Hamlet, Prince of Plays

[aryanhwy]

The plan for Monday had been to go to Oxford with Ælfwynn and Conrad and to show Joel around some and meet up with Jill, one of his ex-girlfriends. However, a few days before we found out Jill wouldn't be there because she hadn't gotten her work visa yet, and when we got to the Oxford train station we found that they had no lockers for left luggage (!). So Joel and I continued straight on to Stratford, where we were able to with no problem get a room at a B&B across the street from where belmikey and his party were staying. The B&B had free wireless (very nice!) so we both got caught up and then went to a Thai place on the river for dinner (cheap, yummy, extremely quick service, and we had a wonderful view of the swans).

We met belmikey, pixel39, Edwin, jpgsawyer, and Margaret at the box office (and if we'd been walking on the street rather than along the river on the way to the Courtyard Theatre, we would've seen the Prince of Wales...). And then not too much later, the play began.


We had amazing seats; we were on the ground floor about 5 rows from the stage on the left-hand side, and had pretty much unparalleled viewing. The stage was quite small; it was open on three sides and on the fourth it had mirrored panels. The floor was highly polished and they used this to great affect with some of their lighting affects, e.g., in the opening scene the guards came in with huge flashlights which they would shine on the ground a few feet in front of whoever was speaking, and the polished floor would reflect the light and illuminate the guard.

This was the first time that I'd seem Hamlet performed live, though I've seen a number of the movie versions (Branagh, Gibson, and part of Jacobi (I couldn't force myself to stay and watch it all....)), and we also read and discussed it in my Shakespeare class my freshman year. Originally I'd been really looking forward to the performance and expected it to be the highlight of my trip, but the visit to the College of Arms so totally eclipsed any expectations I had for the play that I went in to the performance rather mellow. The opening scene was well done (and I did get some flutters in my stomach to think that mere meters away from me was Patrick Stewart (he played the ghost in addition to playing Claudius) -- you have to remember that growing up, the only TV we watched was Star Trek and New Trek (aka The Next Generation). So he's something of an icon for me), and then the second scene started where everyone was scattered around the stage to celebrate the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius. And I was looking around, being satisfied, and rather complacent...and then the solitary figure in the front right-hand corner of the stage opposite from where we were sitting spoke. I hadn't even realized it was Hamlet until his first words. He spoke and a pit opened up in my stomach and sucked me in and for the rest of the show I could not keep my eyes from him. His presence was magnetic. Even in the scene at Ophelia's grave when Laertes is clearly the central figure, lamenting over his sister, and Hamlet is crouched nearly off-stage in one of the front corners, he is so overcome by emotion that he was almost vibrating, and even though it was clear that you were supposed to be paying attention to Laertes, it just wasn't happening. Whenever Hamlet was on stage, everything was a backdrop for him. It was truly an incredible performance.

I should also highlight the performance of Polonius. Polonius was fantastic; I'd always found him rather irritating in movie versions that I'd seen, and never quite understood his purpose when reading the play. In this production he was a fantastic balance of humor and senility and pompousness and I swear I've met people just like him. There was also some excellent repartee between him and Ophelia and Laertes, particularly in the "advice" scene, when he starts saying phrases and O & L finish them off in chorus (in the sort of "we've heard all this so many times before" way).

I learned a number of things watching the play that I'd never seen before. The first is how much of a comedy it is. I know that Shakespeare regularly used comic relief in his plays, especially his tragedies so that a contrast could be drawn, but after the opening scene with the guards almost the entire rest of the play until the very final scene was comedy. I didn't expect to laugh so hard. It was also fascinating how lewd it can be with just a few intonations of words and gestures. The sort of lewdness that has little well-brought-up me turning rather red at the implications.

In the movie versions, I'd never wondered about why it is that Hamlet takes his father's death and mother's remarriage so hard. In the 21st century, this sort of thing isn't really all that uncommon (OK, maybe not incest + remarriage with your husband's brother, but the general "broken home" situation). Suddenly I realized that in order to play such a situation in modern times you have to give some explanation of why this bothered Hamlet so much. And the way this came across in this production was showing just how young Hamlet was -- I swear in one scene when he came on stage in barefeet, rolled up jeans, and a t-shirt, he lost 20 years and was suddenly a teenager. OK, so we know from the grave scene that he's at least 23, since Yorick has been dead for 23 years and Hamlet remembers him, but it gave a sort of fragility to the character which helped explain his reaction to the pre-play circumstances. This was not the only part of the character portrayal that I thought was well done. I've always been of the "Hamlet is not mad" camp, and I think that this was supported in this production via two ways. First, Hamlet is not insane -- but he was very clearly manic depressive. I'd never seen quite that twist on things before and what was interesting was that in modern times, manic-depressiveness is not considered "insanity", even if it is a mental disturbance, but it could very well have been in Shakespeare's time. The other aspect of the "Hamlet is not mad" view that came through in this production was his incredible and horrible frustration -- frustration with his father for dying, with his mother for betraying him, with his friends whom he thought he trusted but he KNOWS are being played against him by Gertrude and Claudius, frustration that he knows that they are doing this, and they know they are doing this, but they aren't clever enough to know that he knows, and this culminates in the scene where he explodes on them for trying to play him as if he was a pipe -- he knows what they're doing, and these are his friends, and it's frustrating both because they are his friends and because they do not realize that he knows what's going on.

