dramaturgy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dramaturgy) wrote2009-10-26 10:23 pm
dramaturgy) wrote2009-10-26 10:23 pm
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So like I said, Friday night I managed to get to go see Hamlet with Jude Law. The short version of that story is FUCKING AMAZING, and the longer version of that is FUCKING AMAZING and now we're going to talk about a few things.
I've never seen Hamlet done live. I've seen the Mel Gibson movie, but that's about it, but it's a play that I love and can read repeatedly. There are some things that I normally see in scholarship or reading about production history that I don't necessarily agree with (I think Hamlet has to be younger than thirty, for one) and while they didn't necessarily incorporate it in the production (or didn't seem to), it was satisfying and I could see that a lot of intelligence went into it.
First, Hamlet is an ensemble piece. If you hang the entire play on Hamlet it is not going to work. And they did not hang their hat on Jude Law. I mean, clearly he was their big name for putting butts in seats, but nobody was coasting. Ron Cook, who I saw in London in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer but he's also got some movies to his credit, was Polonius and he was a windbag, but for all that he was not a fool. Hamlet made fun of him yes (and as for the humping that followed the line, "You are a fishmonger!" ... I could live a long time without repeating that), but he was not just someone for us to laugh at. He was shrewd, and he was a caring father to Laertes and Ophelia. Ron Cook is flat out wonderful. He also doubled as the first gravedigger, which makes a poignant double in the first scene of Act V when he is digging Ophelia's grave.
Kevin McNally played Claudius -- that's right, the guy who played the drunken, storytelling pirate Gibbs in all three Pirates of the Caribbean films is a legitimately awesomely talented actor. Who knew? Seriously, he was wonderful. He was charismatic, but at the same time there was the undercurrent of something Not Quite Right. There were glimpses of badass in there as well, which I appreciated. No other names in the cast stuck out to me, although the guy who played Horatio (Matt Ryan?) has been on Torchwood, but I wasn't able to find what episode. He was great, though. And Laertes was smoking in every sense of the word. (He was tall and lean. I like 'em tall and lean. >_>)
Okay. Now the one you really clicked to read about. Jude Law was fucking amazing, pardon my French. He had this amazing, frenetic energy for basically the full three and a half hours. Everything he did was urgent and in the moment, the air practically vibrated around him. He was wonderful with every single member of the cast.
If you haven't seen pictures or video of their production/set, it's very much a castle environment. Stone and wooden doors, everything and everyone done up in blacks and dark greys, in modern but nondescript dress. Lighting is stark, with a lot of white and blue, with the occasional warm tone. But all in all, a very stark and cold environment is evoked to great effect.
Oh, so videos. Here is some, and here is another (there you can see the humping), and here's another, and it's not a video, but it is a wonderful talk about the closet scene with Hamlet from Geraldine James, who plays Gertrude.
First... it was funny. There were funny points. Yes, it is a tragedy but it's not all woe and angst and awful things. Second, even though I think Hamlet is young (mid-twenties at the oldest) I know it's hard to find an actor of that ages with the chops. At the same time, it can be done. His friends are young, the way he thinks about things is not someone who's been around for ages.
I AM DOING REALLY BADLY AT ORGANIZING MY THOUGHTS. Sorry.
The Ghost, I think, sets the tone for the whole thing. And with Hamlet and the Ghost we don't see a spectral scary thing, we see a boy who has lost a father he loved very much -- still loves. And while his melancholy may have stemmed from Gertrude's quick remarriage and subsequent losing out on the throne to Claudius, those embers are fanned into an inferno when the Ghost tells Hamlet that he's been murdered and he needs to be revenged. (The Ghost, by the way, doubled as the Player King, which is not at all unusual but highly effective nonetheless.) He basically wept his way through that scene. It was hard to watch, I felt like I was intruding on some very private moment of grief.
With Ophelia... it's really up to a production how they determine what Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship had been, but I think there had been something going on there, and they seemed to have hit it on the nail there. In the scene where Laertes departs for France, when it is just him and Ophelia and he basically tells her, "Don't give the Prince the buns for free if you want him to buy the bakery," she laughed it off. There was no offense, just laughing it off. And later, in "Get thee to a nunnery" -- you know, he says it about four times in that scene. The first time was so desperately tender, it wasn't angry until the last time (which you can see in the above video clips). I think it's at that moment that Hamlet realizes that if he does what the Ghost is charging him to do, that there is going to be some collateral damage and Ophelia is going to be part of that, and he doesn't want that for her. There's a point in the scene where he pulls her in close and just for a split second kisses her and she looks like she's going to fall right into it, but before she can she's at arm's length again. I think I actually groaned with how much that hurt to watch.
