I'll take Manhattan

Who, when, how long?
Ethan Hawke, 2000, 1¾ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Stocking-capped.

What's missing?
Oh, rather ask what survives--it's half the time of what a full performance would require, so half the lines are gone, and while they're not precisely the half I'd choose, the slashes are intelligently chosen.

What's changed?
In terms of lines as lines, scarcely anything, though the odd direct address is tossed.

What's odd?
Oh, everything, magnificently . . .

• The setting is Manhattan, and the kingdom is Denmark, Inc.


• "I have of late . . . " opens the film: Hamlet on video by Hamlet, viewed on computer. Much of the film is on video, captured by Hamlet or by Ophelia.


• Fortinbras's challenge is financial, displayed on a USA Today front page, with Claudius tearing the page in half--"So much for him"--to signify his disdain.


• Marcellus becomes Marcella, Horatio's girlfriend, played by the Deadwood-lead-whore-to-be Paula Malcolmson. The unnamed Francisco is a security guard, and the first sight of the Ghost is on a surveillance video; the three come to Hamlet's apartment to apprise him.


• Polonius sneaks a bankroll into Laertes' pocket during the "borrower/lender" speech, but he doesn't ask Ophelia about her conversation w/ L until a later scene--and at the end of that scene, she does not say, "I shall obey, my lord."


• Between those two scenes comes the Hamlet-Ghost interview, which is much more physical than typically, the Ghost touching Ham's face early and embracing him at "remember me."


• "To be" has a wonderful prelude, with Ham watching a Buddhist monk on TV discussing being and nonbeing.


• Ham's letter to O is written--with false starts--in a notebook in a coffeeshop, then delivered to her in her apartment darkroom. Then Pol arrives, Ham flees, and Pol retrieves the accidentally dropped page, though he later characterizes it as having been in "her duty and obedience." (When he tells Gert & Claud this, at their indoor swimming pool, O fantasizes/prefigures her drowning in that pool.)


• As one of at least two "to be" teasers, Hamlet visits Claudius's office, piston in hand--but Claud's not there, so a legitimate reason to delay.


• Finally "to be" is delivered in a Blockbuster video store, and though I had not to this point been enchanted w/ Hawke's Hamlet--had thought it rather flat--this is as good a delivery of that famous soliloquy as I've seen.


• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Steve Zahn) meet Ham at a dance club, and afterward report to Clau & Gert via speakerphone. Then we see Ham, during the "rogue and petty slave" solil., watching a James Dean film (East of Eden?) and something that looks very Buñuel on TV.


• Poster: The Mouse Trap, a video by Hamlet.


• Pol straps wire to a tearful Ophelia ahead of the "nunnery" exchange; she brings a '60s-looking box for 45rpm records, containing his remembrances: a bunch of letters and a rubber ducky. He is affectionate in the scene, kissing her and groping--whereupon he finds the wire at "believe none of us." "If you would marry" is seen on tape.


• The "play" is a surreal pastiche of cliché '50s family happiness. Afterward, Ham gets into a cab and hears Eartha Kitt's buckle-up message--brand new in 2000, I believe.


• Ham bribes the chauffeur and is driving Claud--but there's no explanation of why he declines to kill him while he's praying.


• Pol is killed via a gunshot through a mirrored wardrobe door--the "one word more" is from a phone after Ham has dragged the body from Gert's closet. Afterward, R&G accost Ham in a laundromat--Claud joins them and gut-punches Ham at "look for him in the other place yourself."


• Ham mouth-kisses Claud at "and so my mother."


• Ham (w/ R&G) leaves for England via American Airlines, seen off (silently) by his mother. The captain of Fortinbras becomes a flight attendant, played by Tim Blake Nelson.


• O's single mad scene is at the Guggenheim: Laertes arrives; Polaroids become "herbs."


• Pistol used to kill Polonius handed from Claud to L in a plastic evidence bag, as a fax in arriving from Hamlet, announcing his return.


• Hor picks up Ham at the airport, takes him to cemetery, where Gravedigger (otherwise silent) is singing "All Along the Watchtower." Ophelia's funeral is already underway. Ham offers L his hand to pull him out of grave. Then to Hor's apartment, where two volumes of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry are on display--why, I have no idea, not knowing Mayakovsky. The Ghost and Marcella are there. Ham tells Hor of the intercepted and revised email calling for his death. Then a fax comes, outlining the king's wager on the fencing bout.


• L snubs Ham's apology.


• Gert intercepts the poisoned chalice, and clearly knows what's up--and then, so does Ham. Laertes pulls a gun to decide matters.


• Final Fortinbras speech falls to a TV commentator.

Flesh?

Solid.

Ghost?

Sam Freakin' Shepard, and he's freakin' great--good enough that you don't mind that he appears a couple of extra times.

Gert-Ham eros?

No.

Other characters.

Julia Stiles is an excellent Ophelia, and Bill Murray may well be the best Polonius I've seen. Liev Schrieber is very good as Laertes, Diane Venora (Kline's Ophelia, at age 38) a fine Gertrude, and Kyle MacLachan a good enough Claudius.

This is just a fucking terrific production--thrilling to hear WS's language in a contemporary context and have it still seem so right. I mourn many lost lines and would have done the cutting differently myself--and probably would have made it 3/4 of an hour longer--but that's a quibble. If you didn't know Hamlet at all, it might be a bizarre but still effective film; but if you know the play well, it's a brilliant modernization. Five ear-flap stocking caps.

