If you love theater, superb performances of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are a fan of actors David Tennant or Patrick Stewart, or especially if you are all of the above, as I am, then click here to watch the film of the production shown on Great Performances this past April.
Both men are indeed formidable actors, not only as The Doctor or as Captain Picard, but within the rigors and disciplines of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now the Great Performances site is offering the film to be viewed online.
Some gifted actors, and generally the productions of the RSC itself, have a way of being able to give us Shakespeare’s lines — “talk Shakespeare” — so we understand them as conversationally as if they were penned yesterday, without changing a word or a syllable of Shakespeare’s text to do it.
When I was in high school, I had just been introduced to Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, and Hamlet (which became and remains my personal favorite). I could imagine the characters and the action as I read these plays just as I could when reading a novel.
Then I wanted to read Shakespeare’s other plays, and did so at home — and also enjoyed the repertory Shakespeare productions of the Phoenix Theater in New York, with a truly superb and unforgettable Hamlet starring the young Donald Madden; and Henry IV Parts I and II, where I first met the characters Hotspur (Madden again) and the inimitable rascal Falstaff.
One play remained opaque to my best armchair efforts, though: The Merry Wives of Windsor. I understood the basic idea, with the wives’ hiding Falstaff and carrying him away in the big basket under his enemies’ noses, with many layers of double- and triple-cross and unmasking and excuse-making. What stopped me was that the language of the play is a thicket of Elizabethan comedic jargon and contemporary references, impenetrable to me. Eventually, I gave up on it.
Then, a little later in life, as part of a group trip to London, I made sure to get tickets for whatever was playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company — which, I was disappointed at first to learn, was The Merry Wives of Windsor. I felt sure that my time in the audience would be another round of ‘chase the possible meanings.’ To my happy astonishment, the entire complex farce was not only completely clear and delightfully fast-moving, but howlingly funny. Not just a smile now and then, or the occasional ha ha, or even a guffaw, but pound-your-thighs, cry-real-tears and hold-your-aching-sides funny. It was only after the performance was over that I could really catch my breath.
And if they know how to make you laugh at the RSC, they also know how to make you feel the weight of the country’s fate on the king’s shoulders, or feel the fiery resentment of the wronged, or feel the sadness of life’s bereavements and disappointments, the tragedy of great possibilites unfulfilled or of great characters overborne by fate.
See this Hamlet. If you’ve already seen it, see it again. It wears well.
