Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet
Oct. 6th, 2015 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsSo, I've been to England to see the Queen Benedict Cumberbatch. And I loved it.
...as I normally tolerate Hamlet at best, this may be a warning as much as praise. Much more under the cut. And yes... the production needs cut text.
Now I know why Lyndsey Turner originally put the To Be or Not To Be monologue up front. The entire play was reshuffled, and now it begins with Hamlet sitting alone, listening to sad music, looking through photo albums, and giving an abbreviated version of the end of the "too, too solid flesh" monologue.
Horatio enters, covered in tattoos and wearing a backpack, and we launch straight into the "Hey there, what brought you to town?" "The funeral." "You mean the wedding" scene. From there, a servant calls again, Hamlet dismisses Horatio, longingly buries his face in a jacket pulled from a box (presumably Daddy's), puts it on, and it's off to the banquet scene (where Hamlet spends a lot of time staring at one of the family portraits on the wall and is the only one wearing black among all the white).
Claudius launches into his exposition, kisses Gertrude, Laertes gets his exposition and passage to France, Gertrude delivers the "cast off thy knighted colors" line and then the entire scene goes into slow motion while Benedict marches across the table, in tears, delivering the famous part of the "too too solid flesh" monologue.
20 minutes in and not one hint of ghost yet. And that's one of the things that I like about this Hamlet - rather than turn him into the vacillating puppet of his father's spectre, this Hamlet is already cracking up from grief, a male foreshadowing of Ophelia's descent into madness. (Alas, poor Ophelia, she is problematic. More on her anon.)
The ghost finally comes waltzing out, showing itself for the first time to Hamlet, Horatio, and the random guards (aka Role Switching Guy #1 and Hamlet's Understudy), this ghost not having spent its time farting around pre-play giving a phosphorescent peep show to random supernumeraries. (This ghost also had, in my opinion, a "comedy nose" - something explained when he wiped off the blacklight makeup and came out as the grave digger later.)
This is a Denmark very much on a 50s war footing, full of bustling people with typewriters and dispatches and earnest urgency, providing a good background for Ben Cumberbatch's "I've gone cray-cray" scenes. He comes out with a wide, open-mouthed rictus grin, acting (and dressed) like a drum major. What happens after that tends to shift from night to night, apparently; he marches up and down the war table while doing different bits of comedy business with the red phone.
(Side note - the set is the royal palace, and it never changes, even when the scene onstage takes place elsewhere. It's a choice I've never approved of - it threw me when the Patrick Stewart MacBeth had a sink nailed to the stage, too. Dunsinane Wood has hot and cold running water? How thoughtful for a forest to provide mod cons.)
Unfortunately, while the trimming and reshuffling strengthens Hamlet, the women are sadly undercut. Ophelia starts off the rails and heads ever downwards - even while Daddy is alive, she is twitching and miserable, showing up for the Players while wearing scrubby clothes. (So is the "mad" Hamlet, but everyone else is dressed to the nines. Why isn't she? And by the way, the director apparently decided to leave in the "with my head in your lap" lines but having provided careful notes to not have the actors let on that there is anything remotely naughty about what they mean.) Ophelia's a photographer - Gertrude realizes she's about to kill herself when she abandons images and camera - but is she meant to be a statement on the Denmark surveillance society or part of it? Was she supposed to even realize that it was a surveillance society until Polonius orders her room ransacked? (She did NOT give him the love letter out of daughterly duty in this version, and it's the violent search that seems to have started sending her off the rails more than Hamlet or Polonius' death.)
Gertrude, always a tricky character, seems to float through utterly clueless. She likes Claudius well enough and mourns Polonius, but she doesn't seem to dote on Hamlet as much as want to give him a swift kick for annoying her new boy toy and seems more worried about the war then her son's insanity. She also lost many of her lines - her sole comments in the climactic sword fight are "Come, let me wipe my face" (with every line of Ben's body shouting "Muuuuuuuum! You're embarrassing me in front of my frenemy!") and "I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me" when she's picked up the vessle with the pestle that includes the pellet with the poison. She gives or is given no particular reason to want to drink from the cup, much less insist on it, and she keels over without another syllable.
Speaking of WTF moments, instead of everyone going into slow motion while someone with the spotlight delivers a monologue, everyone breaks into slow interpretive dance - interpretive dance! - when Hamlet stabs Laertes. I'm told that the scene earlier when everyone is scrambling around on all 4s when they're searching for Hamlet after he stabbed Polonius really looks like searching hounds from further back in the audience, but the interpretive dance just looks stupid no matter where you're sitting.
