New BBC Complete Works

Shakespeare Sam Mendes and the BBC are to do another complete works of Shakespeare in a co-production with HBO which'll cost in the region of $100 million. Possibly. Seems like the perfect opportunity to film David Tennant's Hamlet, surely?

Prince of Jutland (1994)

Amled played by Christian Bale.
Directed by Gabriel Axel.

This is just one of those occasions when you really can’t believe quite what's unfolding in front of you. That someone wrote the thing, someone decided to direct it, a deal was struck, financing found and then the script was sent around and attracted this cast who then agreed to go on location for principal photography, the footage was edited, a score written, a prints struck then dvds and at no point did anyone notice that in fact they’d created a monster, the kind of entertainment which is unintentionally funny more than on purpose and deserves at least a cult audience just for the ludicrousness of it all. In other words, don’t get too excited. This is not a chance to see Christian Bale play Hamlet, at least not the Shakespearean iteration. You do, however, get to see him eat a tree branch, one leaf at a time. But more on that later.

In this, Axel who’d previously offered the wonderful Babette’s Feast attempts to film the ancient Danish legends that Shakespeare apparently based his play on. As the film opens a caption heralds that this is based on the original writing Saxo Grammaticus, whose Gesta Danorum was the source of the tales of Amled (isn’t the Wikipedia amazing?). The theory has it that, Shakespeare looked at this material at one remove via an earlier play, usually described as the Ur-Hamlet and actually what Axel seems to have done here is draw together elements of Grammaticus with that earlier play (or what’s known of it), Shakespeare and oddly Return of the Jedi (one or two scenes are oddly similar). In other words its about as authentic as Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur which was also reputed to be of some kind of ancient about Camelot but somehow still managed to feature a Druidic version of Merlin.

The story then, like the Kurosawa, Kaurismaki and Disney has many of the familiar elements in not quite the right order. It seems a bit pointless analysing how the two differ since it really is worth seeing both if you’re a Hamlet and film fan and to deny you the surprise of how the narrative plays out would rob you of one its few genuine pleasures. Lets just say that at about fifty minutes in you’ll be wondering what is going to happen for the remainder of the running time; the answer reminded me of the way that television theme tunes would be released as singles and the composer would be called upon to fill the gap and would simply add in some unexpected solo or wacky jazz version that was totally unlike the tune that everyone knows -- track down the long versions of Grandstand, Rainbow or The Archers to see what I mean. Let's just say is that Fortinbras is here in spirit and spoiling for a rumble. And played by Brian Glover.

Anyway back to Bale and his tree eating. I’m probably not spoiling too much by saying that when Amled discovers his uncle murdered his father that his only recourse is to fain madness. In Shakespeare that pretty much amounts to some shouting at Ophelia, calling her Dad a fish monger and all the talking to himself in between. Here the future Bruce Wayne, his floppy long hair has to bark like a dog, crow like a cock and eat wood (and leaves). But he does it with such conviction that you’re entirely convinced this is the best strategy under the circumstances. When he’s expectedly revealed to be sane (in the arms of a naked wench) Bale steps up his game and he becomes charismatic, noble and everything you’d want from a king, cunning too, and certainly not the ditherer that ‘our’ Hamlet is sometimes portrayed as. Bale is another reason to watch - he steals almost every scene that he’s in and like Welles in his radio version of the play, the actor suddenly presents the on-screen persona that we’d find later in everything from The Prestige to indeed Batman.

Elsewhere, it’s madder than a bag of spanners but gloriously so in that special way that these things often are. Much of the fun is obtained from seeing actors, like Bale who would go on to be known for far more illustrious projects doing some very unexpected things. Well, yes Mirren’s back as this show’s version of Gertrude, and goes naked again -- but by this time she was already film the Prime Suspects for television so this was a very curious career choice and she’s not all that bad. Gabriel Byrne hadn’t get gone stellar with The Usual Suspects, although he generally plays Fenge (Claudius) in the same mould as Dean Keaton and there’s even s moment when he does the finger pondering thing which crops up in the closing montage of Byran Singer’s film to make him look suspicious. Tom Wilkinson’s in here too as Hardvendel (Hamlet Snr) which should indicate that it’s not for long. Oh and Kate Beckinsale too as Ethel (Ophelia) but doesn’t do much other than look longingly at Bale.

Now take a look at this tableau:



That's Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting), Mark Williams (The Fast Show) and Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings & King Kong). Tony Haygarth (Bleak House) and David Bateson (The Hitman games). And some beards.

The music is by Per Nørgård. Per Nørgård is one of Denmark’s most famous composers -- his work is in the international repertory and what’s here is remarkable. Unfortunately at no time does it match the visuals and some of the more unintentionally funny moments are when the five above (in clothes) are striding purposefully around the village (they couldn’t afford a castle in those days) to a soundtrack which indicates that they might as well be attacking Norway. Fans of Murray Gold’s soundtrack to the first series of new Doctor Who would be well served here as the chords clash in at random moments. And the whole film is like that -- just as it settles into a rhythm, there’s always some bizarre bit of editing, fake wig action, wavering accent. extremely odd acting choice (see Byrne fake cry), piece of set design or crowd scene which breaks the drama. The closing shot, which might be entirely accurate, might have looked good on paper, is totally ludicrous, as a collection of extras and many of the principles are called upon to pat their chest in unison, the sound of fist on cloak being the final sound we hear.

18 Orson Welles

Hamlet played by Orson Welles.
Directed by Orson Welles.

Orson Welles was one of the great Shakespeareans of the 20th Century. His book Everybody’s Shakespeare examined the potential the bard had to reach the popular audience and he strove for much of his life to produce some great interpretations of the canon and sometimes succeeded. In the end, only his Macbeth would have a relatively unhindered passage to the screen but even that was compromised because it was produced for a tin-pan alley studio more used to producing westerns and unable to provide the budget his vision required.

He would go on to complete just two other screen adaptations -- Othello and Chimes At Midnight (a conflagration of Falstaff’s story from Henry IV parts one & two and sections of Merry Wives of Windsor) -- but on both occasions production spanned years, with shooting occurring only when financing was available from Welles own pocket as he provided voiceovers and performances in films he cared little for. Both of those films are messy curiosities, snatches of brilliance mixed with failure, but nevertheless inventive even as he had to recast parts in mid-flow. Desdemona is obviously portrayed by at least three actresses, two of which were overdubbed in the final mix.

On stage he found rather more success and his voodoo Macbeth at the Federal Theatre was considered a triumph and it was with some amazement I discovered that he did indeed also play Hamlet albeit in production of an hour’s duration for the Columbia Broadcasting Company’s Columbia Workshop, a series of experimental radio dramas broadcast in 1936 just two years before his own Mercury Theatre would receive a regular spot on the same network ( which is when the War of the World incident occurred). The production, such as it is was broadcast in two parts, firstly on September 19, 1936 and then after what must be the longest interval in theatrical history the second part appeared on November 14, 1936, two months later. Judging by the introduction to the first broadcast, the second was by no means certain:

“In deciding to present an abbreviated version of Hamlet the Columbia workshop found itself facing a considerable dilemma. Would it be feasible we wondered to give merely the plot in our short space of time, or should we concentrate on certain well-known passages, and let the story proceed confusingly. Our final decision was this: to present the first two acts of the play, presenting whenever possible, the most notable scenes in their entirety. And giving you, we hope a clear dramatic statement of the causes of Hamlet’s tragedy.”

The method utilised by Welles in his production is to have actors speak with rapidity and concentrate solely on those scenes featuring Hamlet, his adaptation being a psychological study in revenge. After presenting much of the opening scene on the battlements, the focus shifts almost totally the prince; once Hamlet agrees not to go to Wittenberg, Horatio is quick to advise him of the ghost who quickly appears minutes later to be followed by the fishmonger and the players closing with a delicious cliffhanger -- ‘The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’ The only interruption is the introduction of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, presumably because as I gather these plays where presented live it would have given Welles, who has the dramatic weight a moment to mop his brow and take a drink of water.

Brilliantly, Welles cuts Ophelia and Laertes altogether. For all we know, Polonius has no children and is merely Claudius’s adviser. This allows us to concentrate on Hamlet’s emotional state and Welles’s performance is a tour de force, despite being pretty much alike with every other performance Welles has given. It’s difficult throughout not to think of Charles Foster Kane or Harry Lime, but this isn’t because he lacks range -- he does generality and darkness particularly well, and indeed it’s amazing hear that five years before Kane brought him to a (slightly) wider audience his acting persona was already so clearly defined. The only disappointment is that without Ophelia there isn’t the nunnery scene and without the nunnery we do not get to here Welles’s version of ‘To Be Or Not To Be’; but these are supposed to be ‘experimental’ productions and cutting the play’s most famous speech is certainly that.

