Plot Intro
“Hamlet? The story is as old as time. Pretty boy son has a rich Daddy, and a good-looking Mommy. The Uncle knocks off Daddy, marries Mommy, and he cuts pretty boy out of the action. So Junior goes crazy and he kills them all. Not a pretty story…but there it is.”
“Isn’t that the plot to ‘The Lion King’?”
— Third Rock from the Sun
Here are my problems with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It may be the bard’s most enduring work but it’s horrifically long- an uncut version can hit four or five hours, perhaps more- and it’s nowhere near eventful enough to warrant such a length. The whole plot hangs on the audience being involved with a hero who is convinced that his uncle killed his father, based solely on the testimony of a hallucination. It has also become theatre’s easiest profit-maker. If a production company doesn’t know what to put on for it’s Winter season, they just find the most fashionable TV actor at the time (David Tennant, Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott being the most recent choices), plonk them in Hamlet and make a bomb. No wonder so many budding new playwrights are stagnating in cocktail bars while this 400-year-old antiquity gets trundled out every year.
So I went into Lawrence Olivier’s famous adaptation with a feeling of dread. And no, it still didn’t make me love Hamlet. It’s as lugubrious and uninvolving as most Hamlet’s are (don’t even get me started on Kenneth Branagh’s 4-hour reverential rubbish). But, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it my favourite adaptation, I would at least give it the accolade of “least bad”, which is an achievement in itself.
Many reasons why Olivier’s Hamlet is criticised are the reasons why I’m about to praise it. It’s blessedly cut down, with key characters and speeches removed, and some scenes re-ordered. At two and a half hours, it still drags occasionally but it’s bearable and the pace remains brisk enough for the audience to keep going. It also ensures that Olivier, who directed the film as well as starred in it, can utilise music, camera movement and scenery to enhance certain phrases and moments and relish them. The early scenes involving the ghost are genuinely creepy, while the play-within-a-play in Act 3 is quite intense, both because the dialogue has been stripped down and an atmosphere has been created.
Also, Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet as a man who could not make up his mind, often dismissed as simplistic, keeps the play and film easier to follow. This is a vulnerable, fragile, psychologically troubled Hamlet, not the self-indulgent cynic that we usually get in modern times. Olivier is obviously not interested in making Hamlet complex and thought-provoking in order to appeal to literary snobs, but rather make it emotional and packed with vivacity. I am in full support of this, as Shakespeare often gets a bad rep for being elitist when really it should be made for the everyday movie-lover.
I won’t give it a high mark, however. Despite enjoying the melodrama, sweeping music, and surrealist camera work, Hamlet remains a cold, overrated piece. Bring me the brutality of Macbeth or the machinations of Othello any time.
Highlight
The ghost scenes are quite chilling - like something out of a Hammer horror film.
Lowlight
Polonius’ death scene goes on way too long. There’s only so much hysterical Gertrude one can take.
Mark
4/10
My views on Hamlet as a piece are pretty similar to Paul’s, only I quite liked Kenneth Branagh’s version (uncut at 4.5 hours as it was). It at least had colour, vibrancy and a few twists and turns (Kate Winslet as Mad Ophelia arrives in a straitjacket). This version, however, did not.
I’m beginning to think that Hamlet is an actor’s play in that it exists mainly for actors to satisfy their own ego at the expense of any audience. There are currently three versions of it on in London’s West End (Andrew Scott, Tom Hiddleston, and the lawyer-by-day Giles Brandreth). And yet every time I’ve gone to see it, I leave wondering why everyone gets so overexcited about it. It’s dull, it’s overlong, it has far too many ponderous sentences, and while the poetry is lovely, hearing it over and over again becomes just wearying.
So I approached Laurence Olivier’s version with wariness. And boy was I right to. I shouldn’t have been surprised really - Olivier’s style of direction was reportedly to act it out himself and tell the actor to just copy him (that ego is just phenomenal), and when his acting is as over the top and oddly wooden as this, one wonders how he managed to climb to the position of Acting Legend. Every scene was dragged out to the extent that I lost the will to follow what was happening at all. Deaths happened with no real shock, and as usual with Hamlet, we got to the final scenes with nothing more than just plain relief.
The question of why Hamlet is such a big thing right now remains unanswered. Jude Law, Maxine Peake, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Andrew Scott, Gyles Brandreth, Rory Kinnear and Paapa Essidedu have all played the role recently to hugely feted audiences. The only one I wish I’d seen was Simon Russell Beale’s, about a decade ago. His performance of one particular speech at the National Theatre’s 50th Anniversary Gala was sublime and touching in a way no other actor has emulated for me. But the play must be touching some unseen nerve, for it to be at such colossal repetition on London’s stage right now. What it is, I have no idea. I don’t care for the play, and am irritated by theatre’s scheduling the same old safe bet rather than risking their luck and discovering a new, great, writer.
Highlight
I had a lovely nap during the middle of the film which was great.
Lowlight
Laurence Olivier and his outdated acting really haven’t translated over the decades at all.
Mark
0.5/10 (no lower than that other paragon of dreadfulness: The Broadway Melody)
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