Boston Globe
November, 1980
It is a measure of Shakespeare’s brilliance that even now, 400 years
after the play was written, people still argue whether Hamlet was sane. It is also a measure of our own confusion about what is
normal and what is not.
The difference is difficult. Even
people who are sound of mind occasionally worry that perhaps they are going
insane. They wonder whether they
themselves are becoming unraveled, or whether it is the world about them that is
loosed from its mooring, and who can say whether such a notion is the first step
toward insanity or merely madness put to good use?
What is sanity, anyway, except the difference between what seems to be
true and what is true?
Few actors in the world know Hamlet’s state of mind better than Derek
Jacobi, the British classical actor, who first played Hamlet at 18, has played
the role more than 300 times and who has spent half his life preparing for
tonight’s 3 ½ hour performance of “Hamlet” (Channel 2, 8 p.m.), the most
prestigious role for an actor this year, and one of the most important
television roles of the decade.
Americans who are awed by his performance last year in “I, Claudius”
are in for a treat. Jacobi is even
more impressive tonight in one of the theater’s most difficult roles, the
Mount Everest of acting, as he calls it.
Forget “Little House on the Prairie” (Ch. 4, 8 p.m.), because that
will soon be forgotten, and don’t even turn on the Patriots-Oilers football
game. You can read about it in tomorrow’s newspaper, and in any
case, there’ll be another Patriots game next week.
But it will be a long time before you will experience acting as rich as
Jacobi’s Hamlet, on television or anywhere else. “Hamlet” is a standard of what television can achieve and
it makes up for a lot of disappointments.
When Jacobi says that the role of Hamlet is so varied that one could play
it nude on the moon and it would still come through, well, as Gertrude would say,
the gentleman protests too much. Jacobi’s
achievement is to have taken a role with a tradition that dates back centuries
in the theater, and then adapt it to the television screen without sacrificing
the impact, the mystery, the melancholy or the psychological horror.
Tonight’s production is the latest installment in the six-year
Shakespeare cycle co-produced by the British Broadcasting Corp and Time-Life
Television.
Students think of Shakespeare as an irrelevant Elizabethan fuddy-duddy
who uses funny word, but that is the fault of the teachers, says Jacobi. To renew Shakespeare’s reputation, hundreds of thousands of
students across the nation have been assigned to watch tonight’s performance,
and to help them find deeper meanings in the play and thereby increase their
enjoyment, teaching aids have been distributed to school teachers.
Those who think Hamlet is insane underestimate the Danish prince, says
Jacobi. “He isn’t mad at all.
He’s the sanest man in the court, although he does border on insanity
three times—when the ghost departs, when he confronts Ophelia in the nunnery
scene and when he engages in verbal rape with his mother in the closet scene.
Jacobi’s Hamlet teeters tantalizingly on the edge of madness.
We are sure one moment that he is feigning insanity.
In the next scene, we are convinced that he is a genuine, full-fledged
lunatic until, finally a scene or two later, we begin to suspect that perhaps he
is a jump ahead of the rest of the court. Even
Hamlet is puzzled, wondering whether what began as a game of pretending insanity
has overtaken him and whether he is or is not about to become truly mad.
Hamlet on television is different from Hamlet on stage, of course.
With television, the camera directs our eye, and we do not have the
opportunity to survey the entire stage at once.
While the camera shows us the play-within-the-play scene, for example, we
are not able to study the face of Claudius to detect the horrifying moment when
he becomes aware that Hamlet might have detected his crime.
On the other hand, thanks to close-ups provided by the camera, television
enables us to see intimate expressions, for example, on the face of Claire
Bloom, as Gertrude, who struggles to comprehend the ravings of her maniacal son.
And on television, one can see the lines of agony on the face of Robert
Swann, as Horatio, who cradles the head of the dead Hamlet, whispering, “Good
night, sweet prince and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
The role of Ophelia, played by
Lala Ward, is especially difficult
because she is given only a few lines in which to act out the gradual loss of
her own sanity. “Ophelia can be
played 10,000 ways,” said Jacobi. Whole
books have been written about her, that she was an obedient child, that she was
a disobedient child, that she was the court whore, that all her travails, her
madness and her suicide, were the result of the fact that she was
pregnant.
The play, by the way, is pretty well written.