Then two months later, in the second half, and I can’t believe I’m criticising Orson Welles, it all goes horribly wrong. The pace is markedly even faster in the second segment and subtlety goes out of the window. Unlike the first broadcast, if you weren't already familiar with the plot, despite the more detailed expository voiceover you've little clue of how the narrative pieces fit together; it ultimately descends into a melodramatic soup and if I was someone who’d never heard Shakespeare’s work before I’d probably be of the opinion that this is exactly how I feared it would be like. It is perhaps unfair to criticize the second half as being part of the same production because Welles no doubt thought these broadcasts would have the same ephemeral quality as auditorium theatre living only in the memory of the listener and certainly wouldn’t have expected them to be unified one after the other. He might not even have been expecting that he would have to fit the last three acts when much of the meat of the play occurs into another half an hour.

But even considered on its own as a separate entity it fails, firstly by falling into the trap of doing exactly what was threatened in the introduction to the first part of giving ‘merely the plot in our short space of time’ and secondly because the sometimes subtle performance Welles gave in the opening segment which drew the audiences in gives way to pure ham as he desperately tries to give the character some psychological depth in such a short space of time. As adapter too he spends far too much time over The Mousetrap, perhaps because of its theatrical resonance which leads to the likes of the scenes in the bed chamber being skipped over lightly, the climax with the exception of ‘The readiness is all’ and Hamlet’s death speech being a generally incoherent mess.

The other problem is the sudden appearance of Ophelia and Laertes, unconvincingly knitted back into the story. The genius of losing them from the opening two acts creates a problem because they are so critical to the climax (Hamlet can hardly have duel with himself, although as the Coranado film demonstrates that is sometimes worth a try). Ophelia first drops in during a quick exchange before The Mousetrap and Laertes even later in the narration upon his return to Denmark looking for his father. There’s no emotional connection Polonius or Hamlet though and so when the prince desperately says that he loved Ophelia it comes out of the blue, in a way that’s not unlike soap opera. When Ophelia goes mad we haven’t enough time to grieve.

Such criticism should be taken lightly though when faced with the fact that this was Welles trying to frame Shakespeare’s tragedy for an undoubtedly intelligent audience that might never have heard Shakespeare before. As with all of the other attempts to produce a version of the play with at least three hours of the action missing there are bound to be compromises and the first half really is excellent. In addition, how marvelous to be able to listen to Welles’s adaptation seventy years after its broadcast; the version I listened to was obviously recorded onto LP during the original radio broadcast and so as well as the interference from what sounded like a shaky AM reception there’s also the pops and scratches of vinyl giving the recording an wonderfully atmospheric quality. The music, mostly fanfares, was produced by Bernard Hermann who would go on to provide a score for Kane as well as many of Alfred Hitchcock films. You can’t ignore the fact that this is a piece of radio, theatrical and to a degree film history and on that level it’s priceless [via Wellesnet where there is a link so that you can hear and enjoy this production yourself].

17 Tony Meyer

Hamlet played by David Meyer.
Hamlet played by Tony Meyer.
Directed by Celestino Coronada.

Balanced precariously between art piece and feature film, Celestino Coronada’s Hamlet is not for the faint hearted. Sometimes described as ‘The Naked Hamlet’, it cuts the poetry to ribbons has little regard for the story (Ophelia’s madness is shown even though Polonius’s death isn’t) and instead sets about emphasizing every shred of the apparent homoerotic and incestuous subtext present in the play almost to the point of parody -- no sorry -- crashing straight into parody and galloping even further. It’s one of the most difficult interpretations of the play I’ve had to deal with so far and between my shouts of ’Oh come on’ and ‘Oh for goodness sake’ (substituting the g-word for the f-word more often than not) it’s the first time since the abbreviated National Youth Theatre Production that I was happy to get to the end of it.

Obviously it’s of its time and that being the case I’m very pleased that was too young to notice what that time was like. The mood is set from the off when Hamlet is shown nude on a slab being visited by his father, also bollock naked, to deliver the story of his murder. It’s not clear whether the man is supposed to be a ghost or in his son’s dreams but what is clear is that implication is that something rotten was going on in the state of Denmark even before Hamlet Snr’s murder. From then on we’re greeted by an approach to the play which is on the one-hand sub-Jarman on the other sub-Passolini (the film is dedicated to Pier) and is mostly the kind of thing which would be shown late on Channel 4 when it first started, probably with a red-triangle slapped on the front and as a lead in to Naked Yoga.

Funded by the Royal College of Art in London and filmed on a shoe-string in a darkened studio with the acoustics of a community centre (throughout you can hear doors opening and closing and people chatting off camera) there isn’t much room for scenes changes and most of its costume design and presentation takes elements of the burlesque and camp, silk costumes in primary colours (when people are wearing them) and hair and make-up perhaps influenced by Restoration stage craft, mixed with the sensibilities of the seventies. Frankly, Quentin Crisp as Polonius looks like Batman’s Joker all green hair and white face paint and Barry Stanton's Claudius seems to have wandered in from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax video.

There is a good idea at the centre of all this though. Coronado’s casting of the brothers Tony & David Meyer (which means I can add two Hamlets to the list this time) allows them to emphasize the dual nature of Hamlet’s character playing the obviously mad and feigning madness versions off against one another and sometimes they appear in a scene together, fighting each other for supremacy. In this production ’Now is the very witching time of night’ becomes a two-hander the two actors demonstrating that Hamlet is very much in two minds. Unfortunately this is all undermined because clearly one of the brothers (it’s difficult to tell which) is clearly a better actor than the other and they also both have the extra weight of having to portray Laertes and it all becomes desperately confusing.

Given the circumstances of the production, you can’t really blame the actors for being inconsistent and just plain bad but the the Emmy, Bafta and Oscar winning Helen Mirren saddled with playing both Ophelia and Gertrude (that duology again, hey) is just awful, blankly regarding the other actors and doubtless wondering what made her sign up to this. Quentin Crisp looks equally bored and it’s unfortunate that with all of the emphasis on symbolism and imagery that the director has forgotten to take care of his cast. Coronado is more orgasmic over the possibilities inherent in the then new video mixing technology with a montage sequence which resembles a Top of the Pops Pans People filler directed by Ken Russell and each and every scene features some kind of super imposing of one character over another. This was a year after the premiere of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody video and it shows.

Obviously this was not created as an exercise in drama -- like Stoppard’s fifteen minute distillation, the audience isn’t supposed to be able to follow the narrative in a traditional way. It’s the filmic equivalent of an academic essay written for the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies and I'm sure just that kind of essay could even be written about the film explaining the emblematic relevance of everything. In the end though, the whole fancy leaves a nasty taste of misogyny in the mouth; the inference is that none of this craziness would have happened if Gertrude and Ophelia hadn’t been quite such tasty propositions and although the thing ends with the naked bodies of the two acting brothers (one playing Laertes this time not that it matters by then) writhing around one another as the duel is substituted for some Greco Roman Wrestling in one of the worst examples of confused homo-erotic testosterone since Kirk fought a shirtless clone of himself in the Star Trek episode The Enemy Within. Mirren is variously uncomfortably stroked, massaged and snuffed, her make-up smudged all over her face in some kind of ur-version (or more precisely ugh-version) of torture porn. Dreadful.

16 David Meyer

Hamlet played by David Meyer.
Hamlet played by Tony Meyer.
Directed by Celestino Coronada.

Balanced precariously between art piece and feature film, Celestino Coronada’s Hamlet is not for the faint hearted. Sometimes described as ‘The Naked Hamlet’, it cuts the poetry to ribbons has little regard for the story (Ophelia’s madness is shown even though Polonius’s death isn’t) and instead sets about emphasizing every shred of the apparent homoerotic and incestuous subtext present in the play almost to the point of parody -- no sorry -- crashing straight into parody and galloping even further. It’s one of the most difficult interpretations of the play I’ve had to deal with so far and between my shouts of ’Oh come on’ and ‘Oh for goodness sake’ (substituting the g-word for the f-word more often than not) it’s the first time since the abbreviated National Youth Theatre Production that I was happy to get to the end of it.

Obviously it’s of its time and that being the case I’m very pleased that was too young to notice what that time was like. The mood is set from the off when Hamlet is shown nude on a slab being visited by his father, also bollock naked, to deliver the story of his murder. It’s not clear whether the man is supposed to be a ghost or in his son’s dreams but what is clear is that implication is that something rotten was going on in the state of Denmark even before Hamlet Snr’s murder. From then on we’re greeted by an approach to the play which is on the one-hand sub-Jarman on the other sub-Passolini (the film is dedicated to Pier) and is mostly the kind of thing which would be shown late on Channel 4 when it first started, probably with a red-triangle slapped on the front and as a lead in to Naked Yoga.

