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.

Branagh Hamlet coming to DVD

This will please some regular readers. Movie Web have news that a Region One dvd release is coming in August -- and on two discs which means that the bit-rate should be high enough to do justice to the 70mm photography. The details are as follows:

Hamlet 2-Disc Special Edition (1996):

- Running Time: 242 minutes
- Color
- Rating: PG-13
- Audio: Soundtrack remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1
- Subtitles: English, French and Spanish subtitles. (feature film only)

In this first-ever full-text film of Shakespeare's greatest work, nominated for 4 Academy Awards®, the power surges through every scene. The timeless tale of murder, corruption and revenge is reset in an opulent 19th-century world, using sprawling Blenheim Palace as Elsinore with much of the action staged in shimmering mirrored and gold-filled interiors. The luminous cast includes actor/director Kenneth Branagh, Kate Winslet, Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal and Charlton Heston.

The excitement of the Bard's words and Branagh's adventurous filmmaking style lift the story from its often shadowy ambience to fully-lit pageantry and rage. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said, "In the 80 years that works of world literature have been adapted for the screen, few filmmakers have attempted so much and with such success."

DVD Features:
- Introduction by director/star Kenneth Branagh
- Commentary by Kenneth Branagh and Shakespeare scholar Russell Jackson
- Featurette To Be on Camera: A History with Hamlet
- 1996 Cannes Film Festival promo

The extras aren't of the order of Lord of the Rings but with over four hours to chat, Ken and Russell will probably cover much of the ground. The 'To Be On Camera' featurette is the same one that appeared on its own tape accompanying the film on its original vhs release and although it is alright, it's not a patch on any of the BBC documentaries that turned up around the cinema release. Perhaps when the UK release drifts around they might appear as exclusive items. The package has a reasonable price of $19.97 which'll probably double in region two.

For the really interested, it's also appearing as part of a boxset, The Shakespeare Collection with Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (with James Cagney as Bottom!), Larry Olivier's Othello and MGM's Romeo and Juliet - none of which have anything in common other than the obvious and that their rights are now owned by Warner Brothers. Still excellent value at just under sixty dollars. [via]

10 Natalie Quatermass

Hamlet played by Natalie Quatermass.
Directed by Dan Meigh & Iona Farley.
Fights by Eleanor Stephens.

Twice in the past couple of days in relation to this weblog and well, I suppose you could call it 'the project', people have asked me, 'Why Hamlet?' In answering I repeated some of what I wrote in the introduction about the man who'd seen sixty-eight of them, remembering something about each of them and me wondering if I could beat that - which I still do even if with all the audio and video and film and television I could possibly be cheating.

But I also said something new. That it was like listening to your favourite album. I love watching Hamlet. I love the language, the story, the fact that it has a range of facets that it's an investigation into what it is to be human and about what could potentially lead us to lose our sanity. Like the your favourite album I can quote whole sections of it, but never as well as the best performances. And I also don't want to listen or watch it so much that it eventually becomes a chore (which is why the posting rate here is fairly irregular).

It's also as I mentioned in that introduction the most flexible of plays; with the acreage of text it can be cut and interpreted, as this blog has already demonstrated in a whole vast range of different ways, the directors and actors bringing to it quite rightly their own biases and interests in ways that I'm not sure you can with that many other of Shakespeare's plays. You can play it funny and serious for example, reduce it to being a chamber piece about family or project it out to a much wider military canvas.

Last night I saw my first live Hamlet in years, at the Crypt Concert Hall at Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral. It was the work of 'Off The Ground', a youth theatre company celebrating its tenth season with this as its finale. Chatting to a family beforehand I discovered it was to be a female Hamlet, the group were really good and that I was in for a treat. And I was.

The Crypt Concert Hall is an amazing space. It's built into a section of the structure constructed from the designs by the Cathedral's original architect Sir Edwin Lutyen (the story of whose grand design can be read here) and works almost as a worship space in and of itself with ceilings patterned out in red brick in concentric circles and tiny domes. Although man made it seems deceptively organic, a classic place for this piece to appear, a long chamber with a stage constructed at the end.

