by Owen
McNally
October, 1980
Hartford Courant
“The Shakespeare Series” production of “Hamlet,” which airs tonight on PBS, is a hit, a very palpable hit.
Derek Jacobi, as Hamlet, leads an excellent cast in this straightforward,
unpretentious and most gratifying 3 ˝ hours of television viewing beginning
tonight at 8 on CRTV.
Moving the enormous subleties of language and the metaphysical
profundities of the play from the printed page to the small screen is no mean
accomplishment. With all of its
myriad interpretations—with Hamlet as not only a man for all seasons but a
character who seems to be all things to all critics—transforming this verbal
symphony to a visual medium was a most monumental task, even for a genius like
Laurence Olivier in his much-celebrated film adaptation of the classic more than
30 years ago.
The
challenge is met here triumphantly once again in this new BBC-TV and Time Life
production, one of the 36 plays to run in this six-year Shakespeare series.
No doubt, this latest “Hamlet,” with its sturdy values, will be
playing to audiences around the globe on TV screens as the glass of fashion and
mould of form for drama itself.
Out of the
rich stream of “wild and whirling words” from the prince of Denmark, Jacobi
and director Rodney Bennett have focused on Hamlet’s more resolute qualities. Jacobi’s Hamlet is not the standard, perpetual, if not also
pathological procrastinator, a pathetic, neurotic soul too impatient to wreak
vengeance for his father on the “incestuous, murderous, damned Dane” King
Claudius.
When, for
example, Hamlet decides not to slay Claudius when he sees the king kneeling at
prayer, Jacobi gives the prince’s explanatory lines a very hard, steely,
Machiavellian edge. How much better
to kill the King when he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, or in the incestuous
pleasure of his bed . . . about some act that has no relish of salvation in it. “This is not a wimpy Hamlet, copping out.
This is a cool, calculating Hamlet, not a man rippled by indecision but
an avenger who is determined that his victim also suffer hell-fire and damnation
as well.
Without
diminishing the melancholy or the constant foreboding and speculation on death,
decay and deceptive appearance, Jacobi’s Hamlet is assertive in the face of
the most tragic of adversities and at his best, boldest and brightest when at
his most spontaneous. This is not a
Hamlet borne down with the weight of an Oedipus complex or with neurotic or
homoerotic fantasies.
When
Jacobi’s Hamlet disposes of the loathsome Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he
does it with the dispatch and sang froid of a modern man of action like James
Bond. Jacobi’s Hamlet has a certain volatile, even Jacobin-like
quality in this personal revolt he leads to remove the canker eating away at
Denmark’s body politic.
Hamlet’s
anguish and torment—the crushing burden of the rude tasks he must bear—are
not diminished by this tack.
Jacobi does
not succumb to the temptation—as have other actors—to play the sweet prince
as some sort of mincing pansy, an ineffectual intellectual pacing aimlessly
about the battlements of Elsinore castle. His
Hamlet is more the Renaissance Man of thought and action.
When he
devises the “mouse trap” scheme to trap the king—the famous play within a
play to catch the conscience of the king—he does so much like a scientist who
wants to observe physical evidence to verify the story told to him by the spirit
who claimed to be the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
If Hamlet had been as hot-blooded as the vengeful Laertes or as young
Fortinbras in this play whose common theme is death of fathers, then
“Hamlet” would have been just another revenge play—mere Kyd’s play and
not a masterpiece that everyone from groundlings to psychiatrists has pored and
pawed over with such delight. Being
a rational man, Hamlet had to prove to himself that the ghost’s story of
murder, adultery and incest was true.
More often
than not, Jacobi is able to have his cake and eat it too:
his robust Hamlet doesn’t diminish any of the marvelous soliloquies
which still come across as drenched in poetic, metaphysical speculation on the
here and the hereafter. His playing
both in speech and gesture, has many nuances in this play so replete with rich
ambiguities.
As King
Claudius, the murderer of Hamlet’s father, Patrick Stewart creates a powerful,
urbane, intelligent, courageous and diplomatic rival for Hamlet.
Stewart’s performance is so strong, in fact, that at times it does
indeed rival Jacobi’s. Stewart
has a much more resonant voice than Jacobi’s thinner tones, a difference in
pitch and timbre that gives him a decided physical advantage over the leading
player.
As Gertrude,
Hamlet’s mother, Claire Bloom is initially quite disappointingly wooden.
The wood becomes flesh, however, in the famous bedroom scene with Hamlet,
with their physical relationship coming across here both physically and verbally
as more war-like than Oedipal. With
Polonius’ death, the confrontation between mother and son and the reappearance
of the ghost, this is a fast-paced scene. Overall,
the play is quite well-paced. Speeches
play off one another rather than just hanging suspended or moving along
haltingly as in some productions. The
cast functions as an empathetic ensemble and the play develops its own sense of
rhythm and momentum.
Eric Porter
does passing well as the windy, precept-packed Polonius, advisor to King
Claudius. David Robb keeps his role
as Laertes at a hot-blooded level, the noble youth who must avenge his
father’s and his sister Ophelia’s deaths.
Ophelia is
played well by Lalla Ward who does lack the sort of verdantly alluring quality
that the very young Jean Simmons brought to the same role in the Olivier film. Nonetheless, Lalla is to be commended since she, unlike some
actresses, never mixes up the sane with the mad or the mad with the sane moods.
Robert Swann
plays the loyal and true Horatio, and Jonathan Hyde and Geoffrey Bateman are
good as the odious, lickspittle duo of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Peter Gale also does well at inflating the short but windy
role of the foppish Osric, furnishing a bit of comic relief among the madness
and melancholy.
The sets are
spare and Elsinore castle doesn’t look much fancier than it might have looked
on an Elizabethan stage. The
costumes are pleasant enough, but certainly not luxurious.
As the play
opens with the portentous line “Who’s there?” the platform before the
castle is shrouded in fog—a good special effect.
Overall, the
visual and verbal elements are tied together well and make for an entertaining,
worthwhile investment in 3 ˝ hours.
As for the
climactic dueling scene between Hamlet and Laertes, it’s awkwardly staged and
looks more like a street fight, one in which pushing and shoving play more of a
role than parrying and thrusting. The
duel looks as if it had been choreographed by mountebanks rather than Fairbanks.
Beginning
next spring, the series, which is brought to PBS by WNET New York, will present
“The Taming of the Shrew,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Merchant of
Venice,” “All’s Well That Ends Well,” and “The Winter’s Tale.”