Funded by the Royal College of Art in London and filmed on a shoe-string in a darkened studio with the acoustics of a community centre (throughout you can hear doors opening and closing and people chatting off camera) there isn’t much room for scenes changes and most of its costume design and presentation takes elements of the burlesque and camp, silk costumes in primary colours (when people are wearing them) and hair and make-up perhaps influenced by Restoration stage craft, mixed with the sensibilities of the seventies. Frankly, Quentin Crisp as Polonius looks like Batman’s Joker all green hair and white face paint and Barry Stanton's Claudius seems to have wandered in from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax video.

There is a good idea at the centre of all this though. Coronado’s casting of the brothers Tony & David Meyer (which means I can add two Hamlets to the list this time) allows them to emphasize the dual nature of Hamlet’s character playing the obviously mad and feigning madness versions off against one another and sometimes they appear in a scene together, fighting each other for supremacy. In this production ’Now is the very witching time of night’ becomes a two-hander the two actors demonstrating that Hamlet is very much in two minds. Unfortunately this is all undermined because clearly one of the brothers (it’s difficult to tell which) is clearly a better actor than the other and they also both have the extra weight of having to portray Laertes and it all becomes desperately confusing.

Given the circumstances of the production, you can’t really blame the actors for being inconsistent and just plain bad but the the Emmy, Bafta and Oscar winning Helen Mirren saddled with playing both Ophelia and Gertrude (that duology again, hey) is just awful, blankly regarding the other actors and doubtless wondering what made her sign up to this. Quentin Crisp looks equally bored and it’s unfortunate that with all of the emphasis on symbolism and imagery that the director has forgotten to take care of his cast. Coronado is more orgasmic over the possibilities inherent in the then new video mixing technology with a montage sequence which resembles a Top of the Pops Pans People filler directed by Ken Russell and each and every scene features some kind of super imposing of one character over another. This was a year after the premiere of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody video and it shows.

Obviously this was not created as an exercise in drama -- like Stoppard’s fifteen minute distillation, the audience isn’t supposed to be able to follow the narrative in a traditional way. It’s the filmic equivalent of an academic essay written for the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies and I'm sure just that kind of essay could even be written about the film explaining the emblematic relevance of everything. In the end though, the whole fancy leaves a nasty taste of misogyny in the mouth; the inference is that none of this craziness would have happened if Gertrude and Ophelia hadn’t been quite such tasty propositions and although the thing ends with the naked bodies of the two acting brothers (one playing Laertes this time not that it matters by then) writhing around one another as the duel is substituted for some Greco Roman Wrestling in one of the worst examples of confused homo-erotic testosterone since Kirk fought a shirtless clone of himself in the Star Trek episode The Enemy Within. Mirren is variously uncomfortably stroked, massaged and snuffed, her make-up smudged all over her face in some kind of ur-version (or more precisely ugh-version) of torture porn. Dreadful.

15 John Dougall

Hamlet played by John Dougall.
Directed by Eoin O'Callaghan.

So from Hamlet in an hour, to half an hour and now a production in half even than that time. Tom Stoppard’s Fifteen Minute Hamlet is excerpted from his longer 1976 play, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, the former section of which is an intellectual exercise in demonstrating the schism between words and context. Three school children, speaking in a new language ‘Dogg’ attempt to put on a production of Hamlet, with this being their resulting production, a collection of excerpts from the major scenes and famous speeches mostly keeping the narrative sense of the piece. Unlike those other short forms though, this is played for laughs and no attempt has been made to construct a story lucid enough to be understandable a novice or someone approaching the play for the first time.

It would be pointless to list all of the omissions, except to say that The Players get but one line, there isn’t time to see Laertes off and that we hear more of mad Ophelia than Ophelia the sane. Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are only mentioned in Hamlet’s letter to Horatio reporting their death. Amazingly, he does manage to cram in Fortinbras though and spends a couple of minutes over the fight sequence, presumably because when staged this would still provide the thrilling conclusion on stage. It’s worth noting too that of the themes he chooses for his narrative through line (such as it is), the emphasis is on the quick marriage of Hamlet mother to his uncle -- many of the lines which aren’t ‘well known’ refer to that.

Then at close of the first run around (which actually lasts thirteen minutes), and after some appreciation from an audience, the play is repeated, in an encore lasting but a two minutes; a whirlwind, there’s scarcely time for anything but Hamlet gets most of the wordage and it only features the actors who would be on stage for the finale. I was reminded of The Last Night of the Proms, the ever quickening tempo during Pomp and Circumstance in which the conductor and orchestra are trying to catch the promenaders out.

This production was broadcast as part of BBC Radio's Three and Four’s Stoppard season in June and July 2007 and since it works so pacefully the radio, I can’t imagine how it might be accomplished on stage. Produced much in the same style as the BBC Millenium productions, weighted with atmospheric sound effects and orchestral music it’s certainly a passionate rendition and through Eoin O'Callaghan's direction importantly shows that in cutting, Stoppard still managed to give each of the characters and so the actors a moment to savour.

What that means is that amazingly it is possible to say that none of the actors embarrasses themselves and that John Dougal’s is a very lucid Hamlet, brooding when he needs to be, his delivery of what’s left of ‘The Readiness is all’ just perfect. It does have a touch of the Olivier’s, but with so little time and so few words to develop a psychological profile for his version of the prince he’s bound to pick a tried and tested model. The cast work so well together, that it’s a shame that all we’ll ever hear of them is in this fifteen minute fragment -- I certainly would have liked to have heard what Jasmine Callan would make of Ophelia over a longer period, Nitin Ganatra’s Horatio too.

Shak Attack

I have of late, but wherefore I know not retreated to Shakespeare. I think it's no doubt the post-academic slump, the shift from one state back to 'nother, the determination to hear beautiful language still ahead of such discourses as party speeches, by kings and princes, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. To be honest, I think it be infecting my mode of speech. Same thing happened between original school and college, but I was less worldy wise then and none to familiar with the ways of the world, less sharper than the serpents tooth, without money in my purse.

The upshot of this is that when I look at something like John Sutherland's bit of fun in yesterday's Guardian about the so-called poor passages in Shakespeare's plays I begin to grumble, especially because he's very very wrong (in my humble opinion). He explains initially thusly (sorry, I'll stop it now):

"The proposition that not all Shakespeare is Shakespeare-great was put forward by Frank Kermode in his recent book on the bard's language. Kermode came out and said what most audiences secretly think - a lot of Shakespeare is impossible to understand."

"Following Dromgoole and Hall's allegations, "Crap Shakespeare" will probably be a fashionable parlour game over the next few weeks. What, it will be mischievously asked, are your candidates for the worst ever lines in our nation's best ever plays?"

Which seems perfectly reasonable -- Shakespeare is known to have loved a tipple and it's supposed that it ended up killing him. But did it effect his writing? Sutherland presents a cornucopia of examples but none of them quite ring true for me. So if you'll indulge me, it's time for us to have a conversation (with some help from a few friends).

When, for example, pondering whether to be or not to be, Hamlet fantasises about "taking arms against a sea of troubles", what does Shakespeare expect us to see in our mind's eye? Some mad idiot firing a blunderbuss into the waves from the end of Brighton pier?

Harold Jenkin's Arden Edition of the play suggests that although this line has been objected to, it explains that 'the incongruity of taking arms against a sea is expressive of the idea - the futility of fighting against an uncontainable and overwhelming force'. Sutherland leaves off the point of the line too -- it ends with 'and by opposing end them' -- which in Jenkins words means -- 'not by overcoming them but (paradoxically) by being overcome by them'. Like Milton, Shakespeare's verse is filled with double meaning and irony. It's about the ending of 'troubles' by 'opposing' -- and Hamlet understanding that inevitably the only outcome to his course of action is the destruction of everything he knows and perhaps himself (I'm not convinced he's sure of that at this point in the play especially since this line is from the 'To Be Or Not To Be' speech).

The richest hunting ground for crap lines is the "Scottish play" - a dramatic work which is so terrifying to actors that they will go to almost any lengths to avoid playing in it (think of Peter O'Toole - has his reputation as a classic Shakespearian actor ever recovered from that disastrous 1980 production at the Old Vic?).

Actually that sentence should really read 'has his reputation as an actor ever recovered from appearing in High Spirits with Steve Guttenberg, but I digress. I can't think of any actors who have avoided Macbeth when asked or cast -- it's K2 to Hamlet's Everest. You've done one, you have to do the other.

