Hamlet (revisited)

by William Shakespeare

a recording from 2018 watched on 22 March 2020

Having announced a pause in postings to this blog, I've now decided to publish my thoughts on watching the Almeida's production of Hamlet (which I've already reviewed twice before in March and August 2017). The BBC broadcast it in 2018, when I recorded it, but it has taken the current situation for me to find time to watch it. I was a little apprehensive that a filmed version of a production which had impressed me so strongly in the theatre would be a disappointment, but I need not have worried. Here goes:

As I have already said, Andrew Scott is one of the two best Hamlets I have ever seen, but the production as a whole is incredibly rich, though not without some problems of directorial intervention.

The intensity and brilliance of Scott’s performance suffers a little from the camera’s close attention to his face, since his expressions are perhaps too dramatically signalled for such proximity – they are of course directed to a theatre audience. Just occasionally his pauses are too clever, leaving a phrase hanging as if it is the end of a thought when it is in fact in the middle, though one does of course get two significant ideas for the price of one when it works. For example,

            Now, whether it be

            Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th’event –

A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward – I do not know

Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do’, …

Here, Scott paused after ‘I do not know’, so that he seems not to be able to decide between the two alternatives that have gone before (bestial oblivion, or craven scruple), investigating a moral dilemma. But then he went on with ‘Why yet I live to say’ and so forth, which makes it clear that he is not ruminating upon causes, but rather offering them both as unsatisfactory mitigations for his inaction. It only just passes muster.

Elsewhere I was enormously impressed with the detailed characterisation of minor characters who can all too easily be forgotten in the massive effort to create a production of Hamlet. Horatio was perhaps still too much of a cipher, though Hamlet’s encomium (III.ii.66-84) was poignantly done. For himself, it was very good that he should be quite tart with Gertrude when she attempts to avoid seeing Ophelia; the social inferiors were often shown to have minds of their own, starting with the guards in the opening scenes. Guildenstern (here a woman) was clearly being crushed by Hamlet’s attitude, even though she and Rosencrantz had haplessly brought it upon themselves, while Rosencrantz himself was positively snarky in his last utterance, ‘Will’t please you go, my lord?’, the appellation dripping with frustration and contempt (IV.iv.30).

As the play has an unstable text there are always cuts and elisions – here most notably only one gravedigger rather than two, and the reduction of Osrick from a pompous fop to a mere functionary. But there was one small scene which had passed me by on both my visits to the theatre, but which caught my attention here, a quick interchange between Horatio and Gertrude in which he tells her of Hamlet’s return and Claudius’s treacherous message to the King of England well before he delivers the two letters. It turns out that this scene is present in the First Quarto text (generally considered garbled and bad), and I had never come across it before – I had to scrabble through the apparatus in my Penguin edition of the play to find its provenance. In this production it provides Gertrude with far more awareness of the perils swirling round her; she appears to drink the poisoned cup in the full knowledge of what she is doing, though her rejection of Claudius has previously been less assiduous than might be expected after the crisis of her encounter with Hamlet in her bedchamber.

The Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia household is also given remarkable attention. Polonius, though an irritating father, is not belittled nor particularly unpleasant – just totally out of his depth. (The intriguing question of whether he, as an apparently trusted counsellor, was at all aware of Claudius’s activities before the opening of the play, is not addressed, though it is very difficult to see how it could be.) There are nice exasperated glances between Laertes and Ophelia in their first scene together when they are listening to yet another paternal tirade, though of course it all goes horribly wrong later. Ophelia mad is heartrending, and Laertes, a fundamentally decent young man, is fatefully betrayed by his passionate anger. The formal plea for forgiveness by Hamlet before the start of the duel really touches his finer nature, and the panicked realisation that he has put himself in an intolerable position is wonderfully portrayed through his comment about the foils, ‘This is too heavy. Let me see another.’ Usually, this is taken as an opportunity for him to swap his first foil for the poisoned unbated weapon. Here, he already has the ‘envenomed’ foil and is making a desperate attempt to change it for a harmless weapon, but Claudius and the referees prevent it, and he is stuck. The whole duel scene is played as a fencing match with news (or sports) commentary, so that much of the dialogue is mouthed but not heard – revisiting the idea of the dumbshow play, perhaps assuming that most in the audience will see the significance of the gestures (especially Gertrude drinking the poison) without need of the words

The weirdest thing, apart perhaps from the use of Bob Dylan lyrics at various stages, is the treatment of the deaths. Gertrude, Claudius and Laertes are prone on the floor, and Hamlet is struggling, when the ghost of his father appears for a final time. Laertes rises, and speaks his plea of forgiveness in a clear remote voice, as he hands his watch to the ghost and retreats to the back of the stage, where Polonius and Ophelia are waiting to welcome him. Claudius wordlessly rises and hands his watch to the ghost, followed by Gertrude. By this time we can see that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also behind the ghost. Only when Hamlet surrenders his watch does ‘normality’ return as he collapses in Horatio’s arms. I’m really not sure about all this, though it is noteworthy that Hamlet has spent much of his nervous energy in fiddling with his wristwatch throughout the play, and Laertes was given an obviously valuable wristwatch by his father as he prepared to leave for Paris.

I’m really glad to have seen this version of the production; I’ve saved it for future viewing, as it obviously repays detailed attention.