Bloody or nothing worth

Who, when, how long?
David Tennant, 2009, 3 hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Barefoot and poignant.

What's missing?
Hmm, didn't have my crib sheet with me while watching, so I wasn't thinking about this question. Let me look at some of the ones from the original Elsinore Project 3 years ago . . .

Oh, of course: the Fortinbras subplot ends with the "little patch of ground" sequence of IV.iv; with no F to arrive in V.ii, the play ends with Horatio's "flights of angels" line.

No pirates, but otherwise, it seems pretty much complete in terms of the elements everyone remembers. Some reshuffling, though, and presumably--since it's not a hurried 3 hours--a lot of lines judiciously pruned.

What's changed?
Main thing I noticed was that, with Fortinbras subbed out of the game in the 120th minute, the Stoppardian "R & G are dead" line is given to Horatio and moved to the beginning of V.ii--oh, and right, it actually subs for Ham's whole 80-line narrative re the pair's conspiracy, before the arrival of Osric.

Oh, something else, and this annoyed me: Laertes' foil is referred to as "unblunted" rather than "unbated" both times. I'm not aware of that being a textual variant, and it's grotesquely unpoetic, so the only explanation seems to be a dumbing down of the language--but why that word, rather than one of the many others no longer current in the language? Odd . . . which brings us to . . .

What's odd?
Mostly good stuff, most endemic the surveillance cameras scattered around the castle (I suppose I should mention that it's a more or less modern-dress production), which allow for some interesting POV effects. Funny thing is, though, that we never have any sense than anyone is monitoring those cameras. The surveillance in the play is conducted through one-way mirrors rather than arras (arrases? arrasai?), which means Ham has to shoot the rat Polonius rather than stab him, and I'm sorry, but shooting just isn't as satisfactory.

Flesh?
Too too solid.
Ghost?
A nice touch, unprecedented in my knowledge except in the 2002 Peter Brook production--which had only 13 cast members and so had to do some doubling--is the conceit that the elder Hamlet and Claudius were twins: Patrick Stewart plays both. This is a fascinating strategy because it undercuts all of Hamlet's comments about the vast differences between the two men--especially in the Gertrude's chamber scene, when he forces her to look upon the two faces together. "Uh, gee, Hammy, I dunno--they pretty much look the same to me." Inexplicably, though, Stewart gives the Ghost a Scottish accent. I would have wondered whether he was confused about which tragedy he was in, but Banquo's ghost is mute. It's just a silly, pointless, distracting choice; the fuck were they thinking?
Ham-Gert eros?
Not exactly none, but only in short bursts and almost always overwhelmed by violent impulses.

Other people?
Oliver Ford Davies may be the best Polonius ever, and Gregory Doran's direction of the character really gets to the heart of the eternal paradox that one of the most fatuous characters WS ever created can say things that make so much sense that they've been quoted approvingly out of context for centuries. I guess it would come down to "even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn": the blowhard says so fucking much that of course he sometimes makes sense, if only by accident. The I.iii leavetaking by Laertes is wonderful, hilarious, with Ophelia and L exchanging arched eyebrows during P's lecture (Claudius and Gertrude do the same when he bloviates), and finally chiming in with the "neither a borrower nor a lender be" bit, obviously having heard it a zillion times while growing up.

And this is "other people" only in an ancillary all-but-nameless-players sense, but the dumbshow also unscrambles one of the perennial problems of the play: why does Claudius not notice that his guilt is being played out in that sequence even before the spoken play? Often the dumbshow is cut, and if it's not, we are meant to see that C just really isn't paying much attention to the short subject. Here, though, the dumbshow is so farcical that you're looking at the bizarre costumes and makeup and not really noticing the stylized action--unless, of course, you know to do so. And we do get one glimpse of C looking vaguely uneasy, but then he shakes it off--because who could take this silliness seriously? A brilliant approach to a troublesome element.

Fun to return to Denmark, and a very worthy reason to do so.

The rest is silence

Who, when, how long?
Kenneth Branagh, 1996, 4 hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
65mm.

What's missing?
Not a bloody line--and now that I've seen this, I'm confident that that is not true of any other version I've seen; I'm also confident that, reverence to the Bard notwithstanding, no film version should strive to include every blessed line.

