The play begins as an image on the screen of a CCTV camera. Throughout this production one occasionally sees the image transferred to a CCTV screen as if everyone is being spied upon. These have no relationship at all to the story. NO ONE ever watches or examines the recorded film images, and the gimmick adds nothing to the plot. Conclusion: it really doesn't work.
Enter Marcellus and Horatio. Any student of the play knows that the role of Horatio is filled with anachronisms and self-contradictions. One has the sense that Shakespeare put him into the play at the last minute. In Act I, scene 1 he asserts that he'd seen the old king of Denmark only once in his life. In the next scene he will tell Hamlet that he knew old Hamlet as well as the backs of his hands! This is but one example of many. I bring this up because the role of Horatio has to be played moment by moment, as if he always forgets whatever he said in the past. The actor Peter de Jersey does a good job with this role - which is actually a criticism! He plays each phrase, despite its blatant contradictions to whatever came before, with sincere conviction. Clearly The Method at work: find the emotional memory which corresponds to the statement you're making, forget about any connection it may have to the past or future of the characater. Then again, we're dealing with the great Shakespeare, aren't we? One dare not tamper with even a single word!
When the Ghost appears, Horatio literally grovels, rolls about on the floor. Although Hamlet is taken aback and retreats, he does not grovel. It is when the Ghost later reappears in the bedchamber, that Hamlet grovels even more than Horatio did in this first scene. This works very well: in the scene in the first act Hamlet is merely frightened; in the bedchamber he is petrified.
The lighting in this production is always interesting. In the scenes in Act I that take place on the battlements the large hand-held flashlights provide a strongly terrifying, constantly shifting illumination, heightening the sense of "fear and wonder".
The guards' uniforms are from the 19th century; the ghost himself is armed in medieval armor; the dress suits are 20th century; the CCTV is 21st century. Are these anachronisms deliberate? Are they effective, really saying something, or merely distracting, even confusing? Maybe. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Dressed in medieval armor, Patrick Stewart's Ghost looks utterly ridiculous. And why does Hamlet go out onto the ice-cold freezing battlements in a flimsy dress suit, while everyone else out there with him is protected by winter coats, hats, gloves, etc.?
Patrick Stewart's portrayal of the Ghost is simply superb, no other word for it. To me it's actually better than his portrayal of Claudius. His Claudius is very good, of course, but much too buttoned-down. Shakespeare's text describes him as a romantic rogue, a ruthless poisoner, yet full of guile and seductive charms, enough to woe Gertrude and to charm his critics and opponents into taking his side. Patrick Stewart's Claudius is stiff, formal, inhibited, gloomy and dour( though also highly intelligent and above all shrewd.) He is not sufficiently charming for the personality indicated by Shakespeare.
Still, Patrick Stewart is the master of the small yet significant gesture. Note how, when he says to Hamlet "Be as ourselves in Denmark", his lips are twisted in a significant leer! Likewise, when various suggestions for Hamlet's madness are proposed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , Claudius nods his head and waves an index finger when they charge Hamlet with a "crafty madness." That's the real explanation!", Claudius seems to be saying: "craft !" This is one among several possible interpretations for the devilishly perverse text of "Hamlet". In the earlier versions of the legend by Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest, Hamlet feigns madness to appear like a harmless idiot and fool. The ploy works and Hamlet ultimately uses his disguise to bring down the court and murder the usurper.
However, in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet's efforts to disguise his intentions by playing madness only increase Claudius' suspicions. This is well brought out by Patrick Stewart. Stewart is also very skillful in the smooth delivery of his platitudes and hypocrisies, while he keeps his eye on the main business at hand, as in the audience scene in Act I, scene 2, when he sends the ambassadors off to Norway.
As indicated by the text, Claudius is unnerved by Hamlet's persistence (in the "Audience Scene", Act I, Scene ii) in dressing in mourning. Claudius comes up with a long stream of insults to try to force Hamlet into giving up his grief. This diatribe is not well performed by Stewart, one of the reasons being that Claudius' speech is fatally cut down, so we do not experience the growing crescendo of invective as Claudius realizes that he's getting nowhere.
Tennant's rendition of To Be Or Not To Be is a true tour-de-force , infinitely better than what Kenneth Branagh does with this classic soliloquy in his own Hamlet film. One particular to watch is the excellent, slow, delicate,even meticulous, camera work. Like a sculptor molding clay the camera moves slowly, yet with an expressiveness almost equal to that of the speech. Together with the muscles of David Tennant's face,every detail in pressed into service for this heightened rendition of this classic monologue.
All the more shocking then that the production cuts 7 entire lines!
It is a kind of crime against the play. Obviously, all productions of Hamlet must make cuts. The modern editions on which most productions are based, are a compilation of all the versions and modifications of Hamlet as it was performed over the 17th and part of the 18th centuries. Shakespeare himself could not have intended the play to go on for 5 hours. But one does not cut out an entire paragraph of the most famous speech in English theatre!