It's not just the witches - although all that double, double, toil and trouble stuff is pretty blotworthy.

Is it really. So setting up the texture of the play and creating a bit of mystery isn't? Oh Ok.

Apart from Macbeth's soliloquies, the porter's half-pissed prose and Lady Macbeth's mad musings, the play is, to borrow a mixed metaphor, a veritable sea of crap.

Hey, Jimmy, j'ya wannu taek this oussi'?

What actor, for example, can utter, without an inward shudder, King Duncan's opening line: "What bloody man is that?" One can imagine Prince Charles saying it, on glimpsing Nicholas Witchell on the slopes at Klosters. But Duncan, in the play, has just come across a soldier horribly wounded in the civil war that is tearing his country apart. A certain urgency would seem to be in order.

I'm suspecting a double meaning here but really this is about stage craft. This is only the second scene of the play, so after the witches, Shakespeare is setting up the world the characters will inhabit. This was written for the Elizabethan age of theatre, remember, The Globe, a place without sets and precious much in the way of costuming and special make-up effects. When Duncan says the line, he's indicating that the solidier is wounded so that the image is fixed in the imagination of the groundlings -- that's why these plays tend to also work so well on audio -- it's the same technique used in radio to create setting.

It is also the first appearance of a usage or allusion to the word 'blood' which according to Kenneth Muir in the Arden edition of the play is used over a hundred times throughout. If one wanted to pick, its that the solidier then has a whole speech to work through explaining the plot and who this Macbeth character is -- but we're not told how badly he is wounded (could be just a flesh wound) and in any case the fact that he's prepared to risk his life to let his King know the matter gives Duncan a certain authority that increases the enormity of Macbeth's dirty deed later.

If you were a young actor given his big chance with Macduff, and you wanted to catch Michael Billington's notice in the front row, would you really want to leap on stage, claymore in hand, with the line "Turn, hell-hound, turn!"? I have heard audiences yowl with uncontrollable mirth at that ejaculation. Another career-killer.

Sure this is rum stuff but looking at the rest of the scene (Act V, Scene 8) and the context it's part of the swash and buckle that occurs in many of these plays and Errol Flyn movies when the really meaty talk is over and the fighting begins. To pick this line out of the rest of poetry does seem like grasping at straws. It's often forgotten that Shakespeare was just as interested in the bottom line as possible literature and this is part of one of the crowd pleasers.

There is also, at this point in the tragedy, a feebleness in the plotting, which does incline one to the suspicion that the playwright was drinking too deeply of mine host's four-star in the Tabard the night before. You will remember the great plot twist. No man "of woman born" can kill Macbeth. How does he know? The witches (is this for real?) have told him so. Lay on, Macduff.

Well no, it isn't for real. It's fantasy -- was Macbeth mad when he saw the figure of Banqou or was it a ghost -- some productions have it both ways, but given the presences of WITCHES I'm inclind to go with the latter.

And how is the villain confounded? "Know that Macduff," our good guy says, "was from his mother's womb untimely ripped." Collapse of hell-hound. Heads on poles. Happy times for Scotland. But what, the audience will wonder as they file out of the theatre, does "untimely ripped" actually mean? A Caesarian? Premature delivery? Was the Macduff foetus removed at the point of conception and, by the advanced technology of 15th-century alchemy, brought to term in a test tube? Even in medieval Scotland, surely, you are still "born of woman" even if you did pop out, or were pulled out, a month or two early?

Well, actually in Elizabethan times, I'd say that yes the baby could have been taken from the womb and not be called a birth because it wasn't through the natural and at the time largely sacred process. So Macduff was not of woman born according to those values -- and if you really want to stretch the issue it could have been a male who aided the removal of the child and not some medieval midwife -- arguably the man would have been the one holding and being able to use the big knife (see Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, no really, do).

There is a quality of "who gives a toss?" in the play which, sadly, bears out Dromgoole's heresy. Homer sometimes nods. And Shakespeare occasionally suffers from dramatist's droop.

Or you're applying modern stage craft and expectations on four hundred year old plays which had very specific staging requirements and when audiences had very different expectations.

See what happens when I start reading and listening to Shakespeare? Aspirations of grandeur.

I'm going back to bed now, my joints are beginning to ache in that 'oh shit I've got a cold' kind of way.

Jude-In-Law

Kenneth Branagh to direct Jude Law in Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse "running from May 29, with the official opening on June 3." Which is at roughly the same time Mr. Tennant is to be at the RSC. I wonder if I can do them both in a weekend.

What? Whaaat? 2

Continued from here. One of the reasons for the break is because David Tennant is due to give us his Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company next year which is a really interesting and exciting piece of casting especially in relation to this blog. The lead actor of my favourite television series appearing in what's probably my favourite Shakespeare play. I'll have to start saving now...

Actors Wanted

This just popped through on the Arts Council mailing list:

"el mono theatre's next production, Hamlet, is being performed at Camden People's Theatre in September and we're looking for help in the production stages of the project.

"We require a group of actors to help our one member of cast in devising and rehearsing the show. You would not be needed every day but any day you can spare would be very welcome. There is no fee for the work just a chance to work with the company and be creative. We are rehearsing from 21st August-7th September at Friargate Theatre, York. Rehearsals are from 10-5 Monday -Friday.

"If you're interested or know of someone who might be email me on el.mono@virgin.net with your cv and availability."

Sounds fascinating.

Potential forty-two

I'd better start saving:

"Time-travelling David Tennant - the best of all the Dr Whos - is in negotiations to play Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. To be, or not to be the Danish prince, that is the question for Mr Tennant, who starts shooting his third series as the Time Lord in Cardiff on Monday.

"The plan being developed by RSC artistic chief Michael Boyd is for Mr Tennant to play Hamlet in a production he wants to direct next summer. The exact timing will depend on whether the actor will do a fourth batch of episodes as the Converse All Stars-sporting Doctor. "

"To be or not to be...." "Ooh that's good." [via]

14 Nicholas Farrell

Hamlet played by Nicholas Farrell
Directed by Natalia Orlova

Produced as part of the BBC's Shakespeare: The Animated Tales project, this Hamlet manages to lucidly abbreviate the story to just over twenty-five minutes employing voiceover and impressionistic imagary from the Russian animators of Christmas films who use paint on glass to create the world. Bravely, screenwriter Leon Garfield only layers in narration when absolutely necessary -- to explain the prince's tooing and froing between Denmark and England, relying instead on Shakespeare's verse where possible.

There is some creative license. In the opening narration, Michael Kitchen's delicious tones, after noting that 'Something was rotten in the state of Denmark' goes on to imply that there are already whispers in court regarding Hamlet Snr's death, that perhaps he was poisoned, a fact that in the play only Hamlet and perhaps Horatio is privy to. It's pretty unequical as to the Dane's state of mind on hearing the news: '(Hamlet) hides his terrible knowledge under a cloak of madness'. It seems pointless to list the cuts because there are so many, but it's interesting to note that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't survive (simply referred to as 'spies' when necessary) but the Gravedigger still manages to enjoy a few jokes.

With little time to create a pschological coherance it's perhaps understandable that the performances whilst distinctive don't leave as much of a mark as the mystical images. That said, Nicholas Farrell's Hamlet perfectly carries some of the narrative burden even if there's little time to establish much of the humour inherent in the character on the page -- but its telling that he only really flies when interacting with others, Tilda Swinton's etherial Ophelia or Dorien Thomas's rather stolid Horatio (Farrell would later appear in Banagh's Hamlet film is Horatio).

It is the first time I've seen the same actor doubling the two older brothers, Claudius and Hamlet although the irony is lost of course because the character designs are so different, the former reminiscent of The Walker Art Gallery's portrait of Henry VIII. Claudius is perhaps the most memorable of characters with Hamlet perhaps being a touch too much like a yokel -- but is long golden locks do contrast nicely against the stone grey back drops and the crashing of the sea that buffets the castle.

Overall then, it's a treat, the kind of pleasure which is best enjoyed in the evening with a cup of coffee and some rice pudding, feet up next to a radiator and I wish that the funds had been available to animate the whole play in this style. The most effective moments are when the visuals and sounds take flight, as in the terrifying appearance of the ghost, with actor Joseph Shrapnel's booming voice relating the terrible deed as he floats stately across the battlements. But the most emotional scene is reserved for Ophelia's decent into real madness and her sucide, her songs echoing about the halls of Elsnore, her figure decending into a ghost like state before disappearing into the garden, her drowing signalled by the disturbance of a crane.

