KD^3C^3 - 20250406 We'll strike it rich, a monster switch
I have been watching a lot of Hamlet in the last few weeks.
You know Hamlet, right? Shakespeare play from the late 1500s, A moody prince is visited by his fathers ghost to tell hime that he (the ghost king) was murdered by his brother who subsequently married the queen (Hamlet's mother) and took over the kingdom. Hamlet swears revenge and then goes about committing his revenge so poorly that almost everybody he knows dies, including himself? It's kind of well known.
I was (and am) pretty familiar with the play. I've read it a couple times and seen some of the various adaptations. My absolutely favorite production was one I saw in Prague that had been translated to Czech. I don't speak or understand Czech, but I knew the play well enough that I could follow along with wat was happening. And they made some really interesting choices in their production. I was a small, cramped theater with a relatively tiny stage, which meant they didn't have room for big set pieces alike sword fights or jumping in graves. I won't bother you with all the specifics, because it's not really important, but it really helped me see how flexible the play could be.
Thinking about it, I wondered how many productions of Hamlet I had seen in total. The number was smaller than I expected when I counted it out. If I was generous with my definition of what counts as a Hamlet, I had the following list (Not in chronological order):
You know Hamlet, right? Shakespeare play from the late 1500s, A moody prince is visited by his fathers ghost to tell hime that he (the ghost king) was murdered by his brother who subsequently married the queen (Hamlet's mother) and took over the kingdom. Hamlet swears revenge and then goes about committing his revenge so poorly that almost everybody he knows dies, including himself? It's kind of well known.
I was (and am) pretty familiar with the play. I've read it a couple times and seen some of the various adaptations. My absolutely favorite production was one I saw in Prague that had been translated to Czech. I don't speak or understand Czech, but I knew the play well enough that I could follow along with wat was happening. And they made some really interesting choices in their production. I was a small, cramped theater with a relatively tiny stage, which meant they didn't have room for big set pieces alike sword fights or jumping in graves. I won't bother you with all the specifics, because it's not really important, but it really helped me see how flexible the play could be.
Thinking about it, I wondered how many productions of Hamlet I had seen in total. The number was smaller than I expected when I counted it out. If I was generous with my definition of what counts as a Hamlet, I had the following list (Not in chronological order):
- Prague - 2010
- Lawrence Olivia 1948 movie
- Slings & Arrows season 1
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
- The Lion King
- The David Tennant/Patrick Steward BBC production from 2009
- Hamlet 2000 - the one with Ethan Hawke that fails in almost every way possible.
- The episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000
- The filmed performance of the 2018 production at Shakespeare's Globe (the recreation of the original globe stage in London)
- The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
- Arden (the podcast) season 2 (technically I heard it, rather than see it, but whatever)
That's not a short list, but there are so many hamlets out there that I figured I should see more. So I started watching Hamlets. By my count, (really the count of someone on Letterboxd) there are at least 85 Hamlets on film. And that list doesn't include the non-film hamlets from my list above. So I had only seen 8 of those 85, just under 10% of the Hamlets. I could do better.
So I started watching Hamlets. Why? I wish I could tell you. Here's the ones I've watched so far, since starting on March 26.
Le duel d’Hamlet, Directed by Clément Maurice - This is probably the first ever film of Hamlet (and is absolutely the oldest surviving film of Hamlet.) It's a short, only a couple minutes long, and depicts the climactic sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes. ALso notable is that it stars Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. She mad waves a few years before this film for being one of the first Women to play Hamlet on stage, and it seems she was happy to have that performance immortalized on film. And here we are 125 years later and I'm still watching it, so that's pretty cool. Wikipedia says there was originally a wax cylinder recording of the actors reciting their lines to be played along with the film, but it has since been lost. The film itself is not particularly remarkable, being a short sword fight shot from a static angle, but I'm still glad I watched it.
Hamlet, Directed by Peter Pasyk - This is a filmed stage production from the Stratford Festival and features the first black woman to play the role at the festival. It's an impressive Hamlet, the lead brings a whole lot to the role, playing everything at about 2 levels higher than her scene partners, which can be a but much. But Hamlet is a bit much so it works. I really enjoyed the scenic design on this one as it was minimal but evocative. The most interesting thing was a central rectangular platform that raised and lowered, serving multiple purposes including a magic trick like reveal that played really well. I also have to applaud the production for making the text very understandable. So often the actors can lose the words they are saying and the audince will have to go on vibes (Foreshadowing for the Branagh production down the list) but here it felt like people talking and the words never felt separated from meaning.