After some first night hiccups with the lighting and background noise and when to begin the performance what developed was one of the most passionate and engrossing readings of the play I've seen in a while, thematically focused and wonderfully staged. If the sound of foot traffic on the stage and the acoustics of the hall sometimes got in the way of the verse (now and then voices would be lost in the back of those domes) the sheer belief in the text and the quality of the performances from the young cast more than made up for it.

Natalie Quatermass's Hamlet was inspired, initially emphasised the bitterness of the character before (I think) feigning madness in order to throw her (his?) antagonists off the scent of his (her?) real intent. There was freshness and fearlessness to her, changing emotion on a dime, the stage almost darkening when she wasn't around. Still fitting perfectly into the ensemble, she was an electric presence and compulsive to watch.

The intelligence of her choices could be enjoyed in the fishmonger scene when you could see the moment, just before she gave Ryan Radley-Lawley's prating Polonius his new job title, when she decided that rational discourse was simply not going to get her where she (he?) needed to be. The biggest belly laughs from the audience happened during this scene, the comic timing between the two of them absolutely catching the humour of the scene.

Perhaps selecting Quatermass to play the Dane wasn't a stunt or to particularly bring new thematic tone within the play. It's simply that, like Frances De La Torre before her, she had the emotional range for the part so why let femininity be a barrier? Her costume was gender neutral - black shirt and trousers before the trip to England, khakis afterwards (half of the cast appeared in military uniform) contrasting perfectly against Ophelia's dresses.

Which isn't to say that there weren't one or two moments which didn't resonated differently with a feminine energy from that part of the stage particularly in relation to the characters relationships with Ophelia and Gertrude. But in this reading she still manage to dominate both, noticeably with the latter. Frances Robinson portraying the character almost as a trophy wife, won by Claudius from Hamlet Snr upon his demise, lacking her usual forthrightness only finally rebelling against Claudius in her final moments, her independence drowned in the poisoned cup.

That said, with the exception of an introductory dance routine and military costuming, Dan Meigh & Iona Farley offered a fairly traditional approach to the play with perhaps slightly more stress given to the plot. It was noticeable that despite presenting a cut text, that the material often left out of some presentations was left in here, with Fortinbras in particular being well served and The Mousetrap appearing in its entirety, the play within a play's language given the space to breath. I particularly loved the initial appearance of the players on stage, looking for all the world like the cast of Hair in their studenty fashions.

Maria Welsh's Rosencrantz and Joseph Crawford's Gildenstern in particular were given so much stage time that they seemed like much more rounded characters in their own right, the eyes and ears of Bill Pasterfield's suitably villainous Claudius. Welsh and Crawford double teamed throughout, playing off one another in their reactions to the events surrounding them developing into very sympathetic figures right up to their demise, presented actually on stage during Hamlet's description of their termination to Jake Dodd's loyal Horatio enunciated by the crack of a gunshot.

That same gunshot could be heard ringing out as Hamlet murdered Polonius. Something highlighted in this production was the swiftness of the murder of Ophelia's father after Hamlet is unable to do this same to his own father, almost as though the frustration of not being able to go through with the first act is carried over into the second. Quatermass's Hamlet showed genuine remorse but rightly left Polonius to rot as she (he?) underlined to Gertrude, his (her?) mother, a water drink of a woman exactly what her husband was capable of.

Another striking moment was inevitably Ophelia's decent into madness, rendered here with an unseen cast providing a chorus. Really touching and effective and helped immeasurably by Sarah Banks's Ophelia finally given a chance to shine. Regular readers will know that one of my few criticisms of the play is that Ophelia material always seems slightly insubstantial. I always wish she had more to do, more stage time to give the actress (actor?) a fairer crack of the whip.

Here that was partially solved by having Banks on stage during 'To Be Or Not To Be' reacting to the words and the ensuing remembrances scene underscored once more the real key to the production, the chemistry between the actors - despite everything, you could really believe these two have had such a relationship. See also the Polonius advice scene when she and James Marshall's Laertes reacted wittily to their father's advice.

All of which reminded me why I love Hamlet and why I'm conducting this project. Partly it's an impossible search for the perfect production but it's also an opportunity to observe the fact that even after four hundred odd years it still has new mysteries to reveal and can still be presented in dozens of ways. It's also a thumping good revenge thriller, a ghost story and as this production also demonstrated a thematic exploration of fatherhood. The fact that I'm only fitting in that observation at the end of the review just underscores how rich this interpretation was.