What's changed?
Very little textually, but I did notice that about ten lines that Claudius speaks beginning c. IV.5.80 (editions vary), "When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions . . .," get moved to the start of that scene. Maybe there are other such liberties, but I wasn't alert enough to catch them.

Oh, wait: there are some lines not delivered per the text, perhaps most notably and effectively during the scene where Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude his theory about Hamlet's madness: he brings Ophelia in, forcing her to start reading the letter. Overcome, she runs away, whereupon Pol reads the poem, but then Hamlet himself takes over, as we see a flashback to Ham & O in bed.

I'm not sure whether that falls under the rubric of the changed or the odd. Of course, no audience since WS's time has not wondered whether O & Ham have actually made the beast with two backs, and I'm not at all sure what's gained by making it explicit, as Branagh does in three or four flashbacks. (Well, aside from seeing Branagh and Winslet naked, to which I certainly have no objection.) Those flashbacks completely change the tenor of Laertes' farewell lecture to O, as well as Pol's chiding afterward: they're both telling her "don't fuck him," and she's guilty because that horse is already out of the barn. Maybe it's not a minus, but I don't see it as a plus. More about that interesting sequence below.

What's odd?
Quite a bit, some to the good, most not.

Let me start with the worst: the ending just absolutely blows. In the text, there's a stage direction, "March afar off, and shot within," after which Hamlet asks, "What warlike noise is this?" and Osric answers, "Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland / To th' ambassadors of England gives / This warlike volley." From that evidence (and intuition, and will, perhaps) the dying Hamlet "prophes[ies] th' election lights / On Fortinbras" for the now-vacant Danish throne.

How does that translate to the final fencing duel being intercut with the Norwegian army marching on Elsinore, overrunning all sentries, and skewering Osric such that when he delivers the line, he holds up his bloody hand? How does that translate to F (Rufus Sewell at his testosteronic peak) being crowned while Hamlet's still warm? It's all an inexplicable overreach of the text--did Branagh decide that the final scene just wasn't gripping enough as written?

Apparently so, because he also turns Laertes into a rank coward in that scene, running away from Hamlet after nicking him with the unbated and envenomed foil--running away and up a flight of stairs, so that after Hamlet nicks him back w/ the poison blade, he can, as if the foul practice is insufficiently turned on him, tumble over the balustrade to the floor below. Silly, silly, silly shit, followed by Ham slinging the envenomed blade from the landing to the ground to skewer Claudius, then unloosing a chandelier onto him before running down to force the poisoned chalice onto him. It's like fucking Die Hard Danish. Finally, we have a statue of old Hamlet being toppled by the Norwegians in an unsubtle and completely inapt allusion to the toppled Lenin statues after the Wall came down. Look, if Hamlet has just been the last bastion of corrupt Communism, why the hell should we care about his moral dilemmas in the first place? This is just brainless filmmaking--"Hey, we have a big statue of old Hamlet--you know what we could do with it at the end? . . . "

And yet.

Back to the Laertes-Ophelia-Polonius sequence in I.3. Maybe I'm just dim, but in all the times I've read the play and all the films of it I've seen in the past five or six weeks, it has never before been so obvious to me that Laertes' lecture to Ophelia parallels the lecture he's about to receive from Polonius, and thus clearly suggests that he's a foppish Polonius in training. One seemingly pointlessly weird thing about that sequence is that when Pol starts his farewell speech, the scene abruptly shifts from outdoors to a chapel. At first I thought, "Brilliant: this speech is a flashback, addressing one question I've always had: if Laertes has already taken his leave from his father once, as he tells O he has, why has Pol waited until now to impart these words of wisdom?" Well, I still think that would be a brilliant way to play it, but that's not Branagh's game, because instead of bringing us back to the outdoors location for the final farewells and Pol's badgering of O, we stay in the chapel, making the scene shift just a strange puzzle. Nonetheless, the scene ends on a high, as a tearful O delivers the final line, "I shall obey, my lord," not aloud to her father, as in every other version I've seen that includes the scene, but as an interior monologue.

Other unusual approaches are hit and miss: Ham essentially provides a comic crowd warm-up for the play-within-a-play, telling jokes and dragging Pol into the act. It's interesting, but I don't know if it's useful on balance. He also dashes back to the stage after the first scene to ask Gert what she thinks--a device with some precedent. The play itself is a series of rapid cuts with a lot of reaction shots--clearly Ham and Hor are not the only ones observing the reactions from the royal box. When the Player King is killed, we also get a couple of cuts to Old Hamlet's murder. This just all seems rather gimmicky and obvious.