Hamlet from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Directed by Bill Colleran, John Gielgud - This is another filmed stage production, this time of a Brodway cast led by Richard Burton. Burton is an actor I know mostly fro Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which is a very good movie, but in ways that are perpendicular to Hamlet. Burton brings a lot of gravitas to the role, and the production was styled as minimally as possible to let the words and actions do the work. The actors are in "rehearsal" clothes and the set is functional only. I think my favorite thing is the Ghost, which is presented as a giant shadow projected on the stage, which is very effective.
Three Days of Hamlet, Directed by Alex Hyde-White - A 2012 documentary about Alex Hyde-White getting a bunch of actors together to put on a staged reading of Hamlet in 3 days. Hyde-White also plays Hamlet and it seems his time is spent between directing the play, playing hamlet and directing the documentary we are watching. "Time is out of joint" has never been a more appropriate line in this. We see a mix of rehearsal footage and live performances all in unpredictable order, and this is all interspersed with interview footage from the actors who mostly seem baffled by the whole thing. They end up reading scenes that didn't rehearse, picking up new roles as things go along and even in one case, bringing on an audience member to read a couple lines that they forgot tot cast someone for. Almost a Hamlet meets This is Spinal Tap sort of affair.
Johnny Hamlet, Directed by Enzo G. Castellari - What if Hamlet was a spaghetti western? Ditching the original script entirely, this Italian produced western ersion keeps only the most basic structure of hamlet and jettisons everything else. Hamlet is a cowboy in this means there are more than a few shootouts, something surprisingly absent from the original text. Westerns aren't really my thing (or maybe I've just not seen the right ones) but this seems to have hit all the marks it was supposed to. I think the most surprising choice among all of this is that Johnny makes it out alive, even if almost nobody else does. I wonder if they were thinking about setting up a Johnny Hamlet 2.
Hamlet, Directed by Kenneth Branagh - This one was a beast. I had been putting it off for a while because at four hours long, it is the only filmed Hamlet that uses the full original uncut text of the play. Branagh stars and directs and he does both with quite a bit of pomp. He sets the play in roughly Victorian times, and it mostly takes place in a giant hall in a castle full of mirrors. I'd like the mirrors to have a deeper meaning to the text, but I really can;t say it works. It's really pretty to look at and I even rewound a couple times to admire a particularly impressive camera move, but if the audience is focusing more on the camera moves than what is being said, you might have a problem. It often felt like the actors were reciting more than performing the text. It was almost like they didn't have a grasp on the words that were being said and Branagh as a director just told them to act certain emotions rather than the meaning. I'm glad a full-text version is out there, but I kind of wish it wasn't this one. Plus Billy Crystal and Robin Williams show up in act V to play small but important roles, which was a real surprise.
RSC Live: Hamlet, Directed by Simon Godwin - As the titles implies, this was a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2016. So far this is my favorite Hamlet that I've seen in this project. Everyone is firing on all cylinders, it all just works. The costuming also did a great job of reflecting Hamlet's changes over the course of the play, something I think a lot of productions neglect, preferring instead to just throw him all in black and call it a day.
I've still got so many more Hamlets to see. I've got a made by Hallmark for TV version from 2000 (before they were the Christmas channel), the same year the Ethan Hawke one came out, and the Mel Gibson version, which I'm dreading more than the Branagh one, a version I just picked up ad the used book shop yesterday that I know nothing about, not to mention all the "Based on" hamlets like Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, Strange Brew from he Canadian SCTV team, and the newly produced Grand Theft Hamlet which is a documentary about putting on Hamlet entirely inside the world of Grand Theft Auto Online. I better get to it.
So I started watching Hamlets. Why? I wish I could tell you. Here's the ones I've watched so far, since starting on March 26.
Le duel d’Hamlet, Directed by Clément Maurice - This is probably the first ever film of Hamlet (and is absolutely the oldest surviving film of Hamlet.) It's a short, only a couple minutes long, and depicts the climactic sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes. ALso notable is that it stars Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. She mad waves a few years before this film for being one of the first Women to play Hamlet on stage, and it seems she was happy to have that performance immortalized on film. And here we are 125 years later and I'm still watching it, so that's pretty cool. Wikipedia says there was originally a wax cylinder recording of the actors reciting their lines to be played along with the film, but it has since been lost. The film itself is not particularly remarkable, being a short sword fight shot from a static angle, but I'm still glad I watched it.