13 Derek Jacobi

Hamlet played by Derek Jacobi
Directed by Rodney Bennett

I knew when I began this process that there would be certain 'tentpole' productions, so renowned that I'd want to save them and relish them. The BBC Shakespeare Hamlet is one such presentation with its central performance from Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart's Claudius and Claire Bloom's Gertrude. But for this fanboy there's an extra level of interest because glancing through the cast list beforehand it would be quite easy to say 'I can't believe it's not Doctor Who'.

In casting terms that means Geoffrey Beavers who played the Doctor's nemesis The Master during the eighties, Lalla Ward (Ophelia), who famously companioned Tom Baker's timelord as Romana (before marrying him in real life) and Jacobi who would later go on to play a version of the Doctor on an audio cd (Deadline), The Master in an animated story for the BBC website (The Scream of the Shalka) and is soon to appear in an episode of the new television series (Utopia).

But a range of actors who filled bit part roles in Hamlet would go on to do the same in Who. Geoffrey Bateman (Guildenstern) played Dymond in The Nightmare of Eden), Emrys James (First Player) was Aukon in State of Decay, Peter Burroughs (Player) was the Jester in The King's Demons, Peter Benson (Second Gravedigger) essayed the role of Bor in Terminus, Stuart Fell (Player) has been a whole vast range of different characters including Alpha Centuri in The Curse of Peladon and Reginald Jessop (Messenger) was type cast as a Servant in a number of episodes.

That connection continues behind the camera as the production is kinetically directed by Rodney Bennett who helmed a range of stories for that series in the same period (The Ark in Space, The Sontaran Experiment and The Masque of Mandragora), the fights were co-ordinated by B.H. Barry (The Mind Robber and Four To Doomsday) and the vision mixed by Shirley Coward (The Tenth Planet and Remembrance of the Daleks). The music too is supplied by that series' main composer during the Baker era, Dudley Simpson and indeed one of the few distractions is when Simpson's familiar brass section clashes in between acts or scenes, so redolant of a cliff hanger or the attack of a Wyrrrn.

This is a wonderful production. Tied though it is to the BBC drama department's idiom of the time, all studio bound, multi-camera setups shot on video, it straddles the divide between pure theatre and television and is one of the jewels in the BBC Shakespeare series, so traditional in many ways but radical in others. Perhaps acknowledging the limitations of the medium, Bennett favours performances over setting, a decision that pays dividends.

Series producer Cedric Messina's hope was that the big roles should be played by renowned actors and Jacobi certainly fitted the bill, having seen him in a famous 1977 West End production (more on which at a later date). At the planned time of taping, Jacobi was contracted to play Richard II on stage, so Messina waited until he would be free and thank goodness he did -- this recording captures one of the best characterisations of the role I've ever seen.

I don't I've seen Jacobi give a poor performance -- even in Evolution: Underworld he managed to keep his dignity. What makes this so special is that the actor absolutely understands the range of emotions that Hamlet is dragged through and is able to successfully layer in the sheer frustration of not being able to carry out his dead father's wishes either because of the situation or his own falabilities. Watch his face during The Mousetrap as he realises that his uncle hasn't reacted to the mime of the death of Gonzago and that he'll actually have to talk him through the deed, hammering home the message that he knows of the murder.

He's so very vulnerable too, slightly nervous, never entirely sure of his actions even when he's addressing the audience during soliloques; rather like other fourth wall breakers in such films as High Fidelity, Alfie or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, there's a bond of trust between him and us as he imparts his feelings -- a connection which isn't granted to Claudius when he too sits alone and faces the emotional consequences of his actions (Stewart looks away from the lense even in close up). Only towards the end does Hamlet's loyaly really shift to his good friend Horatio, loyally played by Robert Swann with just a hint of homo-erotic tension.

It's also a very droll turn as Jacobi mines the seam of black comedy that Shakespeare has threaded through the dialogue that I've seen so few other actors take advantage of. Some moments are laugh out loud funny, such as his treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, here portayed as nothing more than acquantances suddenly dropping in unannounced rather like that email you sometimes get from someone you hardly knew at school who's signed up to Friends Reunited.

Some of this is made possible because of the choice to use a near complete text, allowing the actors the space to provide a more complete pschological arc for their characters. In this reading Claudius becomes a full blooded antagonist with almost as much screen time as Hamlet, Stewart relishing the opportunity to show both sides of the character, the public statesman who is privately guilt ridden. That tension is particularly clear in his dealings with a grief stricken Laertes (David Robb), nervously turning parental and sibling loss to his advantage.

There's certainly a grey area as to who the audience should be sympathising with. Although Claudius's murder of Hamlet Snr is inconscionable there's an inferance that he took the action for the good of the country to help the peace process with Fortinbras who to my understanding lost part of his kingdom in a previous war. To an extent it's almost as though Hamlet isn't seeing the bigger picture, putting his own revenge plot ahead of the country's needs, Denmark's strength. This production makes plain that if Hamlet Snr hadn't visited his son the stable status quo would have continued -- it's Hamlet Jnr's plans which lead to the death of a family and the downfall of the kingdom. Comedy, tragedy, irony.

It's no pleasure though to report that I don't think Lalla Ward's Ophelia really works. Perhaps it's because her noble Romana in Doctor Who is so effective that here she seems defeated by the text, never once coming across as really being Laertes sister or in love with Hamlet. Only later, during the descent into madness does the performance gain power but even then it's a forced mess of histrionics. Claire Bloom's Gertrude, by contrast, exudes nobility and a surprising eroticism (frankly she's a babe). Throughout there's an implication that her marriage with old Hamlet was rather boring one and her shift to his brother not too difficult a choice and indeed that the bond with her son was broken long before his father's death.

As Susan Willis notes in her wonderful book, The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making The Canon, from an initial push to produce backdrops that attempt to create a realistic period setting for each of the plays, as the productions drifted onward, taste shifted from representation to abstract with Don Homfray's designs for Hamlet being one of the first experiments. The exteriors then occur in a large empty studio, a grey void ringed with flooring at a slight incline, filled with mist for the battlement scenes, the sounds of the sea for the departing of Laertes and soil and a grave for Ophelia's funeral (which includes the sight of poor Lalla wrapped in drapes lying actually in the grave with mud dropped on top of her).

The interiors are even more experimental. Partitians have been painted with columns and vistas, bookshelves and libraries, paintings and wardrobes but they're generally used without regard for what's on them. During the scene when Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet's disposition with Ophelia they hide behind a wall with a landscape painted on to imply the view from the palace and Hamlet opens up the wall to see if he can find them hiding. It's the representation of a palace without regard for its geography which is by turns confusing and exhilirating and could be interpreted as an example of Hamlet losing his grip on reality, of the details of his surroundings losing their importance in comparison to his cause.

Having bought the boxset, I'm slowly working my way through all of these BBC Shakespeare 'performances', geekily in production order minus the histories which I'm going to watch together at the end. Some have been better than others but I wouldn't describe any of them as awful. Inevitably I've loved the Measure for Measure and the As You Like It is far from the disaster its reputation suggests (with it just see a young Helen Mirren and an old David Prowse acting in the same scene). If the Romeo and Juliet shows signs of early nerves, Twelfth Night is a lovely romp and The Tempest has real power. But I think this Hamlet almost towers above them all and will be hard to beat.

[Updated 07/12/2012!  BBC Worldwide has now made this Hamlet available to watch on YouTube.]

Extract from Dead Like Me.

Another Hamlet sighting, this time in the US fantasy series Dead Like Me. For the unitiated, this ran for two series in the mid-naughties and is the story of a group of photogenic grim reapers tasked with collecting souls at the points of accidental deaths. Although notionally an ensemble, the general focus is Georgia, a post-teen who was hit by a falling toilet seat in the first episode and who provides a voiceover reflection across the rest of the series.

One of the twists is that the reapers still have a corporial existence and have to hold down jobs and pay rent and eat and do all of things they would have had to before they died, lingering on Earth until they've reached their reaping quota. Georgia works at Happy Time, a temping agency and in the episode In Escrow has to interview and select a candidate for a job with an important client. She can't decide -- one flatulent, one's too pushy and the other's too needy.

Towards the end of the show she sits on a bed with the candidate's application forms in front of her in the apartment she shares with fellow reaper Daisy Adair, an actress from old Hollywood who apparently died in a fire on the set of Gone With The Wind. She just can't decide between them:

Daisy:
Why on earth is this so hard for you?

Georgia:
Because they all want it and they all can handle. Who to choose. How to choose.

Daisy:
You sound like Hamlet.

Georgia:
What do you mean I sound like Hamlet?

Daisy:
Indecision. I was Ophelia in Province Town.

Georgia:
Seems appropriate. Ophelia was the one who drowned right?

Daisy:
Yeah. Six nights a week and twice on Sunday.