09 Merfyn Cave

Hamlet played by Merfyn Cave
Directed by Mr Gleave

It's become apparent that if I'm going to reach my target I'm going to have to include Hamlets that I've already met, no matter how hazy my memory of them. The first time I saw the play produced was at my secondary school, the Blue Coat in Liverpool. The programme which sits before me (illustrated above) doesn't say what date this was although I'm guessing it would be in 1992/1993 the year I left school. The production was cast from students who were in the first year of their A-Levels and I was one year older than them you see.

My school was lucky enough to have a main school hall that featured exactly the kind of stage that you might find in a theatre or every school-based film you care to mention. Remember the scene in Love Actually with the Nativity with the lobster? We had one of those. I think it might even have been extended forward whilst I was there. Oh and there was also a churchy pipe organ which was never utilized during these sporadic Shakespeare performances, which is a shame.

I remember it being a very lengthy production - I don't think the whole text was included but I imagine it must have stretched on for at least three hours and it was pretty grueling sitting on the typical wooden chairs usually used for assemblies. Fortinbras is listed in the Dramatis Personae so you never know. The programme suggests that there was a interval of ten minutes which in retrospect doesn't seem long enough. I went with my Dad and I know that he fell asleep.

I think the most remarkable thing was the production design. The set designer, Stephen Simpson, who worked on most, if not all of the school productions tended to create something that filled the stage in our main school hall. In the previous year, for Macbeth, that was a giant green set with steps and small caves and hillocks.

For Hamlet he created a giant white space covered in a black grid - imagine a negative version of Star Trek's holodeck and within this the scenes would proceed with thrones and table and whatever was needed ushered in and out. The reason for this design became obvious at the death of Polonius - when Hamlet thrust his blade into the man, the white walls suddenly flashed blood red underlining the point of no return. Amazingly effective.

Inevitably I also remember most vividly Merfyn Cave who played Hamlet. I think he must have lived the role. I don't mean that he murdered his girlfriend's father and his mother married his uncle, I mean that when we were in the Art Room together he would approach me sometimes and fix me in the eye and quote speeches and snatches of dialogue at me. It must have been his way of remembering, but it was downright eerie particularly since he had these very serious eyes, which on reflection he could have been borrowing from a young Al Pacino.

I'd love to say that this was when I fell in love with the play and Shakespeare but it really wasn't. Even though I was studying Othello and Measure for Measure for A-Level which is what prompted this viewing I hadn't yet attuned to the pentameter or even begun to understand the implications of the story. It's a difficult play and I was still trying to work out the motivations of Angelo and Iago without throwing the likes of Claudio into the mix.

It's still fun to look through the programme though and be reminded of people I haven't seen in nearly sixteen years and to wonder what they're doing now and to wish that I'd paid better attention so that I could tell you whether Zoe Johnson was a good Ophelia or if Pete Bouvier really was as wasted as I suspect he must have been as Fortinbras given his charismatic appearance as Ebinarza in that year's pantomime. Two of the other teachers, Mr Preston and Mr Crighton were the grave diggers. That must have been a laugh.

Update! I've found this rather good article from the school magazine that fills in some of the gaps.

"Seeking the bubble reputation"

I'm always just slightly behind in reading weekend newspapers -- there's always many more words than can possibly be covered in those forty-eight hours even after skipping through articles about relationships, travel and property and everything else which is currently irrelevant. Now that I'm actually working at the weekend, that's going to become even more accute. I won't know what's happened in the world until at least Monday afternoon.

Today, I was actually reading Saturday's Guardian from the 14th April (Grand National Day) and fittingly that meant this rather wonderful piece by Jonathan Bate which illuminates William Shakespeare's passage over the years into become a legend and being tagged with the description 'genius' taking in his veneration by actors and academics alike.

If asked I will say that I'm a Shakespeare fan, in much the same way as I might describe myself as a Doctor Who fan or that I like films. A bit. I've as many different Shakespeare productions as anything else and like those other 'interests'. And like those other loves, I can't always quite put my finger on why I'm addicted. I do agree with the reasons usually trotted out by talking heads in television documentaries -- 'They're such great stories', 'The language is amazing' and 'He's a genius'.