Hamlet, Directed by Peter Pasyk - This is a filmed stage production from the Stratford Festival and features the first black woman to play the role at the festival. It's an impressive Hamlet, the lead brings a whole lot to the role, playing everything at about 2 levels higher than her scene partners, which can be a but much. But Hamlet is a bit much so it works. I really enjoyed the scenic design on this one as it was minimal but evocative. The most interesting thing was a central rectangular platform that raised and lowered, serving multiple purposes including a magic trick like reveal that played really well. I also have to applaud the production for making the text very understandable. So often the actors can lose the words they are saying and the audince will have to go on vibes (Foreshadowing for the Branagh production down the list) but here it felt like people talking and the words never felt separated from meaning.
Hamlet from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Directed by Bill Colleran, John Gielgud - This is another filmed stage production, this time of a Brodway cast led by Richard Burton. Burton is an actor I know mostly fro Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which is a very good movie, but in ways that are perpendicular to Hamlet. Burton brings a lot of gravitas to the role, and the production was styled as minimally as possible to let the words and actions do the work. The actors are in "rehearsal" clothes and the set is functional only. I think my favorite thing is the Ghost, which is presented as a giant shadow projected on the stage, which is very effective.
Three Days of Hamlet, Directed by Alex Hyde-White - A 2012 documentary about Alex Hyde-White getting a bunch of actors together to put on a staged reading of Hamlet in 3 days. Hyde-White also plays Hamlet and it seems his time is spent between directing the play, playing hamlet and directing the documentary we are watching. "Time is out of joint" has never been a more appropriate line in this. We see a mix of rehearsal footage and live performances all in unpredictable order, and this is all interspersed with interview footage from the actors who mostly seem baffled by the whole thing. They end up reading scenes that didn't rehearse, picking up new roles as things go along and even in one case, bringing on an audience member to read a couple lines that they forgot tot cast someone for. Almost a Hamlet meets This is Spinal Tap sort of affair.
Johnny Hamlet, Directed by Enzo G. Castellari - What if Hamlet was a spaghetti western? Ditching the original script entirely, this Italian produced western ersion keeps only the most basic structure of hamlet and jettisons everything else. Hamlet is a cowboy in this means there are more than a few shootouts, something surprisingly absent from the original text. Westerns aren't really my thing (or maybe I've just not seen the right ones) but this seems to have hit all the marks it was supposed to. I think the most surprising choice among all of this is that Johnny makes it out alive, even if almost nobody else does. I wonder if they were thinking about setting up a Johnny Hamlet 2.
Hamlet, Directed by Kenneth Branagh - This one was a beast. I had been putting it off for a while because at four hours long, it is the only filmed Hamlet that uses the full original uncut text of the play. Branagh stars and directs and he does both with quite a bit of pomp. He sets the play in roughly Victorian times, and it mostly takes place in a giant hall in a castle full of mirrors. I'd like the mirrors to have a deeper meaning to the text, but I really can;t say it works. It's really pretty to look at and I even rewound a couple times to admire a particularly impressive camera move, but if the audience is focusing more on the camera moves than what is being said, you might have a problem. It often felt like the actors were reciting more than performing the text. It was almost like they didn't have a grasp on the words that were being said and Branagh as a director just told them to act certain emotions rather than the meaning. I'm glad a full-text version is out there, but I kind of wish it wasn't this one. Plus Billy Crystal and Robin Williams show up in act V to play small but important roles, which was a real surprise.
RSC Live: Hamlet, Directed by Simon Godwin - As the titles implies, this was a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2016. So far this is my favorite Hamlet that I've seen in this project. Everyone is firing on all cylinders, it all just works. The costuming also did a great job of reflecting Hamlet's changes over the course of the play, something I think a lot of productions neglect, preferring instead to just throw him all in black and call it a day.
I've still got so many more Hamlets to see. I've got a made by Hallmark for TV version from 2000 (before they were the Christmas channel), the same year the Ethan Hawke one came out, and the Mel Gibson version, which I'm dreading more than the Branagh one, a version I just picked up ad the used book shop yesterday that I know nothing about, not to mention all the "Based on" hamlets like Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, Strange Brew from he Canadian SCTV team, and the newly produced Grand Theft Hamlet which is a documentary about putting on Hamlet entirely inside the world of Grand Theft Auto Online. I better get to it.