I dunno. I really think that Hamlet loved Ophelia.
I also don't really think he started out mad. I think he started playing at mad and it snowballed on him, and he began to actually lose his grip on reality. Jude Law's Hamlet didn't seem mad -- just sad, angry, and caustic by turns, but very intelligent and on the up and up as to what was going on in Elsinore.
One of my favorite staging bits was the closet scene. When Polonius hid behind the arras, the arras was a large sheer curtain, and Hamlet and Gertrude were placed upstage of it, so that we were viewing them from behind the arras with Polonius. In the above video you can see it being pulled down -- he pulls it down when he dies, and the theatre was SILENT as it came down to the floor when Ron Cook hit the floor. It was AMAZING.
Also the sword fight was really hot. Can I just say that?
I'm sure I'll think of other things along the way but. Holy shit. I think it was a good first production for me to see. I'm excited for the David Tennant stage version to be released on DVD in January (THE INTERNET WILL MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR ME HOPEFULLY) and then I can compare.
That aside, things are all right. I'm keeping busy. I'm excited because I get to do a full protocol for the Intro class, and I get to choose any play I want. I was thinking The Sea Gull, but now I'm thinking about doing Spring's Awakening. (Chris gave a presentation on Goethe and Faust last Thursday and I FINALLY managed to connect Melchior to Faust and Wendla to Gretchen -- I knew in general about the plot of Faust, mind you, but reading it really shed light on it.) I think it would be interesting to work on.
Right now I'm working on a production history project, where we had to cite three productions of any Ibsen play, or any other play that we've studied in the class up to this point. I chose Ghosts because I'm so over A Doll House, and I am remembering how awesome this play is. I haven't read it since I was in high school. I was going to do our next project (images and sound) on A Dream Play by Strindberg, but now I'm thinking I want to keep working on Ghosts.
I've never seen Hamlet done live. I've seen the Mel Gibson movie, but that's about it, but it's a play that I love and can read repeatedly. There are some things that I normally see in scholarship or reading about production history that I don't necessarily agree with (I think Hamlet has to be younger than thirty, for one) and while they didn't necessarily incorporate it in the production (or didn't seem to), it was satisfying and I could see that a lot of intelligence went into it.
First, Hamlet is an ensemble piece. If you hang the entire play on Hamlet it is not going to work. And they did not hang their hat on Jude Law. I mean, clearly he was their big name for putting butts in seats, but nobody was coasting. Ron Cook, who I saw in London in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer but he's also got some movies to his credit, was Polonius and he was a windbag, but for all that he was not a fool. Hamlet made fun of him yes (and as for the humping that followed the line, "You are a fishmonger!" ... I could live a long time without repeating that), but he was not just someone for us to laugh at. He was shrewd, and he was a caring father to Laertes and Ophelia. Ron Cook is flat out wonderful. He also doubled as the first gravedigger, which makes a poignant double in the first scene of Act V when he is digging Ophelia's grave.
Kevin McNally played Claudius -- that's right, the guy who played the drunken, storytelling pirate Gibbs in all three Pirates of the Caribbean films is a legitimately awesomely talented actor. Who knew? Seriously, he was wonderful. He was charismatic, but at the same time there was the undercurrent of something Not Quite Right. There were glimpses of badass in there as well, which I appreciated. No other names in the cast stuck out to me, although the guy who played Horatio (Matt Ryan?) has been on Torchwood, but I wasn't able to find what episode. He was great, though. And Laertes was smoking in every sense of the word. (He was tall and lean. I like 'em tall and lean. >_>)
Okay. Now the one you really clicked to read about. Jude Law was fucking amazing, pardon my French. He had this amazing, frenetic energy for basically the full three and a half hours. Everything he did was urgent and in the moment, the air practically vibrated around him. He was wonderful with every single member of the cast.
If you haven't seen pictures or video of their production/set, it's very much a castle environment. Stone and wooden doors, everything and everyone done up in blacks and dark greys, in modern but nondescript dress. Lighting is stark, with a lot of white and blue, with the occasional warm tone. But all in all, a very stark and cold environment is evoked to great effect.
Oh, so videos. Here is some, and here is another (there you can see the humping), and here's another, and it's not a video, but it is a wonderful talk about the closet scene with Hamlet from Geraldine James, who plays Gertrude.