So, some interesting choices. Not all ones that work, but points for taking the leap of faith.
...as I normally tolerate Hamlet at best, this may be a warning as much as praise. Much more under the cut. And yes... the production needs cut text.
Now I know why Lyndsey Turner originally put the To Be or Not To Be monologue up front. The entire play was reshuffled, and now it begins with Hamlet sitting alone, listening to sad music, looking through photo albums, and giving an abbreviated version of the end of the "too, too solid flesh" monologue.
Horatio enters, covered in tattoos and wearing a backpack, and we launch straight into the "Hey there, what brought you to town?" "The funeral." "You mean the wedding" scene. From there, a servant calls again, Hamlet dismisses Horatio, longingly buries his face in a jacket pulled from a box (presumably Daddy's), puts it on, and it's off to the banquet scene (where Hamlet spends a lot of time staring at one of the family portraits on the wall and is the only one wearing black among all the white).
Claudius launches into his exposition, kisses Gertrude, Laertes gets his exposition and passage to France, Gertrude delivers the "cast off thy knighted colors" line and then the entire scene goes into slow motion while Benedict marches across the table, in tears, delivering the famous part of the "too too solid flesh" monologue.
20 minutes in and not one hint of ghost yet. And that's one of the things that I like about this Hamlet - rather than turn him into the vacillating puppet of his father's spectre, this Hamlet is already cracking up from grief, a male foreshadowing of Ophelia's descent into madness. (Alas, poor Ophelia, she is problematic. More on her anon.)
The ghost finally comes waltzing out, showing itself for the first time to Hamlet, Horatio, and the random guards (aka Role Switching Guy #1 and Hamlet's Understudy), this ghost not having spent its time farting around pre-play giving a phosphorescent peep show to random supernumeraries. (This ghost also had, in my opinion, a "comedy nose" - something explained when he wiped off the blacklight makeup and came out as the grave digger later.)
This is a Denmark very much on a 50s war footing, full of bustling people with typewriters and dispatches and earnest urgency, providing a good background for Ben Cumberbatch's "I've gone cray-cray" scenes. He comes out with a wide, open-mouthed rictus grin, acting (and dressed) like a drum major. What happens after that tends to shift from night to night, apparently; he marches up and down the war table while doing different bits of comedy business with the red phone.
(Side note - the set is the royal palace, and it never changes, even when the scene onstage takes place elsewhere. It's a choice I've never approved of - it threw me when the Patrick Stewart MacBeth had a sink nailed to the stage, too. Dunsinane Wood has hot and cold running water? How thoughtful for a forest to provide mod cons.)
Unfortunately, while the trimming and reshuffling strengthens Hamlet, the women are sadly undercut. Ophelia starts off the rails and heads ever downwards - even while Daddy is alive, she is twitching and miserable, showing up for the Players while wearing scrubby clothes. (So is the "mad" Hamlet, but everyone else is dressed to the nines. Why isn't she? And by the way, the director apparently decided to leave in the "with my head in your lap" lines but having provided careful notes to not have the actors let on that there is anything remotely naughty about what they mean.) Ophelia's a photographer - Gertrude realizes she's about to kill herself when she abandons images and camera - but is she meant to be a statement on the Denmark surveillance society or part of it? Was she supposed to even realize that it was a surveillance society until Polonius orders her room ransacked? (She did NOT give him the love letter out of daughterly duty in this version, and it's the violent search that seems to have started sending her off the rails more than Hamlet or Polonius' death.)
Gertrude, always a tricky character, seems to float through utterly clueless. She likes Claudius well enough and mourns Polonius, but she doesn't seem to dote on Hamlet as much as want to give him a swift kick for annoying her new boy toy and seems more worried about the war then her son's insanity. She also lost many of her lines - her sole comments in the climactic sword fight are "Come, let me wipe my face" (with every line of Ben's body shouting "Muuuuuuuum! You're embarrassing me in front of my frenemy!") and "I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me" when she's picked up the vessle with the pestle that includes the pellet with the poison. She gives or is given no particular reason to want to drink from the cup, much less insist on it, and she keels over without another syllable.
Speaking of WTF moments, instead of everyone going into slow motion while someone with the spotlight delivers a monologue, everyone breaks into slow interpretive dance - interpretive dance! - when Hamlet stabs Laertes. I'm told that the scene earlier when everyone is scrambling around on all 4s when they're searching for Hamlet after he stabbed Polonius really looks like searching hounds from further back in the audience, but the interpretive dance just looks stupid no matter where you're sitting.
So, some interesting choices. Not all ones that work, but points for taking the leap of faith.