On the other hand, Claudius's quasi-attempt to repent afterward is cleverly staged in a confessional. For those non-Catholics in the crowd, this is where Catholics go to own up to their sins to a priest as an intermediary of God. In the old days, this was supposed to be confidential, so there was a screen between the penitent's closet and the priest's. So here, Claudius is going through his self-serving declaration of inability to repent while sitting with his back to the screen. Then when he asks angels to help him to his knees, he assumes the penitent's position, and we see suddenly that Ham is in the priest's closet. When he muses that he could kill Claud now, we see his dagger come through the grille, toward Claud's ear, which I liked a lot. Unfortunately, they had to take it a step further--a fantasy moment in which Ham actually drives the blade home and blood spurts. Unnecessary, Ken. Still, a fine, inventive scene.

There is much that's unusual (nude scenes aside) about the treatment of Ophelia. When she comes in to tell Pol of Ham's strange appearance in her closet, she uses up too much emotion--it reminded me of "Thomas Kent" having to be toned down by the playwright in his early speech about Rosalind in Shakespeare in Love. "She's some baggage we never even see," says WS (or words to that effect). "What will you do when you meet your true love?" Same thing here: she has two mad scenes to come, plus the maddening exchange w/ Ham; Branagh the director should have held her back here.

After Polonius is killed, we get a gratuitous scene of soldiers violating O's bedchamber, looking for the killer. Then she appears, calling to Ham, before he runs away from R&G and co. Again untextually (maybe Branagh just wanted to get Kate's face onscreen as much as possible, which is a reasonable strategy), we see her seeing her bloody dead father being carried away. We see her straitjacketed and capped at the start of her first mad scene, and then after the second, we see her getting hosed down in a cell--and we see that she has secreted the key in her mouth. And when she's dead, we get an obligatory shot of her soggy drowned face.

This is all kind of ghoulish stuff, and all completely unnecessary. On the other hand, her second mad scene, as static as the first one (once Gert loosens her binding) is kinetic, is a quiet marvel, played in a face-to-face squat with Laertes, both of them reflected in a mirror behind. It's one of several good mirror scenes in the film, maybe the best. At the end of the scene, any trained psychologist--hell, anyone who's watched a few psychological dramas--can see that she's made her decision and she wants watching 24/7.

Another notable use of mirrors is in the "To be" soliloquy and the following exchange w/ O--the mirrors in a hallway of doors are two-way, and Claud and Pol are secreted behind one, but which? Well, the one he's addressing, of course--and the tenuousness of the separation is such that Claud flinches when Ham brandishes his bare bodkin. When O comes, Ham doesn't suspect they're being spied on until the spies make a noise just before "Where is your father"--this makes the rough treatment of her before that point a bit puzzling: cruel to be kind? In any case, after he begins to suspect, he ramps up his abuse, dragging her from door to door as he searches, then finally pressing her face up against the mirror/window he senses is concealing the spies.

But it's another soliloquy that provides one of the high points of the film, and one of the most unusual readings--though why unusual is hard to fathom, because it's clearly the right one. This is the soliloquy after asking Fortinbras's captain about the force initially mustered to march on Denmark, now Poland-bound. Hamlet then muses on the pointlessness of such war--a speech parallel to the "What's Hecuba to him" soliloquy after the First Player's rote speech, but more expansive. This is glory, Hamlet concedes: to risk all for nothing. But if some will risk all for nothing, how the fuck can someone who has a genuine grievance still be sitting on his unhomicidal ass? "From this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" It's a big fucking speech, a final declaration--exile to England notwithstanding--that Claud is going down. But bizarrely, it gets slight play if any in the other versions.

Here, Branagh positions it right before intermission and stages it with a gorgeous snow-and-mountain background. And in that snowy field the Norwegian soldiers are arrayed, ready to fight and kill and die for an eggshell. As the speech reaches its climax, the camera pulls back, showing more of the mountains, which dwarf the shrinking Hamlet, thwarting his ambition just as his exile does. It's an amazing bit of filmmaking--and of Shakespeare-filming--and it makes you ready to forgive a lot of the film's flaws.

Flesh?
Too too solid. This soliloquy, incidentally, is where I cast off my early doubts about the production and about Branagh's Hamlet. He gets a 10 on this solil. and high marks on all the rest.

