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the only explanation seems to be a dumbing down of the language--but why that word, rather than one of the many others no longer current in the language?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.