To sing, or not to sing

Two things before we get started: first, a funny things happened on the way to Elsinore: with about 40 minutes left and Ophelia waxing mad, the disc hung up and absolutely would not be nudged or even chapter jumped beyond that spot. Now you might think, this being my seventh Hamlet (8th counting the reread) in less than a month, I wouldn't exactly have been on daggers and foils to find out how it ended. But as you'll see below, while I was reasonably certain that everyone would end up mincemeat, I wasn't at all certain what the motives and logistics for the mincemeating would be. And as it turned out, even my assumptions were misguided. Anyway, the date of this post is when I started watching; I finally got and watched the replacement on 1/5/08.

Second, and more important, I must confess to knowing as close to zero about opera as can be known: I watched the production as a drama and can assess it only on that basis. If you want a review from someone who presumably knows opera, here's one; Google will presumably guide you to several others.

Who, when, how long?
Simon Keenlyside, 2004, 3 hrs. (opera by Ambroise Thomas)

What sort of Hamlet?

Baritony.

What's missing, changed?

So much that let's just wrap it all up in . . .

What's odd?

Let us pose a philosophical question: if Ophelia were to fall mad in the woods with no one around to hear her, how many times would she die?

There was a point at which this production had me: I was willing to grant Thomas some latitude in recognition of my own ignorance of the medium: a weird prosthetic high forehead on Gertrude? OK, whatever. Laertes sent to Norway by Claudius, and taking leave not of his sister and father (whose absence at this point seemed likely to be for the duration), but of his sister and her boyfriend, to whom he entrusts her? Well, the lack of any real relationship between Ham and L has always seemed at odds w/ Ham's praise of him and declaration of love for him graveside, so OK, take us that way and show us what you can do. The "very like a whale" exchange played in act II, and with Claud, and not only eschewing the whale but employing just one shape, that of a ship? Well, it misses the point, but it's not a fatal misreading. The Claud-Gert affair, per the Ghost's testimony, explicitly predating the murder of Hamlet Sr., which conspiracy, we learn in act III, also includes Polonius (whose only words come at this point)? A different reading, but it might be made to work.

Then came the play within a play, which is just absolutely terrific: a delightfully bawdy, campy pantomime, with all male actors. When Claud reacts, Hamlet accuses him publicly, but then covers his accusation with his maddest actions yet: he fills a goblet with red wine . . . then keeps pouring, soaking the white table linen with the overflow. He pours more wine over his head, then wraps himself with the "bloody" tablecloth. It's a powerful sequence, immediately before intermission, and I was as willing to applaud as was the audience at that point.

And finally, at the start of act III, "Être ou ne pas être," which I'd begun to think we wouldn't hear. I'm still on board--even when, after Ham doesn't slay the praying Claud, Pol enters to tell the king to cool his jets lest he gives the game away. Ham overhears this, so now knows Pol is as guilty as Claud and Gert (why the Ghost didn't bother to mention that is an open question, but let be), and thus has a motive to kill the old fool. Which is precisely not the point in WS's play, of course. But it's OK, 'cause guess what? . . . HE'S NOT HIDING IN GERTRUDE'S CLOSET WHEN HAMLET COMES CALLING. SO HAMLET DOESN'T KILL HIM, AT THIS POINT, OR EVER!

Now just think about that a minute. If Ham doesn't kill Pol, then why does O go mad? Well, for loss of Ham's love, of course--and indeed, in the closest equivalent to the "nunnery" sequence (except that the convent is O's idea), she has become convinced that Ham, who is in fact only distracted by revenge, having just encountered the Ghost for the first time, no longer loves her, and she has already started to come unhinged. So she's just a shallow little twerp? And if Ham doesn't kill Pol, then what's Laertes' motive for killing Ham? Well, O's shallow little twerpy suicide, of course, for which L sensibly blames her ex-beau. But of course anyone who doesn't know the opera can only guess about this at this point--pretty much the point, you'll recall, when the disc crapped out.

OK, so Gert and Ham, in genuine privacy, yammer on and on and fucking on, and what gets killed dead dead dead, instead of Pol, is all the wonderful momentum established right before intermission. Just before this, Gert has brought in O in her wedding gown and announced that Claud has ordered the nuptial altar readied--but of course O knows by this time that that ain't happening, and after the Gert-Ham closet interview comes O's mad scene, singular and solo.

Still in the wedding dress, and now with a pillow/"baby" strapped to her belly, she sings that Hamlet is her husband: "If he were untrue to me, I'd lose my mind." Duh. Now, I have no objection to her having only one mad scene--if I were staging the play, I might merge the two myself. But I feel very strongly about one thing: no matter how many mad scenes she has, she should be limited to ONE SINGLE SUICIDE. But no, in fact, after singing about the "fiery-eyed wili," a water nymph whose job it is to lure poor swimmers to death, she produces a dagger and answers the gnawing question "what are those noncleavagy protrusions from each side of her bra?" (OK, OK: cheap shot: you wouldn't see 'em from a theater seat) by stabbing herself once in each breast. Not content w/ that bloodletting, she also opens a vein in each arm (and I confess I hadn't noticed those prosthetics until she'd stabbed them) and finally, after a superhuman effort that--judging by the ovation of precisely two minutes--must have been spectacular, she dies.