The role of Polonius is very well performed by Oliver Ford Davies. It is, of course, a character role, right out of the Italian tradition of the Comedia Dell'arte , and can be well played by any competent actor. (For that very reason, finding something new or original in the part does evidence a high level of ability!) Polonius' character has few shades or subtleties, and is best played that way.
Once again, one can criticize the way the various scenes have been arbitrarily transposed, so that Hamlet's "conversation" with Polonius (The "fish-monger" scene ) is placed after the wild tirade scene between Hamlet and Ophelia. This violates the logic of the action. It is because of the interview with Hamlet, that Polonius thinks he has direct evidence of Hamlet's "madness", which leads him to suggests to the king and queen that he and Claudius hide behind the arras. Because of this transposition, the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius serves no purpose (except that the scene is very funny, and David Tennant plays it to the hilt.)
I have strong reservations about the wisdom of setting almost the entire production in a single room, namely the mirror-floored black marbled ballroom with its pillars, drapes, stained glass, chandeliers, etc. It may be that Shakespeare's Elsinore is confining, oppressive, stuffy, (as Mariah Gale (Ophelia) states in the interviews ), but Shakespeare's mastery of stagecraft has seen to it that there are regular "breathers", allowing the audience, briefly, to taste the tart air of freedom before being plunged once more in the stifling interior of the castle.
Such as the battlements of Elsinore; the garden in which Hamlet strolls with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and which prompts his magnificent speech "What a piece of work is a man!". This is not well recited by Tennant: in my reading Hamlet briefly forgets his depression in his impassioned Renaissance vision of man; then despair overwhelms him again and he can see only a 'quintessence of dust'.); the beach where Horatio meets the sailors; the fencing hall.
Apart from the very brief meeting of Hamlet with Fortinbras' army, the only other bit of outdoors we get in this production - because it had no choice - is the graveyard scene.
It is beyond me why the production dresses the gravedigger, working away with a shovel digging out a hole in the ground, in a suit and tie, while Hamlet and Horatio are dressed like vagabonds on the road! Shades of Samuel Beckett, perhaps. The portrayal of the quarrel between Hamlet and Laertes is absolutely magnificent; there is no other word for it.
But that ballroom! The impact of the setting varies between being very satisfactory (audience scene), to inappropriate (chapel and bedroom scenes) to embarrassing (Hamlet's conversation with the Ghost). Sometimes it's satisfying, more often not. It can leave a really bad aftertaste, when one sees it being used for such different contexts. In my essay on Hamlet, "The Corpse in the Bedroom", I emphasis the initiation ritual that structures Act 3, from the court, to the stage, to the chapel and finally to the bedchamber. To put them all into the same inky space of black marble and mirrors, with the added superfluous device of the CCTV cameras, didn't work, at least for me.
Tennant's performance is by and large wonderful. Look: he understands the part!, by no means a guaranteed quantity in performances of Hamlet; Tennant captures many things that are in the text but so often overlooked by actors and directors. The wild swings of emotion and action for example, that atmosphere of "giddiness" which makes it impossible to know what Hamlet is going to do next :Shakespeare invented 'impulse theatre" long before Brecht! His performance allows us also to clearly distinguish the 4 different kinds of "madness" that Hamlet evidences:
(1)The antic disposition (as in the conversation with Polonius).
(2)The grief which loses control of itself and spills over into a wild frenzy akin to madness, in the scenes with Ophelia and with Gertrude.
(3)The 'attribution of madness', a tactic employed by Claudius, because he knows that Hamlet knows about his crimes. This is a common expedient of tyrants.
(4) The 'appearance of madness', when Hamlet behaves in such a way that any sane person would think him mad: the arrival of the Ghost in the bedroom, who, paradoxically, is visible to Hamlet but not to Gertrude. I've never understood the point of this: it convinces Gertrude that Hamlet really is mad, thus robbing everything he's been trying to tell his mother of all credibility.
(5) Finally there is the genuine madness of Ophelia. It's thrilling in this production. I loved it. May the 'sweet and gentle madwoman', Ophelia, be banished from the stage forever!
Gregory Doran claims that he wanted to create a B-movie thriller. Fortunately he failed. Hamlet is a thriller, but it is also a work of philosophy, of psychology and above all, of poetry. David Tennant fully understood this, and gives us Hamlet in all its aspects. Doran also claims that "there was no editing", but in fact he cuts out important lines from important speeches, as noted above.
One of the failings of the production is to underplay the war between Hamlet and Polonius. From reading the script one recognizes that it structures the entire first part of the play up to the murder of Polonius. As a preamble to the second half the Ghost returns, and one has, essentially, the sequel to the murder of Polonius.
James Joyce wrote about the inconsistency of this structure. In the first part, Polonius is a comedia dell'arte buffoon. In the second part, he is a dearly loved father whose death, deeply grieved by everyone (including Hamlet himself),leads to the madness and death of Ophelia, the vengeance of Laertes, and the final bloodbath. This fundamental structure is somewhat underplayed in the BBC2 production.
Finally, I think that the production should have retained more of the last act, though of course the cuts have to be made somewhere. Apparently the entire last act was filmed, but not used for the TV broadcast.