NT Live: Hamlet 2015

[shadowfireflame]

Finally got to see Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet in the movie theater and really enjoyed it!

Benedict shines as the lead role in this fantastically accessible (and abridged, even at 3 hours!) adaptation of Hamlet, screened by National Theatre Live to movie theatres around the world. The gloomy, atmospheric setting within a dark Victorian mansion

Comments

[daasgrrl]

...I'm sincerely glad you enjoyed it :)

I'm just back from seeing it today! LOL. I do think seeing it on film brought out many lovely details that you probably wouldn't have seen if you were part of the audience, but all my initial reservations about the various performances remain. I desperately wanted to turn his emotional register down about five notches. Maybe six *g*

[shadowfireflame]

Oh my God, I just read your posts on seeing Hamlet in person and in the theater--they were so detailed and lovely! Thank you for doing that, even though you didn't like lots of the elements. Somehow I missed that you had actually seen Hamlet in person?! Wow!!! I think at the time I was avoiding reading Hamlet posts until I'd seen it myself, so that's probably why. But that's awesome!

I actually agree with you on many things that didn't work so well (I didn't like Horatio either, wish there had been more of Polonius, felt that the staging was occasionally distracting, etc.)

But overall, I guess I liked it because...to me, Hamlet isn't a nice guy, and the play embraced that. I took a course in college where we watched about 10 or 15 different takes on Hamlet (including Branagh's brilliant one), and for me BC simply got Hamlet and made the words clear and meaningful in a way that very few other ones did

[daasgrrl]

0.0

You know, I don't know whether it's just that you have the knack of explaining things so they make sense to me *g*, but I feel that of all the things I've read this:

This break leads him to see visions of his dead father, randomly stab people hiding in bedrooms, be cruel and neglectful to his girlfriend, be capricious and mistrustful of his longtime friends, be frankly nasty as hell to his grieving mother, and contemplate ridiculous revenge plans that lead to the destruction of his family and country.

and

not being able to get along with the supporting cast and being an asshole while in his mind he's the heromake the most sense of the director's "vision", which I think has been murky as hell up until now

[shadowfireflame]

See, everything, EVERYTHING, is so disjointed - the clothing, the acting styles, even the physical layout of the stage. Which if you take it as some kind of reflection of Hamlet's fragmented psyche (taking the whole "the time is out of joint" thing literally, lol)... sort of makes sense?

This is totally fascinating because it could, strangely, work like that--I'd forgotten the "time is out of joint" line, actually!

I find I'm able to sympathize with Hamlet better when Claudius is much nastier or when it's clearer that Hamlet is stone-cold sane the whole time. In this one, though, you know, Claudius wasn't really convincingly bad and Hamlet was just causing chaos and sadness wherever he went and truly seemed like he had lost it. I never am sure what Shakespeare's original intention was, though, so it's fun to see the different interpretations! :)

[mariole]

I am SO glad to see your write-up on BC's Hamlet. I've had a couple of friends who've gone, but they haven't yet committed their experience to writing.

It sounds gorgeous. Yeah, Benedict, for being so darned good at what he does. :)

[shadowfireflame]

I know, right?! It is certainly very gorgeous, and the set is creative (and of course BC is gorgeous too, lol!). I got very lucky to go in an encore because I couldn't make the first showing. :)