Hamlet, Barbican Theatre
Lyndsey Turner, director; Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet
via NT Live
15 October 2015

Okay, so Hamlet.

I don’t want to say that it went downhill for me from the beginning, but… ( cut for length and grumpiness )

Thinking, as one does, about Hamlet. I still haven't had a chance to think through the NT Live broadcast beyond the scribbles I took during intermission and when I got home (and probably won't, now). I thought Rory Kinnear was quite good, but--weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly)--he tended to lose me, just a tiny bit, on the soliloquies. I don't want ( Read more... )

1. I should have noticed this before, because it's obvious--and maybe I did notice it on some subconscious level--but: Horatio's "Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" is both the first time Horatio permits himself to use a proper endearment toward Hamlet (or one of very few times, at the least), and the first ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

Going through my files, as I try to look back on what sorts of things actually do interest me and what sorts of things I might be able to manage writing about, after all, and I found that I *did* actually write that defense of Horatio (a thing I keep wanting to do, especially after reading a batch of Hamlet criticism that reduced him to a mere ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I got around to watching the Peter Brook Hamlet (I only just found out that it had been filmed, because sometimes I'm just slow like that), and it was distressing in many, many ways. I once wrote of Brook's King Lear that he treated all the speeches like scrambled eggs, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but... how do you cut out ( Read more... )

What with the Greg Doran interview and the first promotional photo of David Tennant as Hamlet floating around, I figured I might as well go ahead and post this thing I wrote back in August but wound up not posting, for one reason or another. It's an odd, disjointed ramble about why I love Ten (which I haven't posted about really; so many of my ( Read more... )

Sometimes when I can't sleep, my brain gets up to the strangest things. Like my newfound conviction that the world needs a movie called Funeral Crashers, in which Hamlet and Horatio, well, crash funerals (there is totally precedent for this, right?) and inveigle their way in by pretending to be related to the deceased, whereupon they would hang ( Read more... )

So...I probably should not refer to Horatio as my Elizabethan boyfriend, you know, out loud.

Some friends and I saw a really not-very-good production of Hamlet this weekend, which is doubly bad because we've enjoyed this company very much in the past. I can't really put my finger on why it was so not-good, exactly, except that it was boring. Any ( Read more... )