Ghost?
Stiff, a stiff. Spooky blue contact lenses. Had no idea until the end credits that he's played by Brian Blessed, who was Augustus to Derek Jacobi's Claudius way back when. The big Hamlet-Ghost scene is sorta Stephen King-ish, or maybe early Sam Raimi-ish: big cracks open up in the ground, a ton or so of dry ice is converted to smoke--silly.

Ham-Gert eros?
Not a bit of it; Julie Christie is as maternal a Gertrude as I've seen.

Other people?
A big freakin' distraction, frankly--too many cameos by Stars:

• Jack Lemmon, absolutely dreadful as Marcellus;
• Gérard Depardieu, nearly as bad as Reynaldo, apparently intent upon crafting an accent that can't be understood but isn't really French;
• John Mills, unrecognizable as Old Norway;
• Charlton Heston, surprisingly acceptable as the First Player;
• John Gielgud and Judi Dench as Priam and Hecuba, who, of course, are mentioned only in a speech delivered by Hamlet and then the Player, and so are seen only for a few seconds and make barely articulate sounds; it is impossible not to wonder what stars of that magnitude earn for such appearances;
• Billy Crystal, surprisingly good as the lead gravedigger;
• Robin Williams, as a sort of Mayor of Munchkinland Osric; is this when he started to be consistently insufferable, or had that already happened?

On the other hand, casting Timothy Spall as Rosencrantz (or was he Guildenstern?) was a perfect touch, and something should be said about Jacobi's Claudius.

Well, here's something to say about it: it's just the best Claudius ever (and I know at least one person who thinks his Hamlet was the best ever). This Claudius is a political genius--he's so good that if you knew nothing about the play, you would think him a sympathetic character in I.2, and you would be skeptical of the Ghost's testimony until Claud confesses just before the "To be" soliloquy. At the play-within-a-play he loses his cool for a while, but he regains his seductive politesse when Laertes returns. This portrayal makes it absolutely understandable that Gertrude would fall for him, whatever Hamlet might think of his father's and uncle's comparative merits, and it makes it sensible, moreover, that all Denmark would have fallen in line. In short, it makes Hamlet the outsider, the sour-grapes spoilsport, that he really should be at the start of the play--it makes him earn our allegiance.

A very good, if very uneven, production; as good as any at its best, as silly as any at its worst, but take it for all in all, well worth four Mouse-traps.

Hoist

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

1990

Live by Netflix, die by Netflix.

This was supposed to be the epilogue to the Denmark Project, following the Branagh Hamlet. But Nf leapfrogged this over the other on Tuesday, then on Wednesday processed Hamlet . . . to be shipped Thursday . . . from Houston . . . to arrive next Tuesday.

This was filmed in Yugoslavia, the Rosencrantzguildenstern of geopolitics, and how Tom Stoppard got someone to put up money for him to film his absurdist play elevating the most minor of Hamlet's characters to the leads is a mystery probably best not thought about. Whatever it cost to make, it can't have earned out. (OK, couldn't help but look: surprisingly, early a quarter of a million in U.S. b.o., and another quarter of a million is Australian dollars; there must be more Hamlet nerds--or Gary Oldman and/or Tim Roth nerds--than I thought. And it seems to have been released in a two-disc set, which also suggests that there must be a "cult following." Well, good!)

What is this play/movie about?

• Death
• Drama
• Determination
• The anti-Aristotelian notion that no one is a minor character is his or her own play.

Oh, one other thing: this film features not just the best but the two best Hamlet dumbshows I've seen.

Finite jest

Who, when, how long?
Maximilian Schell, 1961, as abridged to 1½ hrs. and eviscerated in 1999 by Mystery Science Theater 3000

What kind of Hamlet?
Teutonic. Very.

What's missing?
Not a pertinent question under the circumstances; according to IMDb the made-for-TV West German original was 152 min., and given the sometimes plodding pace, it can be presumed to have jettisoned at least as much as the 2½-hour versions I've seen. There's no Fortinbras/Norway plot; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear in the IMDb cast list, but MST3K dropped them.

What's changed?
Uh, aside from making the play ludicrous and boring, you mean? I was laughing too hard at the commentary to make many notes.

What's odd?
Well, apart from seeing the silhouettes of a guy and two robots sticking up in front of the "screen" and listening to their commentary, how about this: in the English-dubbed version, Claudius is voiced by Ricardo Montalban.