But along with those forty odd works, there's also four hundred years of history to enjoy. As Bate somewhat describes, you can understand British history through the changes in attitudes to the plays, how they've been performed and the audiences that saw them. Charles I's decree that women should be allowed to take up the acting profession demonstrates a change in society and frankly its amazing that it took so long for you to get the vote after that. As Shakespeare is oft to demonstrate, nearly all men are pigs, especially the ones who make laws about things.

I think though that it's more to do with the fact that even though the words and the plot are the same, every production is different and more than any other writer its possible for a director and his actors to put their own personal stamp on them. I've seen dozens of Hamlets and each and every time, although the text is the same they're all different, they all resonate in different ways. It's simply fascinating intellectually to compare and contrast the interpretations to see who thought what was important.

Plus, in the media age, as this blog demonstrates, it attracts the collector in me. Even though I've eight complete works already, some bought, some presents, I'm gathering the Arden editions of the plays because of the notes and appendixes which often include the original texts such as the Ur-Hamlet that Shakespeare used as his sources. Then there are the collections of criticism, the biographies. On top of that there are the many hundred audio and visual recordings of the plays from the BBC Shakespeare (radio and television) through Argo to ArkAngel. Some people collect vinyl or music boxes or badges. I collect Shakespeare productions.

You would expect on hearing all of this, that I'd seen or at least read all of the plays in the canon. Not a bit of it. I'm working my way through my BBC Shakespeare boxset (in production order minus the histories -- oh yes) and greeting many of them for the first time. Just as I've not seen or heard all of the television Doctor Who (let alone the spin-offs), I think I've only actually come in contacted with about half of the bard's work.

Some of this is simply because the same twenty-odd plays tend to be in production at the expense of others. But also its through avoidance, because I can't imagine that the likes of As You Like It can be as good as the version I have in my head through years of reading about them. Of course they can -- they're by Shakespeare, but there's also the matter of seeing them for the first time in a decent production. Thankfully my first As You Like It, from the BBC, featured the sexy Helen Mirren in a silly hat and David Prowse whose performance was strangely moving for all the wrong reasons.

There's a lovely moment at the end when Mirren delivers to camera the closing speech which features the line 'If I were, that is, a woman' and she pauses slightly highlighting the irony of a line that Shakespeare wrote that would originally have been played by a boy, being read now by, well, Helen Mirren. The viewer is sharing a joke with Mirren at text's expense. That's another reason I love Shakespeare, watching actors and directors cope with moments when attitudes have raced ahead of what's been written.

So Happy Birthday Mr Shakespeare, whether it was yesterday or today or whenever you were actually born. Thank you for over a decade of entertainment and intellectual stimulation and for inspiring one of the biggest laughs I had in an English class when the teacher decided to show us Roman Polanski's mad as cheese film version of Macbeth. For the amazingly intimate Measure for Measure I saw at the Edinburgh Festival in 1998 when I once again inapropriately fell in love with the actress playing Isabella for the umpteenth time (see also Kate Nelligan in the BBC Shakespeare). And for Hamlet. All four hours of it.

The Libertine (2004)

Ophelia played by Elizabeth Barry
Directed by The Earl of Rochester

A bawdy potential companion piece to Restoration and Stage Beauty, The Libertine portrays the fast life and slow death of the second Earl of Rochester, a soul who paraphrasing his own words, drank and shagged his away around London, all the while falling in and out of favour with Charles II before contracting the pox. As the lead, Johnny Depp gives one of his electrically intense performances but the real draw is the photography which unusually for a costume drama is mostly hand held and the entire work is lit only with candles, scene evoked magically through pools of light.

The incursion of Hamlet occurs in a Pygmalianesque story strand when the Earl takes a fancy to one of the new prostitutes turned stage actresses, Lizzy Barry (Samantha Morton) whom he coaches in the way of performance, as part of, unknown to her, a wager with his pals that he can turn her into the greatest actress on the London stage. She's to play Ophelia and he has her repeat the 'Oh what a noble mind is here overthrown' speech all day until she learns to speak it from her heart and not through some mechanical process.

