Hamlet Hum

[bunn]

Certainly can't complain at Patrick Stewart as Claudius and the Ghost, but not entirely convinced by David Tennant's Hamlet, particularly during the scenes with Ophelia. Ophelia was good though.

Laertes was a tit, but then I guess Laertes is a bit of a tit so maybe that was just well acted...  But I think I prefer him more angry and less... prattish. 

On the whole, thinking that Hamlet probably works better on the stage than as a film, though the references to CCTV were quite clever and would have been a bit more difficult to do on stage probably. 

Comments

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

I was disappointed. The stage production was excellent, the TV dramatisation of the stage production lost many of the things that made the original excellent. I was expecting to see a the stage version filmed, not a complete re-imaging of it with the same cast, script and costume. That was a mistake.

In the opening scenes of the stage production where the soldiers see the ghost they used their lamps as the sole illumination, reflecting them off the polished floor onto the speaker. And that was just one example.

Another is where Polonius is killed. In the stage production the mirror which shatters is one of the rear mirrors to the stage; it is a full three stories high, it and its like can freely rotate along their vertical axis. It is semi-transparent and semi-reflective depending on the lighting. It was quite clearly shattered on both sides. How they managed to do that on stage in an instant and for it to remain shattered throughout the rest of the performance and for it not to look shattered prior to that point still has me puzzled. That simply didn't translate to the film version.

The CCTV and video camera was far more developed in the film version, but I'm not sure they added enough to warrant the other changes.

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

I think I'd agree - Patrick Stewart was inspired (he makes it sounds as though he is speaking modern English and David Tennant doesn't). And I thought the setting didn't add anything - if different costumes/settings/scenery make you look at the play in a different way, it's a bonus (the recent Macbeth in the vaguely Stalinist totalitarian state underlined the ruthlessness of the Macbeths in a way I'd never quite seen before). But the Hamlet setting didn't seem to have a reason.