After they're interupted by another reaper, Mason, seeking to use their record player, Daisy suggests, 'Let God decide.'

I can actually see a link between the episode and Hamlet. Something the series always tried to do was thematically join many of the stories together with the title as the hint as to what that theme might be. In plot terms, the title In Escrow describes the story of how Georgia's mother and sister are selling her old family home (one of the attempts to ground the series in reality is to keep those characters around even though they're not connected to the main body of the series) and their portion of the episode is about coping with the period before the closing of the sale.

Hamlet is all about waiting for the right moment, between the prince finding out about the murder of his father and carrying out his revenge. But the indecision is in when that revenge will be carried out -- it doesn't happen when Claudius is at prayer and actually some critics have had problems with dealing with the length of time it takes him to do the deed. If he didn't care about it being in a public arena why didn't he just carry out the execution much sooner. Instead he leaves enough time for Claudius having realised that his nephew is aware that he is his father's murder to develop a range of schemes to bring his downfall. In the end, it's Claudius who forces the issue and Hamlet who leaves his fate in God's hands. He lets God decide.

Which is also what Georgia does. Towards the end, she lays the application on the table and places her pet frog in from of them. 'To jump or not to jump...' she says as the frog steps forward. For reasons that spoil the ending of the episode it turns out that her choice, whatever it might have been would have awful consequences. At the close of the episode, Georgia reflects: "I actually read Hamlet in high school. The guy can't make a decision and everybody dies. [...] I am Hamlet and everybody died."

Cardeninot

Duane has had an answer from the RSC's press office regarding the whole Cardenio announcement. I'll let you visit Shakespeare Geek for the full clarification but it isn't a new find or authentication of an old text but a production based on that later translation called Double Falsehood. It all seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding.

In other news though, according to someone commenting on the blog, Arden are currently preparing an edition of that play for publication, edited by Professor Brean Hammond, Head of School of English, University of Nottingham. There's a transcript of a television interview with him here which seems to suggest it will be published under their Shakespeare banner and that they are making a case for it having a certain canonicity.

It's not listed in their catalogue yet though. Interestingly, Arden are beginning a new series in 2009 of drama from the same period in their distinctive style, so perhaps if they can't authenticate Double Falsehood they'll put it there instead.

Frankly, this is all getting far too confusing. I think I'll stick to Hamlet. So about the placement of 'To Be Or Not To Be' ...

Extracts from Richard E Grant's book The Wah-Wah Diaries and Martin Scorsese's film The Departed

Two different Hamlet sightings in as many days. I have of late been reading Richard E Grant's The Wah-Wah Diaries in which he describes the hair pulling exercise of making his directorial debut. On the 23 April 2004 he says:

23 April 2004

Read Hamlet - a man caught betwixt and between if ever there was one. His penultimate thoughts fir perfectly:

If it be now, 'tis not to come;
If it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.
Since no man knows aught of what he leaves,
What is't to leave betimes?
Let be.

5.30pm call from Marie-Catille. The film is fully financed and start shooting on 7 June! Levitated.

This is during a moment when the film could go either way. Marie-Catille is his producers and she's been something of a nightmare to deal with and because they're not really communicating the project could collapse at any minute. But I think he sense there's an inevitability that something will happen and that its beyond his control.

Then today, watching Martin Scorsese's The Departed I noticed this during a sting operations:

INT. COMMAND CENTER. CONTINUOUS

COLIN turns away from the activity.

COLIN:
Oh, my friends are still coming.

COLIN sees QUEENAN staring at him.

COLIN (CONT'D):
We'll just say lunch tomorrow. All right, bye.

COLIN ends the call. QUEENAN is there.

QUEENAN:
The readiness is all. You know the players, call the game.

COLIN:
Thank you, Captain.

He gives him the clipboard, Colin goes to the work area.

I'm not sure that the sense is thematically keyed into the scene -- but it is part of a screenplay that's replete with Shakespearean allusions both in the dialogue in the whole sense of the story. Without hopefully spoiling anything it seems to run the flip side of a problem play -- instead of slipping from tragedy to comedy, the film flows inextricably the other way.

Cardenio found

Not Hamlet I know, but I read a rumour about this over the weekend and contacted the Royal Shakespeare Company's press office to see if it was hoax. Funnily enough -- it really isn't. Here is the press release:

"Cardenio: Shakespeare’s Lost Play Found

RSC Chief Associate Director, Gregory Doran, chose the opening of his production of Coriolanus at the Teatro Albeniz in Madrid as the occasion to announce the “discovery” of a lost play by William Shakespeare based on an episode in Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. A play by Shakespeare, England’s greatest writer, based on a story by Spain’s greatest writer, Cervantes, is certainly big news, but would also be an ideal intercultural project to celebrate the Royal Shakespeare Company’s growing relationship with Spain . Last year the Company received a Gold Medal for Excellence in the Fine Arts, awarded by his majesty Juan Carlos following a recent visit by the Company with their production of The Canterbury Tales, and a highly successful season of plays from the Spanish Golden Age which played Madrid in 2004.

Cardenio – the title of this missing masterpiece, was written by Shakespeare and fellow writer John Fletcher, in 1613 after Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote appeared the previous year. It tells the story of the lunatic lover and a heroine who dresses as a shepherd boy to follow her love into the mountains – familiar terrain in the tragic-comedies of Shakespeare’s late plays.

We have evidence of the play’s performances at Court in 1613 but for some reason the play was not included in the first folio of Shakespeare’s complete works that was published in 1623 after his death. That’s not entirely surprising as Pericles was not included either nor another of Shakespeare’s collaborations with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The play surfaced when a manuscript was given to the Shakespeare editor Lewis Theobald in the early eighteenth century by John Downes, a book-keeper and prompter for the Drury Lane Theatre. Theobald adapted the play for the stage and it had a very successful run in the theatre in London. It is probable that the manuscripts were lost in a theatre fire in the early nineteenth century, but luckily we still have Theobald’s adaptation, and of course, the original source, Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation.

Gregory Doran is busy exploring the possibilities of some sort of collaboration between Spanish and British artists in order to conduct an exploratory workshop and bring a production to the stage of Cervantes’ story of Cardenio – via William Shakespeare – of which both great authors might have been proud.

I'm excited but it's tempered with a bit of confusion. Are they actually annoncing the surfacing of Shakespeare and Fletcher's original verse or some later translation? There seems so be a skirting around that issue in the release -- and in fact it just seems like it will be a version of Theobold and Shelton's work and not actually Shakespeare at all.

The other problem I'm having that considering everything there's been no coverage of this in the media which just seems very odd to me. Google News has nothing and the wikipedia entry hasn't been updated which are usually indications that something is going on. That suggests that others are seeing the same inconsistencies I am.

Anyway, I've emailed the RSC back for a clarification and I'll keep you posted on developments.

Updated! Hmm. In all my excitement I forgot to add the link in to the source of the story which is of course the wonderful Shakespeare Geek. Incidentally I haven't heard back from the RSC press office since I asked for a clarification but I'll let you know when I do.

'Shakespeare in Production' edited by Robert Hapgood

I don't have many pet hates. There's people who get on buses and stand next to the door when the rest of the vehicle is empty. There's the fact that BBC Breakfast never leads with anything that you could actually call news. And there's when Hamlet is referred to as a good book or a great read. It’s really not - it’s a good, sorry, a great play. When it sits statically on the page, the poetry of some sections really sing, but as drama it simply doesn’t work. Although Shakespeare includes description and the soliloquies offer moments of introspection it’s difficult to reconcile as drama. Only performed does the magic hopefully occur and is the genius of the writing really expressed.

Cambridge University Press’s Shakespeare In Production series attempts to cope with that problem by presenting the play on page but within the context of performance, so that students and researchers (and fans) can get a sense of how various sections were played theatrically, comparing and contrasting the various approaches. So their version of the text is augmented across the bottom of each side by footnotes pertaining to each line describing what happened during various productions; we’re told for example, that at the top of Act IV, scene 2 when Hamlet has hidden the body of Polonius and says ‘Safely stowed’ that Richard Burton ‘briskly rubs his hands together. Stephen Dillane played the scene for its black comedy’.

With information compiled by the editor Robert Hapgood from his own observations and contemporary accounts, it’s an approach that generally works very well. Understandably, ‘to be or not to be’ provokes a mini-essay which includes musical notation to demonstrate the intonation that various actors brought to the line. For the purposes of this blog though it’s replete with spoilers - I don’t really want to know how the like of Burton and Jacobi played the prince before I’ve seen them. In addition you could imagine that an actor venturing into these pages before attacking the role for themselves would feel the ghosts of those you’ve gone before weighted down on their shoulders. The only consolation is that Hapgood isn’t afraid to include criticism were it's due, emphasizing that some previous actors have grasped their parts better than other.