As is customary these kinds of stories, her progress is described through a montage sequence that ends with glimpses of Lizzy's performance, a devastatingly good naturalistic reading which would certainly have overshadowed whoever might be playing Hamlet for a change (although she is all we see of the show). Like the production of Othello at the close of Stage Beauty, it's certainly anachronistic, but it's important at this moment for us to understand why the Earl has fallen for her and this simply wouldn't have worked if her passion had been filtered through the recognizable stage form of the time.

It's one of the those moments that sometimes crops up during play within a film scenes when the layers of costume and setting drop away and its between the actress and the camera and it's impossible to tell were the actress begins and the actress playing a character who is an actress playing a character ends. It would be a definite tragedy were we not to see Samantha Morton's interpretation of the role under other circumstances. Any chance of a new film version with Depp as Hamlet and Morton as Ophelia?

08 Paul Scofield

Hamlet played by Paul Scofield.
Directed by Howard Sackler.

What a chore. This is the first time I've begun writing about an audio production whilst I'm still listening to it simply because I don't want to spend more time even thinking about it than the duration. It's a shame, because it begins quite well with the atmospheric sound of waves as Horatio first hears of the ghostly reappearance of Hamlet Snr. The problem begins when Paul Scofield's Hamlet trots through. Scofield (who would later play the Ghost in Zeffirelli's film version) gives his performance in a declamatory style, reverential to the poetry. Almost every speech he gives happens almost as a broken whisper, in exactly the way I expected Shakespeare to be acted before I saw my first production, the BBC's 80s version of Measure for Measure (which I watched again the other day and continues to be the gold standard). I hope this show, recorded in 1963, isn't any school child's first exposure to the Bard because it could put them off for life.

Everyone else is speaking in a much more contemporary, fluid way and I might have imagined that two different productions had been edited together, Scofield dropped into something else where it not for the fact that whenever any of the big, famous speech arrives the rest of the cast have a habit of dropping into the same style; the directorial decision has no doubt been to emphasise these but it leads to moments, like the one that happens when Gertrude reveals Ophelia's suicide when there is an expectant pause as though the rest of the cast are waiting for the great moment. I understand that this was the rule in Shakespeare's day, and that often these things would be repeated for effect, but here it works against the drama. There's probably a really good production somewhere that makes a feature of expectant repetition but this isn't it.

The problem in this case with being reverential to the language is that it also reduces the pace of the story and draws it away from being the passionate discussion of the nature of humanity that I love. It is instead an exercise in presenting the words, and although those are great words, the drama is lost. The appearance of the Ghost, accompanied by the scratching of harp strings works quite well, but is quickly ruined because the actor playing Hamlet Snr, like Scofield, declares his way through it Churchill-like and the scene seems to continue forever sapping it of the shock and awe it really needs.

Perhaps I shouldn't be quite so harsh about the traditionalism -- this was recorded over forty years ago; it's just that I haven't yet heard a Polonius this daffy and old and lacking all the quite manipulation so evident in the text, particularly when he petitions Reynaldo. New King Claudius too doesn't come across as villainous enough; there is something to be said for his evil being obscured so that his crime is less likely to everyone, but he also needs to seem capable of his brother's murder and this Claudius really doesn't. This Horatio is very good, exhibiting some of the tragedy that this Hamlet lacks.

Neither of the women are particularly strong in this production. Ophelia is particularly naive and distant. Gertrude too, for once, sounds as though she was easily led by Claudius, and what for me is a key scene, whether Hamlet brings Gertude on the side of his cause after the death of Polonius is left entirely unclear. About the most affecting moments are when both allow the tragedy to wash over them and they simply descend into tears.

Inevitably, things are picking up towards the end. The Gravedigger's scene is lovely until Scofield puts on his big speech voice. One of the great features of the production is that this actually feels like a royal family, these are kings and queens and princes and princesses which is something many productions forget. The trumpets and orchestration between scenes help to emphasise this, although sometimes it isn't clear if they're supposed to be within the scene or just signaling the scene shift or both.

But in the best productions, there is a feeling as the duel descends of the end of an era, the break up the status quo. For me it's a but like thirteenth night, Christmas is over and the decorations are down and the feeling of comfort won't ever return. Hamlet's aware of this but soldiers on with all bravura, saying that he thinks he'll win, but secretly knowing that it can't go well. But that's missing here, with one of the most poignant speeches, 'The readiness is all...' whispered off musically. I've had enough. Fortinbras can't come quickly enough.