First... it was funny. There were funny points. Yes, it is a tragedy but it's not all woe and angst and awful things. Second, even though I think Hamlet is young (mid-twenties at the oldest) I know it's hard to find an actor of that ages with the chops. At the same time, it can be done. His friends are young, the way he thinks about things is not someone who's been around for ages.
I AM DOING REALLY BADLY AT ORGANIZING MY THOUGHTS. Sorry.
The Ghost, I think, sets the tone for the whole thing. And with Hamlet and the Ghost we don't see a spectral scary thing, we see a boy who has lost a father he loved very much -- still loves. And while his melancholy may have stemmed from Gertrude's quick remarriage and subsequent losing out on the throne to Claudius, those embers are fanned into an inferno when the Ghost tells Hamlet that he's been murdered and he needs to be revenged. (The Ghost, by the way, doubled as the Player King, which is not at all unusual but highly effective nonetheless.) He basically wept his way through that scene. It was hard to watch, I felt like I was intruding on some very private moment of grief.
With Ophelia... it's really up to a production how they determine what Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship had been, but I think there had been something going on there, and they seemed to have hit it on the nail there. In the scene where Laertes departs for France, when it is just him and Ophelia and he basically tells her, "Don't give the Prince the buns for free if you want him to buy the bakery," she laughed it off. There was no offense, just laughing it off. And later, in "Get thee to a nunnery" -- you know, he says it about four times in that scene. The first time was so desperately tender, it wasn't angry until the last time (which you can see in the above video clips). I think it's at that moment that Hamlet realizes that if he does what the Ghost is charging him to do, that there is going to be some collateral damage and Ophelia is going to be part of that, and he doesn't want that for her. There's a point in the scene where he pulls her in close and just for a split second kisses her and she looks like she's going to fall right into it, but before she can she's at arm's length again. I think I actually groaned with how much that hurt to watch.
I dunno. I really think that Hamlet loved Ophelia.
I also don't really think he started out mad. I think he started playing at mad and it snowballed on him, and he began to actually lose his grip on reality. Jude Law's Hamlet didn't seem mad -- just sad, angry, and caustic by turns, but very intelligent and on the up and up as to what was going on in Elsinore.
One of my favorite staging bits was the closet scene. When Polonius hid behind the arras, the arras was a large sheer curtain, and Hamlet and Gertrude were placed upstage of it, so that we were viewing them from behind the arras with Polonius. In the above video you can see it being pulled down -- he pulls it down when he dies, and the theatre was SILENT as it came down to the floor when Ron Cook hit the floor. It was AMAZING.
Also the sword fight was really hot. Can I just say that?
I'm sure I'll think of other things along the way but. Holy shit. I think it was a good first production for me to see. I'm excited for the David Tennant stage version to be released on DVD in January (THE INTERNET WILL MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR ME HOPEFULLY) and then I can compare.
That aside, things are all right. I'm keeping busy. I'm excited because I get to do a full protocol for the Intro class, and I get to choose any play I want. I was thinking The Sea Gull, but now I'm thinking about doing Spring's Awakening. (Chris gave a presentation on Goethe and Faust last Thursday and I FINALLY managed to connect Melchior to Faust and Wendla to Gretchen -- I knew in general about the plot of Faust, mind you, but reading it really shed light on it.) I think it would be interesting to work on.
Right now I'm working on a production history project, where we had to cite three productions of any Ibsen play, or any other play that we've studied in the class up to this point. I chose Ghosts because I'm so over A Doll House, and I am remembering how awesome this play is. I haven't read it since I was in high school. I was going to do our next project (images and sound) on A Dream Play by Strindberg, but now I'm thinking I want to keep working on Ghosts.
no subject
Onward. I have the time on my hands so I dug it up, Matt Ryan was in Meat, that TW episode that ALWAYS makes me cringe when I think about it (regardless of Rhys's awesome). Just to answer the question. (Looking for him I also found out where I recognized Michelle Ryan from, holy crap, she was the thief in the Who Easter special.)
To the Hamlet:
Watched the first video, my computer won't let me watch the others (BAH I SAY) but I love the lighting and the staging, what I can see of it. It actually makes it look like the state of Denmark itself is ill, if that makes sense.
He also doubled as the first gravedigger Augh ;_;
I've seen Hamlet staged twice and never was there enough physicality in the Hamlet/Ophelia scene for me, so I actually kind of went \o/ at reading your description.
Man I don't even know what else I was going to comment on. OH the closet scene.
I want to hitchhike to New York and see. ;_;