The introduction perhaps provides Hapgood's best work as he provides a more chronological history of Hamlet in performance tracing a through line of Danes from Burbage through Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, Booth, Irving, Gielgood, Olivier and into Barrymore, Burton and Branagh. In meticulous detail the writer attempts to reconstruct how each of the historic actors might have played the role in these productions and how that reflected on those who came later. The most fascinating passages are those which consider the effect that playing the role had on the actor; that the best actors and those for whom it was their signature character exhaustedly put themselves into the dane to such an extent that they never got over it, Hamlet’s doubts becoming their own.

Hapgood is also keen to emphasize the shifts in emphasis and how the play has developed across the centuries from being about one lead character and a range of subordinates into much more of an ensemble, from the likes of Ophelia and Gertrude being portrayed as projections of Hamlet’s impression of them into being full fledged, psychologically distinct individuals. Such shifts seem index linked with the attitudes of the time - of course in the past century Ophelia has become a much more forthright and less submissive role and Gertrude has developed into more of a femme fatale often aware of her new husband callous tendencies instead of the mumsier figure married for her political position that may have appeared in the past.

Also threading throughout the book is some commentary on how the text has been treated through history. As Hapgood lucidly describes there have in general been five different versions of the play in the production, Quarto I (Q1), Quarto II(Q2), First Folio (F), a restoration edit and the more contemporary approach of amalgamating them all, chopped about to emphasize the interpretation and thematic interests of the director. I’ve finally understood that its in Q1 that Gertrude becomes complicit in Hamlet’s ‘madness’ wheras in the other two the change in loyalty doesn’t occur. That in Q1, ‘to be or not to be’ occurs much earlier with the implication being that Hamlet is aware that he’s being watched and play acting to give the impression that his malady is far deeper than it actually is at that point.

Overall the book confirms everything that I love about the play, it’s flexibility, that no two versions are quite the same and that its impossible to find the perfect production. Hapgood unearths a wonderful verse that expresses my feelings exactly. It’s from W. S. Gilbert’s book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1874):

Alike for no two seasons at a time.
Sometimes he’s tall - sometimes he’s very shory -
Now with black hair - now with a flaxen wig -
Sometimes and English accent - then a French -
Then English with a strong provincial ‘burr’.
Once an American, and once a Jew -
But Danish never, take him how you will!

He's such an emo...

If the Globe Theater had an internet message board.: "Oh, please, the plot of Hamlet makes no fucking sense. There's a ghost and incest and an army on the border, yet they have time to fart around with stupid little plays that do NOTHING to advance the story? It's stupid. And he clearly killed Rozencrantz and Guildenstern because of his anti-fun agenda, as has already been noted." [via]

Can I have an 'H', please Bob?

The title on this ebay sale says everything really:

EX- ITV GAMESHOW 'BLOCKBUSTERS' SCULPTURE OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN FIGURE OF HAMLET HOLDING THE SKULL OF YORICK

This piece of television history is yours for just £25-. Assuming you can get to West Wales to pick it up. Says the seller:

"Originally commissioned for the ITV set of the popular 80’s TV gameshow with Bob Holness, “Blockbusters” After starring in the studio gameshow set, they spent a long period of time decorating the Lenton Lane ITV studios, in the café and high up on the scene dock walls. They came into private ownership last year after Carlton closed the Lenton Lane Studios in a unbelievable and saddening fit of “account’s red mist.” (The accountants then ran amok and also closed Tyne Tees as well as Meridian, both superb, irreplaceable and famous studio facilities.)"

And that's Blockbusters.

12 Marc Culwick

Hamlet played by Marc Culwick
Directed by Michael Croft

Surprisingly, the moment when I really began to understand what Shakespeare was trying to do wasn’t during Hamlet but Measure for Measure. I was watching the BBC television version from the eighties and it had reached the fourth scene of act two. Angelo, a hitherto emotionless logical character (think Star Trek’s Spock in his bearded mirror universe version) has fallen in lust with a nun, Isabella, whose brother he’s condemned to death for making a baby outside of wedlock. He gives a speech in which he slowly comes to terms with these feels and decides what he’s going to do about it.

A young Tim Piggot-Smith plays it impeccably in that production and for the first time I understood that Will was writing about real human emotions, something I’d missed during the remote classroom readings that I’d sat through beforehand. I wasn’t a fan yet, but I completely related to Angelo in this moment, especially since I was dealing with similar emotions myself during these post-puberty years, which were a history of unattainable girls who I could even conceive of approaching. Luckily I didn’t follow his lead because, y’know, that would have been bad.

The point I’m trying to make is that Shakespeare works best in performance and the best way to inspire kids to enjoy is work is to put a really good, really accessible production in front of them, literate, clear and filled with the kind of passion and emotion that they might find in the typical movie and soap opera. That version of Measure for Measure has bags of that (it won a few awards) as did Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. The problem is that you can’t really plan for it. You can certainly try, but if just one of the elements is missing or not quite right you’re wasting your time.

The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain in Michael Croft’s production of Hamlet (to give its full title) is one of these attempts. This is a video published in 1984 by Schofield and Sims video designed, according to the box, ‘for use in schools, educational institutions and privately at home’. What this means is that the viewer is presented with the bare bones of the plot, whole speeches curtailed to the minimum, and a narrative shrunk to fit into just eighty minutes. The guts of the story are narrated and explained by Martin Jarvis, who appears between scenes dressed in a brown corduroy jacket sitting on a dirty orange armchair.



The effect reminds me of the treatment the half finished Doctor Who story Shada got on video were Tom Baker featured to talk the viewer through the bits that went unfilmed because of industrial action. It’s pretty sympathetically done and Jarvis is an excellent presenter and there is wonderful moment at the opening when he remembers his own time with the youth theatre. It’s just a bit frustrating when he says things like ‘and then there’s a very famous speech from Fortinbras about this…’ you can tell the purpose is to force the viewer to go and actually pick up a copy of the play to fill in the gap.

It’s all very noble then but unfortunately it doesn’t really work. This whole enterprise has been produced under the impression that its audience simply can’t be bothered to sit through a complete production of the play and would much rather have this garroted version instead. It is literally Shakespeare without the apparent boring bits. They might as well have stuck a label on the front that says: ‘For people who don’t have a couple more hours to sit through the whole thing’. It might have helped if the cuts hadn’t been quite so peculiar, but what’s the point in dropping a classic such as Polonius’s advice to Laertes yet leaving in the unfunny business with Osric? The emotional heart of the play has been cut out.

The other problem is the production itself, which seems designed to fulfill all of the prejudices that potential students have of what it might look like. The costumes are all faux-Elizabethan for a start and all of the young actors affect RC accents that are just silly. Frankly if this had been my first introduction to the play or indeed Shakespeare, you wouldn’t be reading this blog as it does everything wrong that the BBC Shakespeare, Luhrmann and indeed the off the ground show I saw a couple of weeks ago did so right. If the tape was produced to try and make the thing accessible to the uninterested they’ll continue to be uninterested.

Marc Culwick’s central performance doesn’t help. He adopts a shouty mad gurning approach which divorces the viewer from the character. More often than not he seems to be reacting to vocal cues and never appears to be listening to the other characters – there’s little chemistry between them and him which amongst other things makes a nonsense of why Ophelia would ever fall for him. About the only time this understandable is during the Ghost scene when he’s obviously been filmed separately from the other actor who’s appearing via the magic of wizzo mid-Eighties video effects.



There are still some solid performances though. The standout is obviously Nathaniel (call me Nat) Parker as a devilish Claudius who steals all of his scenes and in hindsight obviously looks destined to have a great career. His stand out scene is when the new King seeks penitence, his magnetic eyes breaking the fourth wall as he seems to be asking the viewer for their forgiveness. You can only imagine how brilliant his Hamlet might have been. Rachel Bell’s Ophelia works too, injecting a darkness right from the beginning which rationalizes the decent into madness perfectly.

If the tape fails as an literature education tool it gains a novelty value because of the section that appears at the end of the production in which Ron Daniels (pictured), a director with the RSC, works the young actors through some of the scenes and situations redirecting their work. Obviously in hindsight its fun to see the kinds of fashions a young actor in the mid-Eighties might wear for these kinds of things (The The t-shirts and bright red leggings) and to see which of them are thesps ™ waiting for their career and which might be doing it for extra credit.

