of all, elocution squee. Everyone did very well at not being mush-mouths and Tennant has always had really excellent elocution (his audio book work is like buttah), which is especially amazing considering he was much of the time throwing those lines out there FAST. Really fast. But you could understand every single word he said, clearly. His RP accent wasn't nearly as distracting as I thought it would be, and not as plummy as you sometimes hear actors who are putting on RP for a role do. It actually bordered a bit on the Estuary accent he does for Doctor Who. Not quite, but almost.

500 year old spoilers: I was so drawn in by the production that even though of course we all know what happens, and I've just re-read the play again this week, I found myself actually mouthing, "No don't do it!" and "I can't believe he just said that!" at various points. The whole tone of the production was very much as a modern psychological thriller and the interval happened just as Hamlet raises the dagger over the praying Claudius and says "And now I'll do't!" Yep, it's a cliffhanger!

Mad Hamlet: So of course that's always the big question with Hamlet. Was he really mad, or just faking it? And at what point does he start to go mad for real, if at all? To my eye, what was going on in this production was actually a little from column A and a little from column B. He puts on his madness to a great extent, but his entire plan to do that is in and of itself quite mad. And he starts to completely crack right from when he first sees the ghost, not later.

Audience participateion: Not really, but Hamlet's soliloquies were more than just him talking to himself. FIrst of all, as you can probably surmise from what I've said previously, the soliloquies were all (even the INCREDIBLY famous lines) said as if they were being said for the first time ever in that moment. But more than that, Tennant had the entire audience involved in them. When he asks, "Am I a coward?" it's a legitimate question to all of us, and he pauses there and looks out, daring us to answer. And you want to, he's in such pain, you want to comfort him, you want desperately to answer his questions. And at various other points, he does break the fourth wall slightly for comic effect, especially when talking to the Players and referring to audiences. It's like he knows we're there, but no one else in the play does. It's our little secret with him. Shhh, don't tell.

Humour: All the reviewers had been talking about how funny this Hamlet is, and it really really is. Or I guess at this point, was. It serves to make the tragedy stand out in even sharper relief and quite frankly it makes you adore Hamlet. Productions where Hamlet is just this moaning, emo, dour, dull sod--who cares when he screws up constantly and then dies? Not me. You just kind of go , "Good riddance." Making Hamlet be incredibly witty and sharp draws you to him. You want to take him home and give him some cocoa and tell him it'll all be fine. There was really a general lack of moustache-twirling all around, and all the characters, you could see where they were coming from, why they did the things they did thinking they were doing the right thing. That's why it hurts so much when it all goes horribly wrong.


Okay, I have to get running. We're off to the Greenwich Observatory today and it's a bit of a schlep out there. I'm sure all day I'll be going, "Oh! And! And! And!" I'll be sure to write it all down to report later to you good folks.