If you’re like most Americans, you have a friend that likes to quote films and television shows as, more or less, a substitute for having any original things to say. For a lot these friends, The Simpsons and Anchorman seem to be the go-to sources, but frequently, something that they heard five minutes ago (that you also heard) will do, in the exact same inflection as it was spoken then. If you can imagine an entire play composed of nothing but these quotes, you can imagine the modern day challenge of performing Hamlet. To those well-versed in Shakespeare (not to say that I am), there is hardly a line delivery, a movement, or a thematic element that has not been all but completely established over the last 400 years, with most attempts at significantly modernizing them coming off as gimmicky (‘hey guys, what if we set it in corporate America?’), and the more faithful renditions ending up as rather boring. Fully aware of the challenges set before it, this Royal Shakespeare production asserts itself nicely by never fully committing to either approach, instead ceding most of its creative ground to the two leads, particularly David Tennant.
This being the Royal Shakespeare Company, you expect certain things to be of a higher caliber than you would probably get in the United States (or elsewhere), and they certainly deliver on that account. The production values, uniformly, are outstanding (on the bonus features, they reveal that they shot off-site at an old castle, rather than on the stage of the original performance), even if the sets never provide the consistency that filmgoers (such as myself) are used to looking for. At times, this production appears alternately to look as if it takes place in the 1600s, the 1940s, and the modern era (Hamlet wears a red t-shirt throughout much of the latter half of the show), with the usual giveaway of dialogue naturally being no help. The performances, also, are very good, though they tend more towards the theatrical than the cinematic (which can be expected for something that is essentially a filmed play), particularly Oliver Ford Davies’s Polonius and Mariah Gale’s Ophelia. But particular credit has to go to the actors that manage to avoid this natural pitfall, especially Patrick Stewart as Claudius and David Tennant as Hamlet. To be frank, I’ve never especially liked the character of Hamlet (I’ve always preferred the unhinged insanity of Lear), but Tennant manages to imbue his characterization with enough unique expression to make him engaging throughout the three hour running time, enough so that when he quietly intones ‘to be or not to be’, you don’t wince remembering all the times you heard that very monologue parodied on Looney Tunes. In fact, it’s probably the best scene in the entire film, to the credit of both Tennant and director Gregory Doran, whose innovative staging belies both that he knew that it was what everyone was waiting for but avoiding the pomp and circumstance that typically accompanies the scene.
Other decisions of his (though the creative process for any finished product is always murky, with many fingerprints in many different areas) fall not into the categories of successful or unsuccessful, but merely a side effect of staging a work written before the very notion of a camera was conceived. The soliloquies, always the most dated and difficult aspect of any staging, retain their resistance to the camera, and the frequent cutaways to closed circuit cameras, while firmly separating this from the stage version, only further compounds the show’s confusion regarding the era it takes place in (similar effects are done as Hamlet plays with a Super 8 camera in a number of scenes). Ultimately, however, the show achieves the mixed blessing of preserving (I can only assume) the stage production for the camera, with the framing and camera direction designed to capture as many physical details and performances as possible, rather than make them work together for a cumulative effect. As a result, this show preserves the integrity of Hamlet without remaining strictly adherent to its theatrical format, a filmic preservation of the play rather than a translation of it on both the creative and cinematic ends. This may be satisfying for fans of the Bard, or even to more casual viewers, but it’d be hard to call it a revolution in the material’s presentation; it’s more like a torch-passing, an invigoration just powerful enough to guarantee an audience for the next time someone decides to put on a major production.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The disc features an audio commentary by Gregory Doran, Sebastian Grant, and Chris Seager, as well as a making-of documentary.
"Hamlet" is on sale May 4, 2010 and is not rated. Theater. Directed by Gregory Doran. Written by William Shakespeare. Starring David Tennant, Edward Bennett, Mariah Gale, Oliver Ford Davies, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie.