But wait! After rocking on her side during the ovation, SHE RISES! "He is here! I seem to hear his voice! I will punish him for being late!" Then she invokes the white wilis again and drowns herself, to an understandably briefer and less enthusiastic ovation.

OK, one more good bit before the absolutely goofy dénouement: the gravedigging is achieved by spading up a couple of long floor times, removing them, and then just as I was thinking "You're not laying anyone in there with those crossbeams in the way," lifting away the beams themselves. Unfortunately, the gravediggers lack their WS counterparts' sense of humor--they are grave men, to borrow from another tragedy. Ham arrives solo, and though he doesn't yet know that O is dead, he sings an apology to her for putting her is such a state that her "grief-stricken soul, cruelly rejected by me," already seeks heaven. So having established that, how surprised can he be when he finds out she is dead?

Now L enters and, without making clear that she's dead, chides Ham for his treatment of O, then gutstabs him just before the funeral cortège arrives. Ham has his dagger out as well, but he can't bring himself to use it--you'll notice that he has killed no one yet, intentionally or accidentally.

OK, so now Ham has a belly wound, which of course until the 20th century was fatal about eleven times out of ten. But when O is laid next to her grave, he has enough energy to steal her body so that they can go away and be dead together. No serious effort is made to stop him--except by the Ghost, whom everyone sees and who reminds Ham that he hasn't done his filial duty yet. So the Ghost--who earlier had manhandled his son--goes behind Claud and grabs him for Ham to stab.

Well, OK, pretty good mincemeat count now--but that's it. The Ghost tells his son, "Live for your people, Hamlet, God has made you king." "My soul lies in the grave," replies the bloody-bellied boy, "and yet I am a king." The people hosanna him with "vive"s, and so, it appears, vive he will.

Flesh?

Too too Shakespearean to survive.

Ghost?

Bare-chested in his ripped shroud, looking a little Klaus Kinski-ish.

Ham-Gert eros?

No.

Other people?

I think I've covered the interesting ones.

In a nutshell: nuts. They've not in the cast, but let's give it one Rosencrantz and one Guildenstern, for a total of two court ciphers.

It's acting!

Who, when, how long?
Kevin Kline, 1990 (PBS version dir. by Kline, based on Joseph Papp's NYSF production), 3 hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Actorly.

What's missing?
Bits and pieces, judiciously pruned. Ghost appears only once in I.1; no Polonius envoy to report on Laertes in France; no scene w/ Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern--we first see the latter two w/ Ham; there are actual women among the Players, so no joke to "my young lady and mistress" about his voice changing; no "I'll use them according to their deserts"; no dumbshow; no "I will not speak with her" before Ophelia's first mad scene, which begins w/ O's demand for "the beauteous majesty of Denmark"; only one Clown/Gravedigger, and no bit about Alexander's rotted remains being used to stop a bunghole; at swordfight, Laertes accepts Ham's apology without qualification; and they fight w/ foils only, no daggers (and thus no "that's two of his weapons" joke at Osric's expense); no "hoist."

These are all at the margins, and probably none is a unique cut (except perhaps the swordfight dagger and L's officious rebuttal to Ham's apology--about which more anon). But one omission is significant enough it could as well be covered under "What's odd": Hamlet is unarmed.

The production is in modern dress (complete w/ a Danish flag in the lobby and what I assume are more or less accurate Danish military uniforms), so it's natural that a civilian not carry a sword--but it would be equally natural for a royal to carry a ceremonial one. But Ham does not.

Which means that in I.5 "I'll make a ghost of him who lets me" is a hollow threat, and neither he nor the Ghost can ask his comrades to swear their silence by his sword: instead, he simply holds out his hands, and they put theirs on top, like a basketball team about to break from a timeout huddle.

But of course there comes a time when Ham must be carrying a pointy stick to wield rashly. So how do we arm the otherwise unarmed man?

Well, when play-within-the-play assassin Lucianus enters to kill Gonzago, he brandishes a dagger at "thoughts bleak, hands apt," as if weighing other options to "drugs fit," but when he lights upon that option, he disposes of the dagger by impaling the stage with it--whence Ham removes it after everyone has rushed away. Thus he has it when he comes upon the praying Claudius, brandishing it within an inch of the king's ear, and later when he hears a rat behind the arras. An inventive means of putting the weapon in his hands--necessitated by the odd decision to remove it from his hands in the first place.

What's changed?
Most important changes (or colorings) have to do w/ Polonius's children, who seem to share a tacit understanding of the old man's foolishness. As with the other 1990 example, O's heart doesn't quite seem to be in her promise, "I shall obey, my lord"--i.e., break it off w/ Ham; that coincidence may be explained by the feminist resistance of the time. (Oh, failed to mention a small but very interesting omission from that scene: O tells Pol that Ham "hath given countenance to his his speech, my lord/With all the holy vows of heaven"--deleting an important "almost.")

But her brother is the most notable element of this production: a hulking Frankenstein's monster of a Laertes who grows much more of a conscience much earlier in the final scene than WS gave him. As I've mentioned, he accepts Ham's apology, and then, after surrendering the first hit, he has Ham at his mercy after a stumble, but he declines to capitalize, walks away, and yields the second hit unchallenged.