In The Bleak Midwinter (1995)

Hamlet played by Joe Harper
Directed by Joe Harper

It's December 1995, I'm at university the first time around and I live very close to the one cinema I would say that I ever really loved, The Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. In The Bleak Midwinter turned up pretty much unheralded but I'd read about it in Empire Magazine who gave it a sparkling review and having loved everything else Kenneth Branagh had directed (yes, even Dead Again) and being someway into a lifelong appreciation of Shakespeare I knew had to go and see it..

The Hyde Park was the kind of cinema in which any film could potentially be packed out because the audience tended to go see whatever was on. I took my tall friend Dave with me, even though he wasn't sure if it was his kind of thing - in black and white and about theatre - and we sat at the back of the balcony because there was more legroom.

I'd like to be able to give you a long flowing description of the experience of seeing it for the first time but I really can't. I remember being enchanted and laughing a lot and feeling very Christmassy afterwards and Dave saying that it wasn't what he was expecting and that he really enjoyed it but other than that I'd say that it just made me more excited about seeing Branagh's Hamlet the following year, this almost being a rehearsal for that.

It wasn't until the following Christmas, when I was given the video that I really fell for the film. There was certainly the nostalgia factor - I'd left university by then and it reminded me of a good night out at a place that I wouldn't necessarily be able to go back to with someone I hadn't seen in months. But it was also that it somehow managed to distill everything I felt about Shakespeare into an hour and a half and was also brilliantly funny and touching.

The following year, in 1997, I watched it around Christmas time again while I was wrapping my presents. And again in '98 and since then it's become part of the ritual. When I say that I watch it every Christmas, I really do. Which seems like the definition of a favourite film. Each viewing it means more or less to me than the year before depending on what else is happening in life. Last year I was at university again nd it just fitted into the many hundreds of other films I seemed to be watching. This year I noticed that the main character mentions in his opening monologue that he's thirty-three and I realised that I'd be the same age as him next time I see it.

Perhaps I should provide some background because I know that this isn't a film many people have heard of (it's not even available on dvd). In The Bleak Midwinter (or A Midwinter's Tale as it's called in the US) features Branagh and Shakespeare stalwart Michael Maloney as Joe an out of work actor who decides to produce Hamlet at Christmas time in a disused church in his sister's home village of Hope. With him are a group of actors, some in the offseason from seaside shows, all with their own neuroses and the film charts the rehearsal process and the production. It very much follows the structure and style of the Hollywood backstage films from the heyday of the studio system, except with obvious nods and influences from sources as diverse as Woody Allen, Ealing comedies and silent cinema.

Branagh says that it isn't autobiographical, but when Joe describes his passion for the play, that he saw it when he was fifteen and it changed his life that's exactly what the director has said about seeing Jacobi at the RSC all those years ago. His motivation for making the epic film version of the play later mirrors one of Joe's needs here - to try and make something which has a reputation for being musty and boring and making it exciting for a new generation, essentially dragging out of slow amateur schoolroom readings.

Having tried acting and been around a few actors I can absolutely say that the film captures the brilliance and pain of the art, the fact that it can boil down to bringing the deep seated emotional crap that you try to suppress up to the surface in order to entertain others. But what is really clever, is that having suggested from the opening that all of the characters are pretentious and affected and everything everyone expects actors to be - John Session's raving queen and Richard Briers grumpy old man, for example, in a series of carefully chosen two-handers he carefully peels away the surface and reveals them to be perfectly normal people like us, absolutely aware of the mask they're otherwise wearing to get by in the profession.

I think the film was derided at the time as another opportunity for Ken to give his chums something to do, but I thought it was unfair, particularly since it allows them to reproduce the fragile chemistry that any short term group dynamic has but also because many of them are producing what I think are career best performances. People like John Sessions or Celia Imrie, so often stuck playing grotesques and eccentrics are brilliant here when demonstrating the serious side of their all too camp exteriors. Gerard Horan, latterly typecast as policeman is beautifully touching as Carnforth the man with the drink problem. To be honest the only weak link is Jennifer Saunders with her mad American accent who looks like she's charged in from a Comic Strip skit, but there no doubt she's fulfilling the role of the big producer redolent of the genre.