Flesh?
Solid. And for the first time, I got to see Hamlet jump into the grave while Laertes is in it.

Ghost?
Oh, golly. Liberacesque? One of the robots suggested Rip Taylor, and that's a fair call too. But where have I seen those jutting shoulders before? I've got it: Riff and Magenta in the finale of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Ham-Gert eros?
Not so you'd notice.

Other people?
Yes, there are.

It's funny: I'm looking on Nf and seeing a bunch of one- and two-star reviews from fans of MST3K. I've seen the show only once or twice before this, and if this is really one of the worst episodes ever aired, as several reviewers claim, I might as well buy the whole series right now, because I found it brilliant. The irreverent cracks about Shakespeare's language are funny, but the best remarks show both a sophisticated knowledge of the play and a well-developed critical sense of acting and direction. Oh, and lest you suspect that they made an adequate production bad via their cuts, 252 IMDb raters have given the (presumably full) production an astonishing average of 2.3 stars out of 10. This version, though, gets four jester's caps from me.

And such small portions!

Who, when, how long?
William Houston, 2003, 2 hrs. In fact, only 1:54, not, thankfully, the 3:40 reported by Netflix. I see that IMDb shows it as 220 minutes as well, which makes me wonder whether much of what is wrong with this is down to hamhanded editing. More than in any other version I've seen, the cuts seem calculated to deprive the play of sense. On balance, though, I'm inclined to think that the best thing about it is its brevity.

What sort of Hamlet?
Sort of Dana Carvey-esque. Houston can't help the physical resemblance, I suppose, but he acts w/ a sort of self-conscious sneer that encourages the perception that he's actually impersonating Hamlet rather than playing him.

What's missing?
Every second or third line, it seems. No act I, scene 1, though they sneak some of the Ghost's first appearance in when Horatio is telling Hamlet about it. Polonius doesn't set Reynaldo to spy on Laertes, and in the Laertes-Ophelia dialogue in "a room" (per the stage direction), specifically his bedroom (largely spent bouncing on his bed), he gives only the first part of his warning against Ham, without ever getting to the nitty gritty about her chaste treasure. As a result, her riposte that neither should he go whoring about seems a non-sequitur. Polonius's farewell speech to Laertes consists of the six lines starting "Neither a borrower nor a lender," so the whole notion of a long-winded lecture is lost. And the continuation of the scene w/ Pol and O is cut one line after "green girl," so he doesn't get to drone portentously to her either. For this Pol, brevity is the soul of his seeming somewhat less half-witted.

Ham's first scene w/ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is here (though not their previous meeting w/ Claudius and Gertrude), but omitted is his key admission to them that in fact he knows a hawk from a handsaw.

The Norway/Fortinbras subplot is missing from the start and the end, making bizarre and inexplicable the inclusion of the IV.4 scene of Fortinbras's troops marching toward Poland. Even more bizarre is that the dialogue between the Norwegian captain and Ham is left out--the one that establishes the war-is-much-ado-about-nothing theme of Ham's soliloquy at the end of the scene--but then he delivers the soliloquy anyway (well, some of it). And so on and so forth. It's the worst of both the Olivier and the Russkies--lopping off chunks and also trimming at the margins, but without a real sense of the essence of the play and so mangling all the while.

What is changed?
As is the case with several versions, "To be" is moved. In this case, it's part of a lengthy outdoors sequence (a rare outdoors sequence that actually has anything to do w/ the play--but see below about other outdoors stuff), beginning with the II.2 "words, words, words" exchange w/ Polonius. Most of that text is retained, but when Pol leaves, we go straight to "To be," which is delivered, static, from a river bluff, the suggestion of a suicidal leap standing in for a bare-bodkin quietus-making (which lines, now that I think of it, may have been omitted). Then most of the meeting w/ R&G (which in the play immediately follows the exchange w/ Pol) and then the introduction of the Players, though Ham scarcely speaks a word to them, instead drifting into the "rogue and petty slave" soliloquy as an interior monologue while the First Player is reciting the Priam-Hecuba speech--probably the most intelligent of the innovations in the production. Then finally inside for the exchange w/ O while Pol & Claud eavesdrop--so in fact, the "To be" soliloquy is the only text out of order in this long stretch.