Then after promising Claud to finish it but acknowledging to himself that 'tis almost against his conscience, he begins to put his money where his aside is, going to the rack of foils to exchange his unbated and envenomed blade for a bated, unenvenomed one. But he's interrupted--and perhaps put back on message--by Ham's taunt.

Even then, though, when Ham goes to drink from the poisoned chalice, L stops him--with the blade--then flicks it to cut him. After Ham secures the wicked blade, L (suicidally?) grabs at it and is cut when Ham whips it away.

What else is odd--or, let's say, notable?

• I.2 opens on Gert & Claud playing tonsil hockey.
• At "your chaste treasure," O covers L's mouth w/ her hand, a nice sisterly MYOB gesture.
• Ham swoons backward off platform into his comrades' arms after encountering the Ghost, like a rock star w/ his fans.
• Kline plays act II barefoot.
• Ham has R&G lie with him on their backs at "brave o'erhanging firmament."
• Soliloquies are oddly static.
• The act III Ham-O encounter is strikingly marked almost as much by tenderness as by anger. The remembrances are letters, which Ham tears up, the pieces reappearing in O's second mad scene as the herbs she distributes. At "you jig" Ham grabs her arms and jerks her around like a marionette; by the end of the scene, she seems already well on her way to madness.
• Before the play Ham moves the royals' chairs up onto the stage, which forces the Players to act around them, sometimes descending to the floor--an effective device for getting faces pointing toward the camera. In stark contrast to what I saw the night before, Claud's guilt is manifest: he drops a brandy snifter at "the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife."
• In the Gertrude's closet scene she is at first defiant, then long resistant--more in keeping w/ my reading than most portrayals. (Dana Ivey is a striking Gert, by the way, her mouth often turning down in a remarkable simulation of a Greek tragedy mask.)
• Ham kisses Claud on the mouth at "my mother."

Flesh?

Solid. And O isn't lowered into the grave, so no one jumps in.

Ghost?

Standard Danish Army issue.

Gert-Ham eros?

No.

Other characters?

I've already commented on the interesting ones, but it's worth noting that Hor and Guild and one courtier are played by black actors--notable because I don't believe I've seen an actor of color in any of the five previous versions.

In sum, while I wouldn't call it a bad production, it's certainly the one of the six so far that I'm least likely ever to revisit. I'd never say Kline is a less-skilled actor than Gibson, but of the two 1990 Hamlets, Mel's is by far the more convincing. He seems genuinely unmoored (no Othello pun intended) and capable of committing crazy and destructive and self-destructive acts; Kline's performance never conceals that after he's carried out, he'll hop up, go backstage to wipe off the makeup and change clothes, then go somewhere nice for dinner w/ Phoebe. Three rats behind the arras.

He, Claudius

Who, when, how long?
Derek Jacobi, 1980 (part of BBC's every-freakin'-WS-play project), 3½ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Beebish.

What's missing? Changed?
Scarcely a line--and the completeness made me wonder a couple of times whether I'd heard the lines in the Burton, and thus whether I'd given that production excessive completeness credit.

What's odd?
Nothing's particularly odd, but there are some interesting choices, perhaps most notably a simulated rape by Hamlet of Gertrude in her closet that is clearly the source for Gibson/Zeffirelli. The context is very different in this one, though, because the H-G relationship is not at all sexualized here, so the "rape" can only be about violence and--more to the point--humiliation. Gert is played by Claire Bloom, by the way.

Also notable is the production's making a virtue of budgetary necessity: often there is little or no "set," just an enormous expanse of Beckettian blankness.

Jacobi--who typically delivers his soliloquies directly to the camera--gives some unconventional readings to a few lines. In the "nunnery" exchange, e.g., he emphasizes hath in "It hath made me mad," with a complementary epiphanic mien, as if afraid that his antic disposition has stuck to him like our mothers always told us a weird facial expression would. Both principals are tearful in that sequence--though it begins with a rather obvious low-comedy moment, Ham taking O's book from her and reorienting it to show she'd been "reading" it upside down. The tokens he'd given her seem to consist only of a scarf, with which he feigns to strangle her, alluding, obviously, to a later WS tragedy.

The lead-in Ham-Polonius scene begins w/ Ham entering while Gert and Claudius are still there; Gert approaches Ham, but he recoils (wordlessly, obviously). When Pol takes his leave and Ham replies that there's nothing he'd be as glad to have taken from him, he pulls out his dagger and holds it to his breast for the three "except my life"s, driving Pol away via a threat of suicide.

Then when R&G arrive, Ham delivers "How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz!" to the same character, thus making the same joke of their indistinguishability that readers and audiences always have: he has gotten the name wrong at first stab. [1/3 update: while reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at lunch, I discover that this bit is lifted straight from Stoppard.] Later in the exchange he opens his book and reads--or more likely feigns reading, as he closes the book before finishing--the "what a piece of work" speech.

When Ham reveals his conscience-catching scheme to Horatio, he hands him a copy of the speech he's written. People watching on a 17" screen when the play was first broadcast could probably see that the page was beautifully calligraphed; those watching it in 2007 on a big screen and with the ability to rewind and freeze-frame can see that the dialogue begins:

Ham. Are you honest?
Oph. My lord?

And continues thus.

