Hamlet

 

photo taken from www.guardian.co.uk

Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet
Novello Theatre, London
09 January 2009 

David Tennant is one of those blessed actors that make you remember, if you’ve somehow forgotten, not only why Shakespeare is brilliant, but how.

Shakespeare knew how to provoke, how to make the audience laugh, how to twist the knife when it has already stabbed the heart.  Tennant played the role with the mad humanity and humor the playwright intended but did not include in the stage directions.  He read between the lines, and, if you ask me, read it right.  If one were to have watched the play without hearing the sound of words come out of his lips, one would still know what was happening.  On that stage, that body was Hamlet’s himself, not one simply borrowed from an actor.  

This  execution serves as a reminder that Hamlet was not ever supposed to be constrained within the binding of a book.  Polonius is not so superannuated unless you hear the live voice of an actor trailing away at the sentences, and Claudius (finely played by Patrick Stewart) too often comes out to be either too much of a power-hungry cretin or too calculating a malice when simply put on a 2-dimentional page.  RSC showed whole dimensions, including how horny the queen must have been after losing her husband and how repressed Ophelia must have been after absorbing advice from everyone surrounding her. 

So a round of applause to this amazing cast and crew.  I thouroughly enjoyed the show.

~ by Jean Louise on 19 January 2009.