I am too much in the sun! (Really -- it was about 90 degress today! AGH)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! Alrighty, I'm doing my research for my Hamlet comic; reading up, watching productions -- I've put a request into the library for some sort of documentary with Trevor Nunn talking all about the play (neat!). Anyway, I found this book called Hamlet: In My Mind's Eye, about how the text can be interpreted differently with different readings, stagings, blah blah etc.

Well, I'm reading about Act I, Scene III (Laertes taking his leave), and the author mentions a production (from 1969) in which Laertes gives Ophelia his remonstrative morals speech while they 're both in bed together, because apparently Tony Ricardson, the director though, 'Hmm... how can I make Hamlet more fucked up? ...More incest!' Now, I find this an extremely interesting idea, so I look up the production on IMDb, and what do I find? Well, not only was Laertes played by Michael Pennington (who played Holmes in a TV movie, The Return of Sherlock Holmes in the late 80's), but it has Nicol Williamson as Hamlet! And Gordon Jackson as Horatio! And Anthony Hopkins as Claudius!! (by the way -- Williamson played Holmes in The Seven-per-cent Solution, and I fell in love with Gordon Jackson as the head butler Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs).

Dammit, I need to see this movie. And dammit also, I wish our library was better stocked with books of literary analysis -- when I did my paper on Hamlet in Canterbury, you wouldn't believe all of the Shakespeare stuff they had. Oh, for a copy of Acting Hamlet! Or even better, Shaw on Shakespeare!! He wrote many reviews as well as analyses, of course, being that that was his job for quite a while.

"Mr. Forbes Robertson, his lightness of heart all gone, wandered into another play at the words, 'Sleep? No more!' which he delivered as, 'Sleep no more'. Fortunately, before he could add, 'Macbeth does murder sleep', he relapsed into Hamlet and saved the situation."

Agh, I am regetting not buying that book I saw in that wonderful second hand book shop, it was a coffeee table type of things, pictures of different actors and productions of Shakespeare (or was it just Hamlet? I don't remember now!). The pictures from the Branaugh production made me wish I could have seen it (not just because Claudius looks like a Southern gentleman!). I wish I had a time-traveling machine just so I could go back to the 60's and see David Warner as Hamlet with the RSC!!

Oh no! I just searched some more on IMDb and found a production from 1964 with Christopher Plummer as Hamlet and Michael Caine as Horatio!! Wah!

I amend my earlier statement, so that I can take the time machine back to THIS night's performance..

DAVID WARNER IN HAMLET
by Mary Z. Maher and William Shakespeare
Depending on whom you're listening to, David Warner may have been the best Hamlet of this century... or the worst.


When David Warner was performing Hamlet at the RSC one evening, a member of the audience actually entered the play. It was near the end of the second act, just after Hamlet dismisses Rosencrantz and Guilderstern. With a sigh of relief, Warner breathed,

Now I am alone.

He raked the stalls with his eyes, scooping in the
balcony with a wide look, and then began the soliloquy:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstruous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit
That from her working, all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing.
For Hecuba!

The audience followed him closely. He gave the natural builds in the speech, moving through:

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculty of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can't say nothing - no, not for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made.
At the series of short questions begining with:
Am I a coward?

Warner paused, just to think about what he'd said. Surprisingly, one of the spectators shouted, "Yes!"

Warner responded:

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i'th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

And now a name was shouted from the audience! Warner was excited and responded with some vehemence:

Hah, 'swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
That I am pigeon-liver'd...

Warner remembered this as one of the most exhilarating nights of his acting career. He was stunned with the rightness of feeling and the naturalness of speaking these soliloquy lines to the theatre audience. The text supported him absolutly. No adjusments in timing, motivation or thought needed the be made. He was still making discoveries inside the act of performance, and it filled him with a sense of awe about Shakespeare dramaturgy.


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