I found the portrayal of Claudius also fascinating. After the show I believe it was belmikey that commented that Claudius is rather like most Shakesperean bad-guys, a flat, one-dimensional villain. I disagree. He is hardly villainous (in the typical villain style, e.g. Jafar in Disney's "Aladdin") at all. He was urbane, polite, regal, clearly was ready to make amends to his son, seemed to be an adequate diplomat, and was in general a likeable character. It's in fact only really in his confession scene, when suddenly he asks whether it is possible to repent for sins but still keep their reward and he knows that he can't that you suddenly see a human side to him which lets you see him through Hamlet's eyes, and see how Hamlet could think him such a villain. But I don't think he was villainous at all.

Throughout the play I had been looking forward to the final scene because I must confess that every movie version I've seen I've watched late enough at night that I've been sort of falling asleep by the end, and so I wasn't totally sure how exactly the ending went (since this is a tragedy, I know everyone dies, and I know roughly how, but I wasn't familiar with any of the dialogue). The final scene was, just like the opening one with Hamlet, amazingly well done. If they could have dimmed the lights and ended the play at "and all the rest is silence", I think that would have been true -- I think the entire audience would've just sat in the dark in utter silence made dumb by the weight and the pressure. But of course this isn't how Shakespeare ends, you have to have a final postlogue summing things up, which Horatio did, and then Fortinbras comes in and the attendant who is one of the only ones left alive comes in and bows before him. The final scene was very poignant, and it was fascinating to see how two simple actions without words -- Fortinbras entering, and the attendant bowing -- conveyed so much information about the future course of Denmark. And after that of course the audience was well inclined to applaud. There was no character who was not well done, from the pages all the way up, and the staging and the special effects were excellent. But I have to say that one of my favorite parts, and one of the most indelible, was during curtain call, when David Tennant came on stage to take a bow, the smile on his face and the incredible sense that here was someone who was supremely happy, that there is nothing in the world that he could've done tonight that he would rather have done, someone who is so completely suited for their work that satisfaction and pleasure and gratitude and happiness just radiated out of him. It was fascinating because the emotions were so different from what we had been seeing for the last 3.5 hours, and it was in that moment that I really saw Hamlet as opposed to David Tennant. It took seeing Tennant's happiness and glee in contrast with Hamlet's morbity and even his manicality to see how much of an act Hamlet was, even though it never seemed like acting.

The evening definitely exceeded my expectations (the whole "being in the same room as David Tennant AND Patrick Stewart" thing combined with "I'm in Stratford watching a Royal Shakespeare production"), even though it wasn't quite such an emotional high as the CoA trip was. And the play has stuck with me. Every time my mind replays that "A little more than kin but less than kind" opening words of Hamlet, spat out from his mouth as if they tasted bad, when suddenly you realize who that quiet person in the corner is, I get sucked back into the gut wrenching vortex of his emotional magnetism. I've been itching ever since that evening to write up my experience of seeing the play, and worried that by the time I caught up with everything else I'd have lost some of the feelings that it aroused in me, but now that I've completed my retelling, I don't feel like anything has faded in the intervening days. If anything it is becoming stronger and more affecting the more time that elapses since I saw it.

It's probably a good thing that I'm not living in the UK, because I'd probably be going back at least once a week if not more often to see this. It was utterly fantastic.

Comments

[eleyne-de-c.livejournal.com]

David Tennant AND Patrick Stewart - I hate you.

It sounds utterly amazing and I wish I could go see it. I saw Hamlet when I lived in Bristol and the actor who played Hamlet was the same one who played him in the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's cool. I realized after I'd made the post that I'd forgotten to include "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" in my list of "Hamlet" movies that I've seen. I figure it's close enough to count.

[eleyne-de-c.livejournal.com]

I just told my husband that if we win lotto this weekend I'm off to Stratford to see Hamlet.