so...
Hamlet: worst audience member ever, Y/Y? It always amuses me when productions don't even try to pretend that we can hear him but the players can't: the perils of performing for royalty. (Also, because I am a caricature of myself, I totally dug the Player Queen.)
There may be a proper update about Hamlet at some point, but: let it be known that I am in love with David Tennant's using his bare feet to point at things during the Mousetrap scene. And also with the eager, unselfconscious (and unconscious), childlike energy with which he folds himself down at the Player King's feet to hear of Priam and Pyrrhus--tell me a story, it says, and the Player King obliges, giving him words and gestures with which to imagine himself. Those arms raised for the killing stroke will come back again, in "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" and in "Now might I do it pat"--and so will the standing as a neutral to his will and matter. (I tend to grieve for Hamlet--any Hamlet--in bits and pieces, when we see the young man who was; that was one.)
Oh--and I loved the flying tackle-hug between him and Horatio. Because, once again, I am a caricature of myself.
(ETA: And I squeed, when he said "dreamt of in our philosophy," after reading Jonathan Bate's article about it and Tennant's desire to change the line. I am like that. And there's this brief glimmer of wonder when he says it, too--which doesn't suit with "your philosophy," because that's Hamlet holding himself apart from Horatio's beliefs. For just a second, with "our," we got something different, something more open and shared, something that harks back to the two of them together at Wittenberg. Or I could be reading entirely too much into it; I am also like that, sometimes. But I think it was there.)
There may be a proper update about Hamlet at some point, but: let it be known that I am in love with David Tennant's using his bare feet to point at things during the Mousetrap scene. And also with the eager, unselfconscious (and unconscious), childlike energy with which he folds himself down at the Player King's feet to hear of Priam and Pyrrhus--tell me a story, it says, and the Player King obliges, giving him words and gestures with which to imagine himself. Those arms raised for the killing stroke will come back again, in "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" and in "Now might I do it pat"--and so will the standing as a neutral to his will and matter. (I tend to grieve for Hamlet--any Hamlet--in bits and pieces, when we see the young man who was; that was one.)
Oh--and I loved the flying tackle-hug between him and Horatio. Because, once again, I am a caricature of myself.
(ETA: And I squeed, when he said "dreamt of in our philosophy," after reading Jonathan Bate's article about it and Tennant's desire to change the line. I am like that. And there's this brief glimmer of wonder when he says it, too--which doesn't suit with "your philosophy," because that's Hamlet holding himself apart from Horatio's beliefs. For just a second, with "our," we got something different, something more open and shared, something that harks back to the two of them together at Wittenberg. Or I could be reading entirely too much into it; I am also like that, sometimes. But I think it was there.)