Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london

Follow @theatreguidelon

 The Theatreguide.London Review

In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others by streaming new shows, and various online archives preserve still more vintage productions. Even as things return to normal we continue to review the experience of watching live theatre onscreen.

HAMLET
Royal Shakespeare Company 2009 and BBC iPlayer.  January 2025

The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 Hamlet, directed by Gregory Doran and starring David Tennant, had a very successful run in Stratford. But Tennant was injured on opening night of the London Transfer in January 2009 and only played a handful of performances during the limited run. (We reviewed understudy Edward Bennett HERE)

That made it doubly welcome that the RSC recorded a television version, available on the BBC iPlayer.

While keeping the original cast and the established characterisations, director Doran chose not merely to record a theatre performance but to restage it for the screen, making full use of close-ups and sensitively selected camera angles and movement, and allowing his actors to play much more quietly and realistically than they could in a large theatre.

The result is a very realistic, intimate production that illuminates the play in ways even the most experienced Shakespearean will find exciting and holds your attention and emotional involvement through its three-hour length.

The play is done in modern dress, and once you adjust to that, it does not seem intrusive or arbitrary as the device sometimes can be. Indeed, spotting that Laertes has packed condoms as he leaves for France is a nice characterising touch, while Hamlet carrying his own video camera to record Claudius at The Mousetrap, and letting us see through it, increases our voyeuristic relations to the action.

To have Claudius's court always in formal wear, with Hamlet in the opening scenes visibly uncomfortable in an ill-fitting too-tight suit, nicely establishes his out-of-placeness, while a switch as soon as he can to a T-shirt and jeans suggests that the Ghost's assignment is actually liberating him.

Elsinore is a place of constant scrutiny, illustrated by repeatedly switching our view to the ubiquitous CCTV cameras. (When, at a key point, Hamlet tears a camera down, Shakespeare's line 'Now I am alone' takes on new resonance.)

Tennant's Prince is highly intelligent and self-aware, his wide-open, almost bulging eyes taking everything in, including his own thoughts and emotions. Close-ups allow the actor's slightest changes in expression to convey the character's rapid processing of everything he sees.

Nothing this Hamlet says is casual or without meaning, because we have seen the nanoseconds of thought that led up to it. As a result you cannot pigeon-hole this Hamlet with any of the lazy definitions some other productions allow (and English professors love) – too passive, too intellectual, too Oedipal, etc.

This is a Hamlet who is making it up as he goes along, and if that leads to occasional inconsistencies, that's all the more believable.

Tennant and Doran have evidently worked hard at finding ways to fit the soliloquies into this characterisation. 'Too solid flesh' is addressed conversationally to the camera, 'To be' is wholly internal, 'How all occasions' a vlog to his own camera - each mode reflecting Hamlet's mood or mental state of the moment.

Patrick Stewart makes Claudius (a role he played, opposite Derek Jacobi, in another BBC Hamlet 30 years earlier) a smooth, confident business executive. He reacts to the Mousetrap with anger and defiance (a silent stare-down that says 'OK Hamlet, you've declared yourself. Now the war is on') and he meets his death with striking bravery.

Penny Downie eliminates any distracting ambiguities about Gertrude by making it clear that she loves Claudius and knows nothing of the murder. The ever-reliable Oliver Ford Davies makes Polonius a garrulous old fool while keeping us aware that even a fool can be dangerous, and Mariah Gale makes almost no impression at all as Ophelia.

The text is heavily trimmed, largely though the wholesale cutting of rhetorical flourishes that do not directly advance the plot. Among the losses are the 'So oft it happens with particular men' speech (which Laurence Olivier made the cornerstone of his interpretation), the 'slings and arrows' section of 'To be or not to be,' Hamlet's shipboard story and the whole final scene involving Fortinbras.

Even so, the video version runs three hours, and you may want to watch it in two or three sittings. It is worth it.

Gerald Berkowitz