The film is composed rather like a something from earlier in that century - most of the action plays out in medium or wide shots in deep focus with the actors moving into the foreground and back again creating the effect of seeing characters on a theatre stage - there are very few close ups and they only appear late in the film as the group is fractured and the infighting and arguments have begun in earnest. There are montage sequences, such as the audition process and the costuming but Branagh uses a series of jump cuts and juxtapositions to move the story forward.
Branagh employs lighting akin to film noir which fits the mood of the play in production and there are some lovely compositions as the actors walk in and out of silhouette.

Noir is also implied in the costumes that are finally selected for the production within the film which have a kind of 40s gangster style - and there's a spectacular use of a machine gun which accentuates that idea which I don't want to give away. There's also very little music. The film opens with Noel Coward singing 'Why Must The Show Go On' and ends with a plucked instrumental version of the titular Christmas carol. It's a brave stylistic choice but it gives room for the actor's performances to provide the emotional core and make the one musical moment from inside their story - when Nina (Julia Sawalha) sings Ophelia's lament - all the more heartbreaking.

It has dated slightly. One of the jokes hinges on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers which to be honest seemed out of the date at the time although the target audience will at least have heard of it - I'm not sure what the equivalent now would be - probably Xbox or Wii. Also, when Nicholas Farrell's Tom is auditioning for Laertes, he goes into a wild digression about how relevant Hamlet it and mentions that it's like Bosnia. That would be Iraq now I suppose. One element that hasn't aged is the crucial plot point of the filming of a giant sci-fi trilogy that could be the new Star Wars, especially since we've actually had a new Star Wars trilogy (coindentally featuring Celia Imrie as a fighter pilot) and since and everything seems to be about pre-planned franchises and series now.

Some other things I noticed watching it again the other night - the (uncredited) puppet theatre girl in the audition scene is Katy Carmichael who played Twist in the sitcom Spaced. The brilliance of the acronym LCA - Less Crap Acting. Joan Collins as Joe's agent gives probably her best performance since classic Star Trek's City of the Edge of Forever. That Maloney is the best Doctor Who we never had and is completely wasted playing the range of wackos always seems to now in tv dramas - this is the man who stole Juliet Stevenson from Alan Rickman in Truly Madly Deeply after all.

Stylistically different to anything else what Branagh has directed but still with that love of theatre and theatrics, it touches me each year and even with the darkness, somehow manages to put me in the Christmas mood. There is a scene in which people talk about what makes their life worth living and someone mentions Brief Encounter and offers to buy someone as a present. Do yourself a favour and hunt a copy of this down in time for next Christmas because if you're a reader of this blog I really think you'll enjoy it.

07 Kevin Kline

Hamlet played by Kevin Kline
Directed by Kevin Kline

Kevin Kline's production and performance was one of the key experiences I was looking forward to in this endeavor. During the Hamlet documentary that inspired everything (mentioned in the introduction), Kline was one of the most lucid in regards to the effect the part has on an actor and the sheer endurance required in getting from the young dane seeing a ghost and becoming one. He tells an anecdote about being on stage and being so exhausted during a run that he forgot where he was up to in 'To Be Or Not To Be' - he'd said 'to die, to sleep' but couldn't remember if it was for the first or second time and so he ploughed on ahead certain that if he had skipped a few lines the audience would have heard it anyway.

Kline's is a very moist Hamlet. By that I mean during much of the play its rare that he passes through a scene without welling up, the sheer weight of Hamlet's endeavor and its psychological effects dwell upon his face at all times. I think in the documentary he mentions how emotionally draining the experience is and watching the actor as he runs the gamut of emotions its easy to believe. It's measured too - at first there's a hint of going through the motions as though he's holding back some reserves for later in the play, but then, in the appearance of Hamlet Snr, he snaps to attention and he begins to convince. Kline says that in this version (the second time he'd played the character) Hamlet it borderline mad, and actually this is quite a straightforward reading in that way - I didn't detect that he was feigning madness - he appeared to be floating in and out of the malady.