Ham dons a Death's mask to greet the court arriving for the play. The dumbshow is largely comic, partly explaining the problem of why Claudius doesn't react earlier (though one shot of his face suggests that he's already beginning to be just a bit uneasy). At least one other production that includes both dramas--as most do not--has Claud and Gert chatting and paying scant attention to this preliminary.

During the play Ham grows increasingly manic, actually moving among the players, disrupting their performance to deliver his lines. Claud's ultimate reaction is the most low key I've seen: he doesn't panic, and says "Give me some light" in quiet, measured tones, which leads to the conclusion that Ham has seen what he expected and wanted to see more than what has actually transpired--and indeed, Hor's agreement seems much less certain than is typical.

At Ophelia's grave Laertes spits at Ham in response to "I loved you ever." And in the swordfight Ham immediately knocks L's dagger out of his hand, then lunges for the first hit when L stoops to retrieve it--making L's "No!" the equivalent of a playground "no fair!" Then L wounds Ham when Ham picks up the foil L has dropped by the blade and hands it to L haft away: L takes it and in one motion nicks Ham's wrist with it.

So after this long catalogue of the "odd," I reiterate that there's little really very odd: it's mostly just bits of stagecraft defensible but not automatic from the text--mostly intelligent expansive readings.

Flesh?
Solid, and Ham doesn't jump into O's grave--I'm beginning to think I'm not going to see either variant.

Ghost?
Corporeal, hard, armored, and glowing blue.

Gert-Ham eros?
As indicated above, no.

Other characters?
Of particular note are Patrick Stewart, strong as Claudius (and, just a few years earlier, Sejanus to Jacobi's titular Claudius in the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of the Robert Graves novels about imperial Rome), and an extraordinarily melancholy Horatio--a trait that gives his threat of suicide at the end more force than in any other production I've seen.

Overall, a fine production and in line w/ my grad school-era recollection of that BBC series of the plays: respectful of the texts, but with a blessed lack of awe. Four cetaceous clouds.

Mad Ham

Who, when, how long?
Mel Gibson (dir. Franco Zeffirelli), 1990, 2¼ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Maximal.

What's missing?
As with Olivier's version, Norway is excised, and so all that political stuff; unlike Oliv, Zef doesn't salvage the final Fortinbras speech: the film ends with "Good night . . . to thy rest!" Then an overhead shot pullback.

Anyway, lots is missing, full scenes and lots of lines within scenes. Far more than anything else I've seen so far, this is a movie (w/ a movie star) first, a Shakespeare play second.

As w/ the Russian film, no I.1 Ghost scene--we start w/ an extratextual funeral scene, w/ some lines incorporated from elsewhere. Claudius's line to Laertes about his confidence in Polonius is cut, and this seems to the point, as Claudius does not, in fact, seem to have confidence in Pol, but rather seems only to humor him.

No "rogue and petty slave," no "hoist with his own petard," no "very like a whale," no lecture to the players (we see the Player King studying the lines on a page, and Hamlet walks by and confers momentarily and inaudibly), no mention of the question of Ophelia's burial in consecrated ground.

What's changed?
I had made notes about other omissions but had to revise them when lines turned up in unfamiliar contexts. "Get thee to a nunnery" is razored out of Hamlet's early-act III confrontation w/ Ophelia only to be blurted suddenly amid the dialogue between the two before the play-within-a-play. Most of the nunnery stuff is inserted there, saving the final "Get thee" until after the play, when Ham is positively giddy w/ the success of his plot. Then he reprises the line to O (who is inexplicably still at her seat in the wake of the uproar following Claudius's panicky exit), kisses her long and tonguily, then, "Farewell."

Similarly, we hear no specifics of the Claudius-Laertes plot until after an extraordinarily bland Osric broaches the bet to Ham. Then when we do hear about the plot, first it's Claudius's poisoned wine, then Laertes's anointed blade--the unkosher lack of a safety tip for the foil isn't mentioned at all, though after the fencers are injured and Gertrude poisoned, Laertes mentions the "unbated and envenomed" sword.

Besides moving lines from scene to scene, Zef also shuffles them within a scene, usually with a guessable reason. E.g., all of Gert's conversation w/ Ham in I.2 is grouped after all of Claud's so that he can leave and the mother-son interview can be private (though that means there's no court audience for "Seems? Nay, madam . . . ").

The order of "To be," the interview w/ O (or most of it), and the arrival of the Players is per Oliv, and here almost none of the dialogue w/ the Players is kept--pity, as the Player King is played by the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite. Pol's "the best actors in the world" bit comes as an intro to their performance, which substitutes thematically unrelated antic acrobatics for the dumbshow. (And oddly, Claudius, not Ophelia, complains of Ham's chatter, "You are as good as a chorus, my lord.")

As in the Russian version, we see Ham on board the ship pulling the old switcheroo, and in stark contrast to Gielgud's apparent squeamishness about Ham's petard-hoisting, Zef cuts directly from this extratextual scene to another: R&G being led to the chopping block!

What's odd?
Geez, what's not? Some of the odd (or at least unusual) is quite good: "To be" is delivered in a crypt (though one wishes Zef had trusted the viewer to get it w/out the repeated line-linked shots of a skeleton); O in her first mad scene (dark-eyed and effective Helena Bonham Carter) is openly accusatory toward Gert; the "herbs" in her second mad scene are chicken bones and straw, and she runs off into the country after, last seen alive sitting on a bridge, with a cut then to Gert's narrative of the suicide (then an overkill shot of the by-now-clichéd O-in-the-wet).

