HAMLET RANTS

[owlings]

I just finished watching the David Tennant and Patrick Stewart version of Hamlet. Patrick Stewart was incredible, as were the actors who played Polonius and Laertes, but there was an overall...wrongness to it, that I think was centered around the titular character.

I feel terrible saying such about Tennant, because I will always love him, but he

Comments

[persiflage_1]

Here via tennant_report.

Have to say, that I respectfully disagree with you. I think Hamlet acts manic and antic at regular intervals throughout the play (I'm talking about the actual text, not any specific performances), and I thought Tennant got those moments down to a T.

I first read the play 20 years ago, and I'd read it a handful of times before finally getting to see it live (with DT and PS at Stratford), and when I watched it, I was mentally cheering because I felt Tennant had got Hamlet exactly spot on for how I've always read the character behaving - sometimes he seems to be completely loopy, and other times he's scarily quiet, but at all times he's cunning.

Having seen both the stage version and the filmed version now, I still haven't changed my mind on Tennant's performance - for *me* he got it exactly right at all points.

[owlings]

That's fine! I love respectful disagreement. ::grins::

That's why I prefaced my explanations with "for me" (and you've done the same). Shakespeare is timeless for the exact reason that it can mean something to anyone, and it's rarely the same thing.

I think there are a few moments where Hamlet's behavior could be described as "manic', but to me those are the points where he has gotten himself so wound up, so tightly bound in his own thoughts, that it takes the slightest thing (hearing Polonius behind the scrim) to make him snap, lash out entirely randomly just to ease some of his own tension. But I think the power in those moments is how fast they are over and how rare they are - to me, Tennant defused that power by parading that capacity for violent movement and speech throughout soliloquies and sonnets that would have been better served with gravity and *inner* turmoil rather than outer.