The confrontation with Gertrude just after the manslaughter of Polunius, so often played as though her son is convincing her of his sanity and bringing her into his confidence, she simply seems to be coping with her son, actress Dana Ivey's eyes reflecting that she's humoring her daffy offspring. The selected intermission reflects these readings, appearing after Hamlet and Ophelia's only (if not private) scene together which confirms once and for all his madness. But then, cleverly, once he's been to England, R&G are dead and he's seen the deceased Ophelia and he understands to an extent what the end game will be, the tears dry and he's a much, much more controlled character. Yet, his still seems a surprise, not something predetermined. His performance is subtler than most, but none the worst for it. Sometimes the shouters lack texture.

The rest of the ensemble features many actors that would go on to appear in multiple episodes of the Law & Order franchise (work your way through the imdb cast list). Josef Sommer's Polunius, comes across as a Shakespearean detective using interrogations and tests to examine the form and nature of Hamlet's madness - the fishmonger sequence in particular is presented from his point of view and lacks the asides that some Hamlet actors drop in to show who's in charge - in this case Polonius is. Brian Murray's Claudius is surprisingly sympathetic much of the time, which should work against the character especially in the closing act but somehow works - he deeply regrets what he has done to his brother and is looking for a way to save his kingdom. Oh and, heroically, Leo Burmester's Osrich enters my fantasy casting - he's portrayed as an English gent rubbing up nicely to Kline's American - I thought of Alfred, Bruce Wayne's butler.

Something that is noticeable is the emphasis on Hamlet's absentia. Whether this was a decision taken by Kline as an actor and director to give himself a breather obviously isn't clear, but its a far more democratic production than some. Embarrassingly, this is the first time I've noticed that a full month passes within the first few acts of the play (either that or its generally ignored) which makes Hamlet's decent into madness far less sudden - and indeed this is exactly what Polonius is describing to Claudius before being called a fishmonger. This also leads to the pleasing appearance of Fortinbras, so often cut in shorter productions, who's story as presented here contrasts Hamlet - they're both much the same age and both attempting to avenge their fathers. Everything Ophelia is there too, including a short speech after Hamlet leaves her for the last time, so often omitted. Also welcome is the run-up to The Mousetrap including the Player King's turn. Impressively, Kline has managed to drop in everything that's usually omitted in a production that times out at two and a half hours, without obviously wrecking the momentum.

In the main then, this recording of the production produced for New York Shakespeare Festival and broadcast in 1990, doesn't disappoint. This isn't a recording of a performance before an audience, rather a transplanting of everything into a television studio - which is a shame actually because in places it deadens the drama as moments that may have been electrifying with spectator reaction don't quite have the same power - the Hamlet/Gertrude post-Mousetrap debrief for example (although I suppose it depends what kind of audience you're expecting - I gasped and wonder if a crowd might have too). Non-specific modern dress with simply sets pretending to be stone with lighting and dry-ice employed to create mood and landscape; the 'wooden' floor is particularly noticeable and the deep edges of the floorboards become props in places, for example during Ophelia's decent into madness, excellent actress Diane Venora (who would later play Gertrude in Michael Almereyda's film) claws away at the floor.

As with all of these recorded theatre productions, there is a sense, unavoidably, that half of the production is lost because of the requirements of its new media - in other words a lot of acting going on, but only the decisions of the director revealing what he believes to be important. This can obviously slant further the decisions of actors and the stage director so you do have to tread carefully when commenting. There are some spectacular moments though; after the ghost leaves, Hamlet faints, falling from the battlements into the waiting arms of Horatio and the guards (which demonstrates a lot of trust amongst the company), the image mirrored at the end of the presentation as the Dane is carried off to a military funeral by Fortinbras's men. The duel too has a kineticism, but has an added twist of Laertes allowing the palpable hit, almost as though he's given up and wants Hamlet to win. The only read disaster is the music. A hodge-podge of percussive instruments and oh-god synthesizer music recorded by Bob James that sounds for all the world like the material that ruined some of Doctor Who during the eighties. It's particularly destructive during Hamlet's death scene, Kline's final moments steamrollered by James mickey-mousing. Ugh.

There's a review of the original stage production in 1990 at the New York Times, and also of Kline's earlier attempt in 1986. On reflection I have to agree with much of what the reviewer says, although I'd say that that the scene in which Kline directs 'The Murder of Gonzago' is the moment when he truly shines.