Some of it is defensible if arguable interpretation: this is the most violent Hamlet I've seen--like Gibson's Mad Max or Martin Riggs, always a hair's breadth from killing anyone long before he actually does: he slams O against a wall, kicks a stool out from under Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern?) and later assaults one or the other, and he nearly chokes Gert w/ the chain bearing her miniature of Claud before simulating rape in speaking of her in Claud's bed.

Some of it is just odd: Gert escapes Ham's assault by kissing him passionately on the mouth--Glenn Close is nine years older than Gibson and looks much closer to his age: easily the hottest Gert I've seen. The eros is there in the Oliv, of course, but here it's consistently more of the point. But OK, let's grant that even that's a legit interpretation. But what's the damn deal w/ Ham's slapstick in the swordfight? In this version each pass requires different fencing gear, and the second pass is with broadswords--Ham feigns inability to lift his, and from that point to his wounding, he's more concerned w/ getting laughs from the court than w/ his swordplay. Just weird and out of place--hey, this ain't the time, right before everyone ends up mincemeat, that we want comic relief.

Flesh?
Solid. And not only does Ham not jump in O's grave, neither does Laertes.

Ghost?
Corporeal--simply another character.

Gert-Ham eros?
Duh. An interesting difference: in each of the previous three, Gert seems to have some suspicion of the chalice when carousing to Ham, but this Gert is oblivious, even offering Ham a drink after she's had her taste.

Other people?
Claud is the too, too solid Alan Bates, relishing his role as heavy. Polonius is Ian Holm, who can't help but be Bilbo Baggins to me henceforth. He's fine, though there's little surprising, save some real heat in chiding O re Ham's tenders. O, for her part, is less obsequious than usual in acknowledging her duty to her father (in line w/ her later aggressiveness toward Gert).

This is probably the least good of the four versions I've watched so far, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not good--and golly, just its oddness ensures that it's as interesting as the others. Three petards.

Big Dick

Who, when, how long?
Burton, dir. Gielgud, filmed on stage at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 30 June-1 July 1964, 3¼ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Huuuuuge.

What's missing?
This suddenly became a very interesting question late in the play. For most of four acts, the answer was scarcely anything, or scarcely anything I missed, anyway, save to odd flubbed line. (Likewise, next to nothing changed--most significant I noticed, e.g., was the Ghost's "Adieu, adieu, Hamlet, remember me," subbing the name for "adieu" #3.)

Then suddenly, we go straight from Claudius and Laertes after Ophelia's second mad scene to the scene in which arrive first Hamlet's letter announcing his return, then tidings of O's death. Lost is one of the shortest scenes in the play, if not the shortest (go ahead: look it up if it's important to you), thirty lines in which Horatio receives Hamlet's letter of return, containing the story of the pirates. Then in V.2, the long, long final scene, c. 50 ll. are struck in which Ham gives Hor the rest of the story--stealing the letter and forging a replacement--and finally the payoff: ten lines or so at the end, including the Ambassador's speech announcing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's demise. The only suggestion of that survives right after the long stretch of deletion, when Hor does still say, "So G & R go to't" and Ham replies that they asked for it. But "it" is not specified.

If you're cutting only 100 ll. or so from the play, why those lines, that subplot? So that Ham doesn't intentionally kill anyone who doesn't unquestionably deserve it? Would Guilgud really bowdlerize thus? At first I thought maybe he was feuding w/ Tom Stoppard and didn't want to plug his new play, but in fact Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was still two years away.

What's odd?
Costumes and furniture are contemporary and quite bland, save for Osric's feathery hat. The one period costume is worn by the Ghost, about which more anon.

Flesh?
Too too solid. Ham doesn't jump into the grave, which is raised on the bi-level stage.

Ghost?
Wonderful! Gielgud voices him, but he is seen only as an enormous shadow on the backdrop, in helmet and armor. If the nondescript modern dress of the production is meant to be a disconcerting reminder that we're viewing a play performed by our own contemporaries, the violation of that norm for the one otherworldly character whiplashes us from that ordinariness. Of course, it's a device that can work brilliantly on stage but might be hard to analogize on stage.

Hamlet-Gertrude eros?
Zero.

Other people?
Hume Cronyn as Polonius gives the only consistently distinguished performance other than Burton. I'd thought there's only one way to play Pol, but Cronyn portrays him in the first couple of scenes as weightier than usual--in other words, gives a sense of why shallow people might indeed respect him and think what he has to say is worth listening to. After that, his silliness is more interesting because it's a contrast to the better front we've seen he's sometimes capable of presenting.

Sadly, the rest of the cast is thoroughly pedestrian--the guy playing Claudius is an embarrassment--with the notable exception of the woman playing Ophelia, who, without any earlier indication of talent, is superb in the mad scenes, bending her body in various tortured directions and generally manifesting a kineticism that Kate Winslet may have studied when her turn came.