But, the real curiosity is seeing how some of these performances, so stilted during the main production suddenly gain nuances and depth. Daniels’s general message to them is to really think about their words and really understand their import. He interrupts, he asks them to repeat some things and slowly they all, Culwick in particular, begin to look and sound more like the characters they’re supposed to be rather than actors working through lines. For example, he has Culwick play Hamlet’s greetings with Horatio and Marcellus, then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in quick succession, teasing out that usually missed notion that he’s genuinely pleased to see the former, a confident, but suspicious of the latter two whom he should be question as to their motive. That often played as Hamlet teasing them, but Daniels’s idea is that they he should be putting them on the spot and that seems right too.



Watching that band of actors, their whole careers in front of them, I wondered what they did next. Nat Parker (Claudius) is easy; as well as turning up in the Zefrelli film as Laertes he’s had a steady career in character roles before hitting the prime time as Inspector Thomas Lynley, in the BBC television series based on the novels by Elizabeth George. I jotted down everyone else in the cast list and with the help of the wikipedia, found that only a handful went on to become the kind of people who have profiles on the wikipedia.

Marc Culwick (Hamlet) is ‘married with three children and currently works as a Theatre Studies teacher in Devon, England. As a teacher he is considered by his students to be truly inspirational, and has successfully directed several school musicals and co-directed several Shakespeare pieces.’ Good for him. I wonder if he’s ever shown his students this video and what they thought. It’s important to remember, should any of them be googling that all of the above is just an opinion – I could have simply misread what I saw.

Rachel Bell (Ophelia) ‘now works in theatre and as a teacher for an English boarding school. Previously appeared as Margaret Holmes in Grange Hill (1997-2002); Edith Pilchester in The Darling Buds of May (1991-1993); and Louise, the overbearing chair of the divorcee support group in Dear John (1986-1987). She also appeared in the Doctor Who story The Happiness Patrol (1988) and the Only Fools and Horses episode "To Hull and Back" (1985).’ She was in The Happiness Patrol with the pink hair and everything?

Lloyd Owen (Ghost) ‘is best known for playing Paul Bowman-MacDonald in the BBC television series Monarch of the Glen (2002-2005), and for his portrayal of Indiana's father Dr. Henry Jones Sr. in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1999). He recently played the role of solicitor William Heelis in the film Miss Potter (2006).’

Jonathan Cake (Lucianus) ‘has worked on various TV programs and series. His most notable roles include Oswald Mosley in Mosley, 'Tyrannus' in the TV epic Empire and Dr. Malcolm Bowers in the NBC TV series Inconceivable. In summer 2006, he played the title role in the Shakespeare's Globe Theater's production of ‘Coriolanus’. He is married to American actress Julianne Nicholson.’ Lucky sod – and not a bad career trajectory. I wondered what his reaction might have been if he’d learnt that his bit part in an NYT production would eventually lead to a title role in a re-created Globe Theatre.

11 Carl Wharton

Hamlet played by Carl Wharton
Directed by Ian Karl Moore

Regular readers might remember I wrote last year some time about meeting someone called Claire Jones on the bus and telling them how much I'd loved their portrayal of Ophelia in a production of Hamlet ten years before. It was in a production by the Black Box Theatre Company at the Unity Theatre some time between 1997 and 1998.

To explain how I could possibly remember something like that, Claire was a friend of a friend and I'd actually gone to the production with another friend of that friend, because the friend didn't want to go with her. If you see what I mean. I've confused myself with that sentence. Feel free to email for more details if you too are confused. But I was going anyway because, ironically now that I'd left university I was even more interested in Shakespeare's work than I have been at school and productions were and still are pretty rare in Liverpool.

Looking at the cast list this was a pretty pared down version of the story - no Fortinbras for example and a single gravedigger. It was pacey. That was more than likely because of the space - this was in the smaller of the two auditoriums at the Unity, the studio. The set was minimalist too, I think everything was done with light - I remember lots of deep reds and blues being thrown again the black curtains at the back. Sorry that my recollections are so hazy but I was still trying to get a grasp on the story. Plus I quite liked the girl I was out with and pretty nervous.

But what I do remember is Claire Jones' Ophelia. I recall thinking at the time that she was acting everyone else off the stage. I'm not sure I've seen Ophelia's madness moments rendered as intelligently many times since; a tour-de-force as she shuffled about in her bare feet passing flowers around. It was that night I began to construct my fantasy cast for a production pegging her permanently for the role and when I later saw Kate Winslet in the Branagh film it looked like she'd cribbed from Claire. I think or know that I would still have remembered her performance even if she hadn't been a friend of a friend. Totally captivating.

In the way my mind works though, my Claire memories have rather overshadowed the rest of the cast. I can't tell you how good Carl Wharton was as Hamlet, I simply don't know. Does that mean he and this production doesn't count for the purposes of this adventure? Since it's my journey and I'm making the rules I've decided not. The spirit of this thing is that I should be able to say something about each of these quasi-Danes. So the thing I can say about Wharton's Hamlet is that wore Ophelia the trousers in that production.

09 Update!.

I found some copies of my old school magazine, The Squirrel the other day and what should I find on page 36 on the 1993 issue but this article about number nine on my list:

In the depths of winter when people are overcoming those 'post-panto blues', a notice was posted on the Dramatic Society notice board - 'HAMLET-AUDITION'. These were held, the majority of the cast decided upon and the scripts dished out for the lines to be leant for the New Year.

Back in school after the holiday few lines had been learnt, but Mr. Gleave, our dedicated director, started rehearsals nevertheless. These always followed the same format: Tracy Owens, the valiant production assistant would sit herself at the front of the hall, place her script on her lap and smile intelligently up at the stage. Meanwhile, at the back of the hall, Mr. Gleave would perform his own full-blooded interpretation of Shakespeare's hallowed script for us, the aspiring actors, to attempt to reproduce up on stage.

After a couple of weeks we were making very slow progress. Movements were still being mapped out on stage, Mr. Gleave could not find the 'right' Laertes and still lines had not been mastered. Not exactly the best start to any top-class production.

Spring half-term come and went , and we were still struggling through the final scenes of the play. Rosencrantz, the lovely Alankar Sharma, was continually late for rehearsals and Polonius, Ricky Morton, still knew few of his lines. But, despite these problems some parts of the production were improving. The set was beginning to take shape under the steady guidance of Mr. Preston and Steven Simpson; and the cast itself, was also starting to get its act together; most notably Hamlet (the inspiring Merfyn Cave), who had mastered his soliloquies and was becoming increasingly impressive in the lead role.

The final week of rehearsals arrived and the tension was mounting; would we be ready in time? The lighting had been installed, the set was on the verse of completion and the sound had finally got its cocks to crow; all that was needed was the actors. Well, after our mighty rehearsals under the surprisingly calm influence of Mr. Gleave, we were at last starting to look like a true Blue Coat production.

The Friday before the week of the play a small band of the cast and crew kindly accompanied by Mr and Mrs Halton, took a rest from their hectic schedule to take a trip down to Stratford to see how good Kenneth Branagh & Co. really were. After four and a half hours in the theatre the general consensus was that they were excellent - but not a patch on us (though we would not mind the money) and we returned to Liverpool with some fresh enthusiasm).

On arriving at school on the Sunday for the dress rehearsal, the male contingent in the cast was distraught to discover that their costumes entailed the wearing of tights (some of which were the most putrid shade of orange, green and blue). This being a new experience for most of us, we required instruction in the art of putting them on from those skilled seamstresses, Mrs. Harcombe and Mrs. Holiday, not to mention the actresses of the play. When the laughs over our attire had died down (some of the girl's headgear was also amusing), we began. The Sunday afternoon dragged on, because Mr. Gleave's tireless striving after perfection, with the majority of the problem rearing their ugly heads in the final scene. But, we managed to leave just before darkness with most people quietly confident of a successful production.

The next day, the problem scenes were attended to, so that their standard was on par with the rest of the first-rate production, and so we were ready(?) for the opening night and the show to begin. After some final encouraging words from Mr. Gleave, we were up on the stage in front of the light and an audience acting our hearts out. Unfortunately that first night had too many faults, including a personal one of waiting on top of the battlements of a Danish castle in the freezing cold for what seemed like hours, for a ghost to appear. But the true professional approach of everyone involved meant that these weaknesses quickly disappeared and by Friday night we had reached perfection!

It just remains for me, the honourable Horatio to thank Mr. Preston for his never-ending efforts; the stage, lighting and sound crews; communications; props; make-up; our seamstresses' special effects; and the large group of dedicated teachers, without whom it would never have been. And finally, the inimitable Mr. Gleave, whose dedication and perseverance turned a group of sixth formers into a company of Thespians with a production to remember.

A. ROBERTSON, 10P

It's a wonderful piece and certainly fills in many of the gaps in my memory. I love the detail of some of the production attending Branagh's 1992 RSC production, the precursor to the film and the indignation at having to wear tights.