neadods | Smith & Pertwee & Shakespeare

WD (non reaction post) lj user="neadods"> a href="http://neadods.livejournal.com/968506.html">talks about Matt Smith compared to previous actors playing the Doctor and the importance of Shakespeare (feel free to edit link text)

This is the non-spoiler Doctor Who post, wherein I expand on a conversation I just had with my roommate M about Smith as compared to other actors playing the Doctor.

If there's one thing that RTD introduced into the Whoniverse, it's major continuing angst. The Doctor is suddenly the last of his kind. Not only that, he's the one who committed the genocide, and he did it to (unsuccessfully, as we all find out) end a war.

Having turned a character once described as a "cosmic hobo" into this tragic figure, RTD then went out and hired a couple of Shakespearean actors to play him. And that was, in retrospect, absolutely key to their performance. Shakespeare's plays are stuffed to the gills with scenes where a character starts out intending to do X and ends up agreeing to do Y: "Richard you killed my husband, you monster... okay, I'll marry you." "But I'm loyal to the king of Scotland!... sure, I'll whack him, honey, anything you say." "I'll revenge my father's death... but not right now where I could do it easily, because there's still 2 hours of play left to go." "I love you more than a brother and your company is all I could ask for the rest of my life... but I'm totally ready to kill you to get that hot chick you just saw." "You just totally humiliated the hell out of me and took the one thing I said I'd never give you... let's have coffee and laugh about it." (Bonus points if you can name all the plays.)

There isn't a play where Shakespearean actors don't have to sell that whiplash with complete gravitas. And with that background, it becomes quite easy to sell a character who can flick from childlike enjoyment to worldshattering fury on a dime, as Eccleton and Tennant both did.

And then Matt Smith was hired. A lot of people have focused on his age as a problem, but I've been disappointed more by his lack of experience.

wendymr said she felt that watching him was like watching a teenager play Hamlet, and in retrospect, I think that's almost EXACTLY the problem: he doesn't have the specific acting experience of trying to sell characters who encompass that wide a range of emotion.

I felt a lot better about his performance tonight - that's as close to a spoiler as this post is going to get - but M didn't. She's just not picking up the vibe of someone who is centuries old.

But she's also not familiar with any Doctor before Eight. So I agree with her about not feeling the weight of centuries in Smith's performance, but y'know what? I didn't feel that for many of the previous Doctors either. Yes, I know they've all done Shakespeare as well, but before 2005 they weren't being asked to be both the man who can say "What's the fun of being grownup if you can't act childishly" *and* sell the concept of being the Lonely God of Fire and Ice and Rage. The closest any of them got to that was Sylvester McCoy, who got the personal whiplash of being hired to be the clown and ending up as the guy who could do a Xanatos Gambit better than Xanatos.

The others weren't asked to be that. So while Smith isn't necessarily in the mold of Eccleston and Tennant, but he's a pretty good fit with Pertwee, Davison, and C Baker, all of whom talked about centuries but didn't act like it. Especially Pertwee. Exiled, time- and planet-bound Three had plenty of grief and anger of his own, but it came out like Smith's - shouting and stroppiness.

So... Smith!=Eccleston or Tennant, but Smith=Pertwee. It's a bit of a pity for those of us wanting another Eccleston or Tennant, but now I've seen that in him, he's fitting more into the role of the Doctor for me.

And to end on a shallow note, Jon Pertwee's companions also all ran around in micromini skirts...