This production falls into the category of more interesting than good, but it's pretty good at that. Burton plays to the people in the cheap seats, and while, of course, the Olivier I saw wasn't playing to any seats at all, it's still about as opposite an approach to the role as is imaginable. "Understatement" clearly was not in Burton's vocabulary. If the film of the play--which, by the way, is not bad: obviously camerawork is limited, but there are a few useful closeups--is interesting, I'll bet a "making of," including unguarded footage from rehearsal, would be fascinating. I can't but think the Gielgud-Burton mixture was a volatile one. Oh, one other note: for all his sawing the air and splitting the ears of the groundlings, Burton excels in simply conveying the meaning of the partly archaic language. Four nunneries.

Russkies

Who, when, how long?
Innokenti Smoktunovsky, 1964, 2¼ hr.

What sort of Hamlet?
Siberian.

What's missing?
Presumably about half the lines of the play, since this version, ten minutes shorter than Olivier's, is marvelously unhurried, stopping to dwell on the waves coming to shore, or Ophelia's maids dressing her for Polonius's funeral, or the makeshift construction--two parallel lances, three swords laid across, a banner draped over--of a pallet to carry dead Hamlet in procession, two or three magnificent minutes of silent film after the delivery of the play's final lines. The translation is by Boris Pasternak, but presumably the credit for the extraordinary pacing goes to the director (looking it up now), Grigori Kozintsev.

The approach is in stark contrast to Olivier's: where O boldly slashed three important characters (or two if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are [fairly] counted as one; maybe two and a half?), this production trims at the margins but hangs onto almost everyone (still only one Clown/Gravedigger; and I don't believe we see the ambassadors to Norway; and the guards who first see the Ghost may not have speaking parts: scene 1 is cut, the film beginning with Hamlet galloping to Elsinore and embracing Gertrude, and his first meeting w/ the Ghost ends with him solo, so no demand for secrecy or sharing of his plan to feign an antic disposition. The result is that while you're aware of cuts--"Neither a borrower nor a lender," e.g. (Communist censorship?), and Ham's entire death scene boiled down to "The rest is silence"--you don't see the film as missing entire plot and thematic limbs, as Olivier's does.

There is almost no theology--this omission almost certainly political: no mention by the Ghost of his purgatorial status, no scene with Ham seeing Claudius at prayers and thus forgoing an easy kill. We do have the canon curtailing Ophelia's funeral rite because of her questionable death.

Oh, also: no pirates.

What's changed?
Very little, distinct from the previous issue. Most notable is that we see several scenes only described in the play. We see Ophelia at her sewing when Hamlet comes into her closet and plays out, in dumbshow, almost a dance, the scene she describes to her father in the play (and thus the description is cut). Oh! And before that, she reads, from the back of a small portrait of Ham, his "Doubt thou the stars are fire."

Incidentally, the subtitles are for the most part simply WS, not an attempt to render Pasternak's rendering back into idiomatic (or non-) English. So, when Claudius asks Gertrude for her opinion of Polonius's assertion that Ham's melancholy is down to thwarted love, the subtitle gives her response as "It may be, very like." What the Russian Gert has actually said is "Da." Magnificently rich language, Russian!

We also see Ham, at sea, steal and counterfeit the death warrant R&G are carrying, with the descriptive speech to Horatio, seasoned with the "hoist with his own petard" line to Gert, as voiceover, following a reprise of the Ghost's "Adieu, adieu, remember me." Similarly, a much-truncated "rogue and petty slave" soliloquy is delivered as interior monologue in the presence of the players.

What's odd?
I recall nothing that seemed to violate the spirit of the play or, as with Olivier's prologue, brand the film as the director's work rather than WS's. Moderately odd: Claudius briefly applauds the play before getting it (there's no dumbshow), then leaves in haste, calling for a light only when he reaches the corridor. Ham, who is in general an even icier version of Olivier's character, laughs maniacally while dragging dead Pol from Gert's closet--then cut to the castle's exterior, where Ham's muffled laughter can still be heard. At the duel, Gert shows up only after the action has begun.

The oddest thing for someone who knows about three words of Russian is the subtitling. I've already mentioned the decision for the most part to revert to the original language--nothing wrong with that. But the titles miss a lot: sometimes in dialogue character A's lines will be rendered but character B's not. Since I'm probably as attuned to the play as at any time in my life, having reread it and seen another film version in the past week, it wasn't a problem, but it might mess w/ someone who doesn't have the text fresh in mind.

Flesh is "too too" what?
It's too too cut from the script. Ham doesn't jump into Ophelia's grave, and, oddly, Laertes jumps in while O is still waiting to be lowered into it. Another oddity of that scene: Ham asks "What is the reason you use me thus? I loved you ever" not of Laertes but of dead O.

Ghost?
Bergmanesque, trailing a long black cape in the wind. We see his human eyes briefly. But his first scene is cut, and his presence in Gert's closet is signaled only by a musical crescendo, Ham's face, and Gert's question about why Ham looks on empty air.

Ham-Gert eros?
I'd say no, or at least much less than in the Olivier. Interesting that between her opening embrace of Ham and the scene in her closet, she makes not the slightest attempt to seem conflicted about her situation. But as in the Oliv, she is completely turned against Claudius after the latter scene.

Other people?
Laertes has a bit more gravitas--there's another nice extratextual scene in which he retrieves a presumably heirloom sword from a casket before storming Elsinore with his cronies after learning of his father's death.