As I've mentioned, some of the Ghost's first appearance gets sneaked in elsewhere, and the same is done w/ O's first mad scene, which is missing altogether in sequence. Instead, she appears mad for the first time after Laertes' riotous supporters have battering-rammed in Claud's door. She kisses her brother long and hard on the mouth, continuing the milder, saner eros of their leavetaking scene. Only when Gert tells L of his sister's death do we get a few seconds, including one "Good night, ladies," of the first mad scene, when she seems much less mad.

Perhaps the most idiotic change comes as Ham and L duel--not with rapier and dagger but with wide-bladed sword and buckler. Chicken or egg: did they change blades because of the rewritten line, or did they rewrite the line because this was the only blade the props department could supply? And if the former, did they rewrite the line because they didn't trust the audience to know what a fencing foil is? Whatever, the dialogue that is supposed to go

Ham: Give us the foils. Come on.
Laer: Come, one for me.
Ham: I'll be your foil, Laertes.

becomes instead

Ham: Give us the swords. Come on.
Laer: Come, one for me.
Ham: I'll be your sword, Laertes.

and thus is hacked to bits one of the best puns of the play. Who are these people?

What's odd?
A couple of pretty good things. In I.2, e.g., Hamlet enters as Laertes is leaving, thus naturally prompting Claud's address to/about him. And when Ham makes his rhyming joke about foolish, prating knave Pol, he laughs a bit and so does Gert, though her laughter is clearly uncomfortable, as if to humor Ham.

But most of what's odd (and what I haven't already described) is just odd. The film begins with a medieval street scene of buskers and fire eaters and whatnot, and we get several more street scenes with nothing to do with anything, simply planted, I guess, to remind us that this was a very different world from ours. The effect is unintentionally Pythonesque.

Ham repeatedly and maniacally stabs the unknown rat behind the arras, and even his hopeful reading of "Is it the king?" can't make sense of that, given that we've just seen why he can't kill the presumptively shriven king just yet. Osric's accent is indefinably odd. The second hit of the duel comes after L has fallen on his back, yet he's still defiant rather than sarcastic with his "a touch, I do confess it."

But my favorite silliness is in the scene where the pirates deliver Ham's letter to Hor. One of the pirates wears, yes, an eyepatch.

Flesh?
Cut. But . . . Hamlet jumps into O's grave, albeit not while L is in it, a the variant stage direction would have it. Though I must say it is a capacious grave that would seem suited to hold two standing men and a recumbent woman at once.

Ghost?
As if seen through night-vision goggles. And his mouth doesn't move when he talks.

Ham-Gert eros?
No, though he kind of roughs her up on her bed. But their lack of lust is balanced by the incestuous impulses of Polonius's children.

Other people?
Hellishly bland.

Every other Hamlet I've watched, even the bad opera, has at least been interesting, has at least repaid its two or three or four hours with some unique coloring of my sense of the play. But this one--which, I should also mention before I close, features muddy camerawork and muddier sound, which gets work as the film progresses--was pretty much a wast of time (though again, blessedly only about half the time expected). Two foils, unbated and envenomed.

Bounded in a nut shell

Who, when, how long?
Adrian Lester, 2002, 2¼ hrs. (filmed stage performance, dir. Peter Brook)

What kind of Hamlet?
Dreadlocked: it finally occurred to someone that Hamlet doesn't have to be white. The entire production is refreshingly multiethnic: largely Indian with touches of Japan and Trinidad.

What's missing?
It's a magnificently minimalist production, in terms of set (essentially one spare set, red and saffron), cast (thirteen altogether: no Norwegians, few courtiers, only two players, Claudius and his dead brother played by the same actor, Laertes and Guildenstern similarly doubled up, and likewise Polonius and the Gravedigger; Horatio is only Horatio, but he's nudged into the action at least a couple of times when courtiers are called for), and text.

No opening Ghost scene; instead, we begin with "Oh, that this too too [see below]," followed by the arrival of Horatio, who is the only one to have seen the Ghost--who shows up on cue, Hor politely withdrawing but returning after Ham has had a chance to digest the vision. Ham has no sword, so he (as well as the Ghost) just demands a nonspecific "Swear"--and he doesn't mention his faux madness plan. Finally, the first cut follows the "time is out of joint" speech. Then after that cut, we jump backward to the I.2 imposition of Claudius's and Gertrude's wills on Ham.

