Dr. Who plays Hamlet

Dr. Who took on the role of Hamlet on PBS. I was very impressed by the performance and I would recommend watching it (online if you have to). It's such a difficult play to film. The version filmed ten years ago with Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Sam Shepard, Bill Murray, Liev Schreiber, and Julia Stiles was horrific. This one was much better.

David Tennant is an excellent actor, and this version of Hamlet was excellent to watch. David Tennant was also in a T.V. series called Blackpool, of which there was a U.S. remake named Viva Laughlin.

I heard a rumour that the viewing figures for this show were so bad it got pulled half way through the first episode never to be seen again. Dont know if its true or not.

Quote: Croupier

David Tennant is an excellent actor, and this version of Hamlet was excellent to watch.

Patrick Stewart (as Claudius) challenged us to figure out why he made that very pronounced shrug just before he drank the poisoned wine. I liked Tennant's performance better than Stewart's. Sometimes I think that Patrick Stewart is so concerned with re-inventing the character with his own unique interpretation that he ends up becoming a little gimmicky. He did an Othello in Washington DC, where he was white, and all the Venetian characters were black. Of course, that was relatively easy in DC, where most of the actors are black. My pet peeve with most interpretations of Othello is that racism is a very minor subtext of the play, but it is often made the central theme in modern stagings. In 1600 Londoners would not have understood the concept of modern racism.

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Of course the funniest scene ever filmed for TV with Shakespeare was when he gets punched out by Blackadder who, of course, is smart enough to get his autograph first.

The lines I liked were:
Blackadder: [kicks him] "Oh...that is for Ken Branagh's endless uncut 4 hour version of "Hamlet.
Shakespeare: "Who is Ken Branagh?"
Blackadder: "I'll tell him, you've said that. And I think he will be very hurt."

And of course, the British are masters of sketch comedy. What kills me is the spontaneous applause at the joke delivered by Hugh Laurie: I've always said the Rose theatre is a dump. Frankly the sooner they knock it down and build something decent, the better. . Most of the Americans are in the audience looking around.

I actually really like the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet and thought it was one of the better film versions.

Quote: teddys

I actually really like the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet and thought it was one of the better film versions.

I did as well, as did most critics. I think the Blackadder spoof was meant to be funny, and not a real criticism.

But virtually no one saw Hamlet in the theaters in America. Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V were actually fairly popular for those kind of movies. The majority of people see movies like that at home, so I think they were put off by the length. Romeo + Juliet with DiCaprio and Claire Danes was the biggest hit of the group.

But the Hamlet with Ethan Hawke and Love's Labour's Lost at around the same time killed these movies for several years.

Quote: pacomartin

Patrick Stewart ... did an Othello in Washington DC, where he was white, and all the Venetian characters were black.

Interesting. BTW, the popular notion that there are extensive parallels with OJ Simpson and Othello apparently doesnt hold up. Most problematic is the fact that Othello immediately admitted his misdeed.

Also, one of my favorite tactics in a discussion is to ask "who was responsible for the death of Desdemona?" It's often good to trot that out when somebody is trying to paint a picture of indisputable culpability when there are indeed gray areas. Ironically enough, OJ Simpson case excluded!

Quote: odiousgambit

Interesting. BTW, the popular notion that there are extensive parallels with OJ Simpson and Othello apparently doesnt hold up. Most problematic is the fact that Othello immediately admitted his misdeed.

Well we can only see Othello as a culture that is aware of racism; we can only hear Shylock as a culture that grew up reading and hearing about the Holocaust, and we can only watch Taming of the Shrew as a culture aware of sexism.

The gross parallels are the fact that Desdemona's father admires and envies Othello. They love to drink and tell war stories. Iago opens up the play by playing to her father's instincts of betrayal when he tells him that his daughter is currently married to Othello and is being deflowered at that moment. He uses the famous images to stir up the anger including the "making the beast with two backs" and others vivid images including some that sight his black skin.

But Iago is playing at the father's weakness, his sense of control over his daughter. The other people are quickly aware that Othello is a charming man, and one is quick to point out that his own daughter would be immediately seduced. Othello is almost uniformly admired as a powerful man. He is an outsider in a world that knew nothing about multicultural societies, but he is also a natural leader.

Other than a line or two taunting with Iago taunting his father, his blackness never becomes a major issue in the play. Nor is his supposed interracial marriage an issue. The play is about betrayal, weakness, jealousy, and regret.

Elizabethan society, like all human society, would know about distrusting and alternatively being fascinated by outsiders. But since most people very seldom saw somebody who was different they would not know about racism. Society was still a long way from mass slavery, from the elaborate books describing the races of man. The everyday concerns were about heretics and Catholics.