Oph--played by the absolutely luminescent Anastasiya Vertinskaya--is infinitely more interesting here than in the Olivier. In her mad scenes she has none of the manic quality that is routinely (one might say textually) brought to play; instead, she seems to be in a fog, as if she's taken a drug whose effects are unfamiliar to her. As in the Oliv, we have the image of her on her back in the water, but here she's at the bottom of a crystal-clear stream, which is carrying away the herbs from the second mad scene. Where the other scene is a little weird, this one is chilling.

In fine, this may or may not be a better Hamlet than Olivier's; it is most certainly a better, more assured film. I guess I haven't mentioned yet (though perhaps have hinted at) the gorgeous b/w cinematography. Another plus is a score by one Dmitri Shostakovitch--wonderful music, but music in service of the film, not itself; some of the best sound, in fact, is silence. Five Yorick's skulls.

Larry

My melancholy month
A dozen Hamlets

The project that gave birth to this blog was a plan to screen as
many DVD versions as I could find of Shakespeare's tragedy of the melancholy
Dane, but if that was the birth, then the impregnation (or rather, farther back,
the foreplay, or even the first flirtation--but enough of that metaphor) was a
decision this winter to forgo my annual screening of the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius in favor of rereading the Robert Graves novels on which the
series was based. Yes, that's right: every winter for the past, I don't know,
eight? ten? years, I've devoted eleven-plus hours of my winter
entertainment to what is essentially a soap opera about the imperial family of
first-century Rome. But not this winter.

That decision left a void in my wintertime weeknight dinnertime
viewing. (Let's strive for One Element of My Anality per paragraph: Monday
through Thursday, I typically watch a TV show on DVD with dinner; Friday through
Sunday evening, I watch a dinnertime DVD movie.) No problem: having completed my collection of the HBO western Deadwood, I was ready to re-view the entire run.

That in turn meant that I'd have thirty-six nights
worth of weeknight dinnertime entertainment reserved from my own DVD library,
rather than the usual thirteen. And that meant (here comes this
paragraph's anality fact) that instead of my standard employment of my
two-at-a-time-unlimited Netflix subscription--one TV disc and one movie per
week--I'd have both slots free for movies for the majority of the winter. So why
not do something unusual with that freedom?

Now at about this time I was reading a story in the New
Yorker--while on the stair machine in the morning, as is my wont (a.f.
#4)--about the contrast between Laurence Olivier's and Orson Welles's treatments
of Shakespeare when I thought, "The play's the thing!" Well, not in those words,
exactly, but I did decide right then to dine whole-Hamlet. So I loaded
my Netflix queue and reread the play, jotting a set of questions to ask about
each production.

Since I started the project, a friend has directed me to an existing Nine Hamlets, and then I stumbled onto the Hamlet Weblog. I'll read these once I've finished my own, and I'll look for the 15 or 20 more such sites that are probably out there, but for now, enough prologue; to it:

Who, when, how long?

Olivier, 1948, 2½ hr.

What sort of Hamlet?

Pretty.

What's missing?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and thus "I have of late . . . lost all my mirth"--the "What a piece of work is [a] man" bit that, because of Hair, is for my generation the most familiar, if rearranged and imprecisely quoted, passage); Fortinbras, and indeed any notion of Norway or the threat of war; Clown 2 (and thus the Gravediggers' dialogue before Hamlet and Horatio arrive).

What's changed?

The "nunnery" encounter preceded "To be," which is in turn followed by the (R&G-less) arrival of the players, whose scenes are thus consecutive. Ham's instructions to Hor to observe Claudius during the inserted speech are truncated, and the play is dumbshow only. Hor. gets some of Ham's lines with the Gravedigger, and he gets the nonexistent Fortinbras's final speech of the play dictating funeral arrangements for Ham--but that speech is then followed by "Good night, sweet prince/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" as the final lines of the film.

What's odd?

• Ophelia floating on her back in the river, singing.
• The sets, especially the (obvious) miniatures, seem to have been made of papier-mâché in Mrs. Willoughby's fourth-grade classroom.
• Ham's Howard Beale-like swoon after each encounter with the Ghost.
• A prologue, employing the "So oft it chances" line from act I, scene 4, followed by the utterly twentieth-century "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind"--bizarre.
• The "bare bodkin" looks like a letter opener; Ham drops it into the bay at "thus conscience."

Flesh is "too too" what?

Solid. And in another element with a significant variant, Ham does not jump into Ophelia's grave.

Ghost?

Zombiesque, or maybe a Greek tragedy mask. He's invisible in the scene in Gertrude's closet, but for a blurry moment.

Hamlet-Gertrude eros?

Yes, à la Lesbos. Claudius sees the mutual attraction, incidentally, and is jealous as hell. Also, Gert is completely convinced by Hamlet after the killing of Polonius and rejects Claud's touch thereafter.

Other people?

Ophelia and Laertes are sweet, dumb children of their father. Osric is an over-the-top fop--even gets to take a pratfall down stairs.

Olivier's approach is clearly to understate and subtilize the hero, allowing him anger only in his mother's closet and obvious disorientation only in the meetings with the ghost (where the focus-fucking camerawork anticipates Vertigo). Soliloquies presented mostly as voiceover. Approach to cutting is brave: rather than nibble at the edges, hack w/ a broadsword. Four bare bodkins.