Laertes doesn't appear until Polonius is dead, so we don't have the leave-taking scene, nor Pol's insistence that Ophelia break it off w/ Ham--only the subsequent scene where she reports on Ham's odd visit to her and that she has fulfilled Pol's command.

Few cuts as dramatic after that--though Ham doesn't ask the Player King about inserting a dozen or sixteen lines, and O's first mad scene is essentially a solo, Gert and Claud observing part but not interacting.

I wonder whether someone unfamiliar with the play would be completely lost. There's a lot of telegraphy going on.

What's changed?
In addition to what I've already mentioned, Ham asks the First Player for the Priam-Hecuba speech in Greek, and that's how the Player delivers it. But by far the biggest change is the placement of the "To be" soliloquy, which occurs after Polonius is dead and Claudius has declared that Hamlet must to England. Most of Brook's risks pay off, but I'm not so sure about this one: once Ham has actually drawn blood--half-thinking at the time that it's Claud he's killed--why would he still be wondering whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? By that time, the answer is pretty clear; as the first-season theme song of Slings and Arrows has it: "By the way you sulky brat, the answer is 'To be.'"

Some lines are shifted from Ophelia's first mad scene to the second: after running from offstage to blindside Laertes, knocking him down, she bemoans the laying of Pol in the cold ground, then says, "My brother shall know of it"--to Laertes. The effect is chilling.

There's no mention of Yorick--except for the opera, that's unique in my Hamlet experience so far. The duel finale is cut to the bone (as it were), as well: no one picks up Fortinbras's lines, no one announces R&G's deaths, and Hor doesn't even get to bid his sweet prince good-night; just as we opened on a close-up of Ham, we end with him slumping to the ground, then assuming a beatific smile before "The rest is silence"--then close-up freeze-frame.

What's odd?
Lots, much of it in blocking, most of it wonderful. Lester's Ham dribbles a big old nasty blob of drool at the first "except my life," pretty much chasing Pol away w/ a convincing simulation of possibly dangerous and certainly unhygienic madness.

The "swords" seem to be bamboo sticks. Ham first picks one up from the stage before going to Gert's closet, but I'm damned if I know where it came from: thought it must have been a prop for the play, but I looked at that sequence again and didn't see it. In the closet scene the Ghost all but embraces Gert while causing her to think her son mad. Another really effective bit in that scene is that, in contrast to the typical use of miniatures for the portraits of the brothers, Ham directs Gert's attention to adjacent portraits on the wall, invisible to us. That has the effect of raising the actors faces and allows them more play of expression. (And of course since both characters are played by the same actor, Ham's contrast of their faces might have been tough to make convincing if we could see the portraits.) Yet another nice bit in that scene: Ham grabs Gert's fingers and places them on his wrist, at the same time putting the fingers of his other hand on her other wrist, at "My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time." Finally, he cheerfully puppets Pol as he prepares to drag him out. Then when he takes his leave of Claud in the following scene, he curtsies at "so, Mother."

And as good as that sequence is, the churchyard scene is downright amazing. First, the grave is represented by several pillows and cushions leans against one another like a child's living room fort. The procession is led by Laertes and the Priest, the latter carrying the body--except the "body" is O's empty dress, a wonderful effect. The "grave" is only big enough for one, but w/ O represented by a garment, L can still jump in--and then the protesting Ham knocks the cushions every which way. Everyone leaves but Ham and Hor before "dog will have his day," after which the two gently spread a nondescript gray blanket over O's body. Then, still graveside, Ham tells Hor of the death-warrant switch, representing each of the courtiers with a skull, upending each with a karate chop at "those bearers put to sudden death."

The final duel takes only a couple minutes, each of the first two hits coming almost instantaneously. Laertes has been obviously moved by Ham's apology, by the way, and he seems in good humor during the duel, but then stabs Ham in the back as he stands with his fatally carousing mother; after fingering the blameworthy King, he doesn't propose mutual absolution to Ham. Finally, Claud stands up straight and takes his stabbing (no forced drink) with fatalism bordering on defiance.

Flesh?
Too too . . . sullied! At last! (And, as mentioned, the opening line of the production.)

Ghost?
Of solid, sin-sullied flesh.

Ham-Gert eros?
Nada.

Other people?
As noted, scarcely any.

This is hellbent for leather, and 95% of the time it works brilliantly--at least for someone who realizes what has been elided. Five falling sparrows.

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.