Claudius is a hard one to place, precisely because we encounter a character who has previously committed murder but only gets exposed for it in the play.īut what Stewart’s stalwart performance does is showcase the very best of David Tennant. The prime candidate would be Antony Sher (partner of Gregory Doran). I hoped for something approaching an older Macbeth: capable of murder, capable of holding a facade (which Stewart does), and with the capacity for breakdown. Not convincing enough to murder, not cowardly enough, and not guilty enough. The ghost was ideal but for me, his brother – the king – was not. Patrick Stewart might just have been the interpretive flaw in this 2009 Hamlet for me. Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love (1998) The sole recipient of a Tony Award for starring as Hamlet on Broadway, he also joins Patrick Stewart in receiving the William Shakespeare Award from the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC.
Ironically, it is Joseph Fiennes’ brother Ralph who holds the Shakespeare credentials. Joseph Fiennes combined a mischievous twinkle with a profound gaze Gwyneth Paltrow looked in love with her part and the BBC comedy crew (Day, Clunes, O’Donnell) with their sketch expertise brought superb support. Shakespeare in Love was cast magnificently. Of course, part of that background world is the casting. (The very same as I struggle to imagine the metaphysical Marvell with a Hull accent.) It is almost as though we could barely imagine the young and impervious Will Shakespeare unless it was shown to us convincingly on screen. What was important was the notion of ‘behind the scenes’ for a play that has been performed countless times. For instance, women did not take to the stage until at least November 1660, an occasion marked by Thomas Jordan’s preface to Othello.īut facts weren’t so important. True, the factual details of Elizabethan theatre went astray. The attempt in the late 1990s to portray Shakespeare the wanton writer struggling for ideas, negotiating with patrons and theatre-owners, reinvigorated Shakespeare in popular culture. The greater the background world, the broader the context.
A stage is but a stage, and it’s useful to be reminded of what imaginative twists a film adaptation can bring. This Hamlet of 2009 is to tragedy what Shakespeare in Love of 1998 was to comedy (despite the latter, ironically, portraying a tragedy itself). Between theatre and film, the traditional and the contemporary, this felt like something unique. The 2009 film adaptation (dir: Gregory Doran), that I watched on the strength of the main actor, alerted me to a new sense of seeing theatre. “A Mirror Up To Nature”: David Tennant in the RSC’s Hamlet (2009) Despite largely avoiding Shakespeare at undergraduate level, teaching Hamlet to first-year undergraduates during a very nervous first term in Geneva gives the play special personal significance.