elaby | Tennant Hamlet FTW (Reply)

I still have no Hamlet icons! What's up with that?

Here's the promised squee about the David Tennant Hamlet. It was amazing XD And I babble accordingly.

I never had any doubt that this was going to be awesome, but it was really even more awesome than I expected. I'm lucky in that current style of acting is the one I find most gratifying (as opposed to the style of, say, 50 years ago), and that people never seem to tire of doing Hamlet, or of finding freaking incredible actors to play the parts.

David Tennant was ridiculously good, but I expected that :3 I could tell from watching Doctor Who that he would make a good Hamlet - he's so good at externally displaying very internal things, and I think that's important to the character. He must've had the time of his freaking life, too. The Tenth Doctor was positively stone-faced in comparison with Tennant's Hamlet. He was so expressive, so passionate, and god, can that man ever use body language to his advantage. He jumped around and curled up into a ball and laid flat out on the floor, sometimes upside-down. He made faces and flung himself about and made absolute stillness its own statement. His performance was spectacular, and he did that thing that good Shakespearean actors do: he delivered his lines in such a way that even if I didn't know what the words meant, I knew what he was saying by how he said it. He found the lines that would translate into modern colloquial English if given the right tone and said them that way. I can't think of any part that I would've had him do differently. I've never seen anyone do the Gertrude-confrontation scene like he did: actors usually either go the anger-only route (which I normally prefer) or the Oedipus complex route (which squicks me the hell out and with which I have issues on the lit-crit front). The way he did it was more like "I'm utterly furious with and disgusted by this woman, but she's still my mother and the only family I have left and I also desperately miss her comfort and protection." Theirs was the most realistic mother-son dynamic I've seen (not, you know, having a son or any brothers to judge it by).

There's so many things I want to talk about that I don't know how to cover it all!

I usually judge Hamlet performances by two main things: how they handle Hamlet and Horatio's relationship, and how they do Laertes. This version's treatment of the former is up there with Kenneth Branagh's, my usual measuring stick for Hamlet perfection. The final scene even surpassed it. This is why I love the current style: actors aren't afraid to touch each other and hold each other and other such things that make me giddy with delight. Everything that Branagh did in his interactions with Horatio Tennant did times twelve. In the first scene where Horatio shows up, Hamlet rockets into his arms and practically full-body glomps him. This Horatio, Peter de Jersey, was marvelous, good lord. He's already tied with Nicholas Farrell for my favorite Horatio, and that's no mean feat. He really progressed during the course of the play - at the beginning and even through the middle, it was clear that he knew exactly where he stood as Hamlet's social inferior even though he was his friend, but by the time Hamlet came back from England, Horatio obviously decided that that was no longer so important. He was a little bit less straight-laced in the scenes around the Murder of Gonzago where Hamlet was mocking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which is more true to the original play than I had previously realized. And he knew, oh my god, he knew it was Ophelia they were burying long before Hamlet figured it out. And he was prepared to hold him, or hold him back, both of which he ended up having to do. They did that a lot in this production, characters realizing things before they're usually portrayed as doing so, and I loved it. Hamlet's death scene was incredibly good; they fought over the poisoned goblet, fought with real desperation for a brief moment, and it was heartbreaking and magnificently done.

I have nothing to complain about with their Laertes, either. He was so young; David Tennant and Peter de Jersey were grown-up actors, probably in their thirties anyway, but Laertes looked barely twenty. That really worked well for him, too. He and Ophelia gave each other the now-standard "Oh god, Dad's talking again" looks, and they even recited his lines along with him when Polonius was instructing Laertes about how to act when he went back to school XD Laertes's interaction with Ophelia at the beginning was really good, too, very realistically an older brother who wants to tell his little sister not to let this guy into her pants but is also mega embarrassed by the very idea. The actor didn't blow me away, but he did a very good job, and the idea of Laertes being so very young makes a lot of sense. He needed a hug and to live somewhere besides a castle full of crazy people who keep getting his relatives killed.

Ophelia was okay. It takes a lot to get me to really feel compelled by her, because as a character she's just so... acted upon, you know? She doesn't do anything herself, she just reacts to what other people do to her. Kate Winslet's version is the only one that I really feel gives her personality aside from "I'm doing what you want, Dad!" in the first half and "Now I've gone off the deep end!" in the second. The actress in this version went the "wildly crazy" route, with flailing arms and laughing and dancing and clothes-stripping (the clothes-stripping makes sense, but I prefer Winslet's "insane sage" sort of Ophelia).

The way they decided to handle Ophelia and Gertrude's relationship was very interesting. Gertrude obviously didn't know her very well at all; when they were talking about how Hamlet must have gone crazy with his love for Ophelia, Gertrude said her name with a sort of pause first and question mark at the end, like she was confirming that it was the right name. It was like this was the first time they'd really interacted. It made so much more sense, because in the Branagh version, Gertrude really seems to be friendly with her, which made her nonchalance at Ophelia's death kind of terrifying. Gertrude was pretty good in this version, very politician's-wife, and the awesome thing was that she knew the goblet was poisoned at the end. She knew the minute Claudius told her not to drink it, and she drank it anyway. It's such a different thing to have her make the decision to kill herself rather than unwittingly drink the poison intended for Hamlet, and I thought it gave her a certain amount of... what's the word? Not accountability... being in charge of her own fate, like.

Claudius was amazing, of course; what less from Patrick Stewart? I still can't bring myself to feel bad for Claudius, but Patrick Stewart really did make him more human. At the beginning of the confession scene where Hamlet almost kills him but doesn't because it'd send his soul straight to heaven, once everybody leaves and Claudius is alone, he turns away from the audience and doubles over retching. That went a long way toward making him seem like a real person and not just The Villain. And at the end of the Murder of Gonzago scene, he totally knows that Hamlet knows. That scene was wicked cool, because they had Hamlet recording Claudius's reaction with a little hand-held vintage camcorder thing that he used during various points in the play. And then at the END, AHAHAHA, my favorite Claudius moment EVER - instead of like in all the other versions I've seen where Hamlet stabs him or forces the drink down his throat or both, Hamlet holds him at swordpoint and offers him the goblet... and Claudius looks at him, and shrugs, and takes it and drinks it. *armwaving* He's like "Well, what've I got to lose? Wife's dead, everyone knows I'm to blame, they'll depose me in five seconds anyway... might as well." I've never seen anything like that interpretation before, and I loved it.

Apart from the acting, they did all kinds of neat things with mirrors. The stage set was apparently all mirrors, the walls and floor and everything, and since they couldn't do that for the film without cameras being reflected all over the place, they used smaller mirrors and black-glossed mirror floors to quite amazing effect. They also did a lot with security camera footage (like in the opening scene, where they kept switching to security cameras and you couldn't see Hamlet Sr.'s ghost) and Hamlet's aforementioned hand-held camcorder. The costumes were sexy: Hamlet rarely wore shoes, even with a suit, and he fenced in jeans and a white fencing jacket. For a bunch of the scenes, he wore this red t-shirt that had muscle shading on the front *cracks up* "Than I to Hercules!" Ahaha!

I can has now? (Actually, I can.