Unlike the previous first three Hamlets I watched, where either the visuals or the setting were key
elements of the film, this one is about as visually stark as it gets. It was shot on an essentially empty stage
with actors in every day clothes and terrible film quality. It was a live performance as well, so unlike
an ordinary film, it was just recorded straight through, and you can hear the
audience laughing, clapping and coughing.
With nothing else to focus on, everything came down to the
actors’ performances: if they were good, it would have been as spectacular a
success as Trevor Nunn’s similarly minimalist Macbeth, but if they were bad, it would have been a very painful
three hours. While I thought a lot of
the cast was fairly mediocre, two stars, Richard Burton and Hume Cronyn, made
this a joy to watch.
The only issue I had with the low-budget production was the
film quality. I wasn’t bothered by the
minimalist design; I find simple is often better than overblown, and I think it
worked well here. However, the film
quality was really a problem, because it was often difficult to distinguish
details that are essential to a nuanced performance. When an actor’s face is just a white smudge,
a lot of information is lost, and that happened far too often in this
film. Sometimes an actor would be
entirely off camera when he spoke, or no details at all would be visible when
nuance was really necessary.
The only visually striking image was the staging of the
Ghost. It fit with the rest of the
no-bells-and-whistles production, being simple and cheap, but I thought it was
quite effective. The actors faced out towards the crowd to address the Ghost,
and all that was seen by the audience was a huge shadow on the wall behind them. I thought it was subtle and unnerving in just
the right way, but kept with the low-budget, minimalist approach used in the
rest of the play. However, that was
really the one moment of visual appeal, and everything else was grainy and
minimalist.
Despite the poor film quality and lack of visual appeal, I
still think this is definitely worth watching because of two stellar
performances.
Hume Cronyn was simply the best Polonius I’ve ever seen, and
won a very deserved Tony Award for his performance. He managed to be funny, and a serious
character, two qualities many actors seem to think is a “one or the other” deal
when they play the part. Being genuinely
funny as Polonius is also difficult: when the punch line is that a character is
tedious, it often ends up being, well, tedious.
He made his wordiness genuinely funny, but avoided being a clown by
showing Polonius as a complex character.
He was loving and close with both Laertes and Ophelia, chiding them, but
also comforting them. Most of the Hamlets I’ve seen show Ophelia not
liking her father very much, but Linda Marsh’s Ophelia trusted and loved him,
and he in turn was tender and loving towards her. He was smart enough to know
when he was being mocked by Hamlet, and his Polonius was politically clever
without being manipulative and cruel. When he had to explain his own role in
preventing Ophelia from seeing Hamlet, he recognized that he was in dangerous
territory and tried to step carefully. He
genuinely believed that Hamlet must be in love with his daughter, and his
attempts to figure out what Hamlet’s problem was didn’t come off as
self-serving. He managed to be funny,
complex and even a little bit likeable. For
the first time ever, I felt a bit of sadness when he was killed.
His humor was made all the better when he was on stage with
Richard Burton. They had spectacular
chemistry with each other, resulting in one of the funniest Hamlets I’ve seen. His genuine belief in his theory of Hamlet’s
madness paired perfectly with Burton’s sarcastic, dry wit.
There was more to Burton’s humor than wittiness,
however. He used his humor to distract
himself from his otherwise black thoughts.
It was a sort of defense mechanism: when you want to cry you laugh
instead. He could occupy his time with
mocking Polonius or Osric and avoid thinking about what he had to. He’d smile and mock and enjoy running circles
around them, and then fall into nerves, anxiety and self-doubt as soon as they
left. Even as he was dying, he forced a
last laugh before “The rest is silence.”
Burton’s Hamlet was masculine, loud and sarcastic. He had an athletic energy about him, and a
strong alpha-male presence. He was
simply in charge whenever he walked on stage, and the other men became nervous
little boys in front of him. More than
his possible madness, his social power seemed to be the real reason why
Claudius felt so threatened by him. Robert Milli’s Horatio, who was socially
dominant in the first scene with Bernardo and Marcellus, was instantly
subordinate to Burton, and their relationship was more like a master-servant
relationship than a friendship of equals.
Rosencrantz and Gildenstern clearly felt threatened by him throughout,
and drew their swords to threaten him when trying to find where he’d hidden
Polonius. Despite the swords, Hamlet was
still in control and he knew it. He just
sauntered carelessly around them and wasn’t in the least bit threatened. Though he was welcoming and excited about the
players, he never seemed like one of them; he was always a higher authority
appreciating and guiding their art. He
was so much the alpha male that after getting injured in the fight, to get
Laertes’s sword he literally just grabbed it out of his hand with no resistance
from Laertes.
Despite this power he had over the other men, with the women
he was extraordinarily gentle. He yelled
at both of them, but was never violent, and with Gertrude especially, he was
lovingly tender. He began the play overwhelmed
with fury at her, but after venting it all, he became the image of a loving
son. The only time he showed any emotion
regarding his own death was when he gave Gertrude a final hug on the line
“Wretched Queen, adieu.” His
relationship with Ophelia before the start of the play was clearly both tender
and intimate, and though he was angry with her, he was never cruel or
violent. I thought his tenderness with
the women was good, and gave him some much-needed balance. Without it, he would have been a Hamlet who dominated
all the men and abused all the women, and he would have come off as just too
overpowering.
Fortunately, Cronyn and Burton were great, because the rest
of the cast was fairly mediocre. Eileen
Herlie was excellent in Olivier’s Hamlet,
but here her Gertrude felt a lot flatter and less interesting. Perhaps the low-quality filming lost the
nuance in her performance. She wasn’t
bad, but she wasn’t anything exciting either.
Alfred Drake’s Claudius was much
more disappointing. He barely made an
impression at all. His lack of
personality was even more marked in contrast to the strength of Burton’s
presence, but I think he would have been flat and dull next to any Hamlet. Sure, he had a “Hello, I’m Evil” moustache,
but I wasn’t buying it. To be honest,
when he wasn’t speaking, I kept on forgetting which one of the guys on stage
was Claudius. Similarly, Linda Marsh’s
Ophelia didn’t make much of an impression at all. She was flat and dull, and her mad scenes
felt contrived and random.
With a weak Claudius and a weak Ophelia, the fourth act
dragged on for a very long time with nothing particularly interesting happening.
Without either Burton or Cronyn on stage, everything seemed to grind to a
halt. When Burton showed up again in the
gravedigger scene, the play came to life, and the fifth act seemed to fly by in
comparison. Paired with John Cullum’s
very worthy Laertes, the graveyard scene and final scene were poignant rather
than melodramatic and ended the play on a high note after its significant dip
during the fourth act.
This Hamlet would
be worth watching for Burton or Cronyn alone, but the pair of them made it an entertaining
and nuanced production despite its other faults.
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