Our local PBS station ran it tonight and it was bloody brilliant. I’ve seen a few productions of the play and this one was the best of them. I could actually get into the story. All of the players made the characters come to life, something I haven’t gotten from the other 2 versions I’ve seen.
Anyone else see it?
I’m planning on watching it this weekend-regicide before bedtime gives me the spookies
I set my DVR to record this, only to find that for some reason my DirecTV package apparently doesn’t include the local PBS channel. I am not amused, and will be calling them to complain.
I watched it after seeing a heads-up for it here in CS. I agree, it was brilliant.
I’d believe Stewart in the role much better if he were, say, 30 years younger.
–Cliffy
Why? He’s playing Hamlet’s uncle. If he were 30 years younger, he’d be approximately the same age as Tennant.
I haven’t seen it, but this preview clip of Tenant giving the most famous soliloquy really makes it look like he did a good job. How old is Hamlet in the play? Isn’t he a college kid? Then again, I love Kenneth Branah’s movie of it and he was older than that as well.
I watched part of it. I hate Hamlet. Now I know how much I hate Hamlet - I still hate it even with two actors I really, really like in the lead roles.
I really liked the look of the production though.
Patrick Stewart is 69. David Tennant just turned 39 last week. You think he’d be more believable as Hamlet’s father/uncle if they were the same age? 
Then you might like the version Stewart did with Derek Jacobi, playing the same role, about 30 years ago (although presumably the character is supposed to be the same age.)
I liked it up until the ending. It’s not so much that Hamlet forces an exchange of swords in big dramatic fashion to defeat Laertes and then stalk and stab Claudius; it all just sort of – happens.
(And then Fortinbras doesn’t show up – which maybe isn’t a big deal in a production where the above plays out BIG, but here it just makes the whole thing sort of deflate. IMHO, anyway.)
My only complaint about the end was how long everyone took to die! Big, LOOONG speech, then “I’m dead.” Oh well, that’s Shakespeare for you.
Still liked it very much. I really enjoy that everyone got inside their character’s heads and became them. I’ve seen Shakespeare done by people who could have been reading their lines off of the back of a cereal box for all the spirit and passion they put into their lines.
How will it play for those of us who only know Tennant from Doctor Who? Will we be constantly expecting him to bust out the sonic screwdriver? Does he sneak in a “oh, well, that’s BRILLIANT!” or something similar? Will knowing Hamlet backwards and forwards make a difference?
The big strength of this production, IMHO, is Tennant faking madness. Oh, he’s fine in brooding mode, which doesn’t much channel Doctor Who – but whenever he goes into the act, it’s with his eyes wide and a little curl of hair spilled forward as he dextrously gestures his way through a rapid patter of I’m-a-step-ahead-of-you zingers that bounce around a bit in pitch for the cut-crystal English accent that occasionally yields to a bleeargh for emphasis. Because, well, that’s his wheelhouse, y’know?
I’m a big Doctor Who fan, and loved the episode. Every once in awhile, Tennant broke into Doctor-like mannerisms (not deliberately – it’s just that I was used to seeing them), but it wasn’t a distraction. It was a fine adaptation of the play.
The double casting of Stewart as both Claudius and King Hamlet was brilliant, and it explained the question that crops up from time to time: why wasn’t Hamlet king? If Claudius and his brother were twins, there could have been a setup so that one would succeed the other.
In any case, I loved it.
I liked it a lot, but what have they done with my fardels?
“Who would these fardels bear?”
It makes the whole ‘to be or not to be’ speech for me, and they left it out!
I want my fardels!!
Anyway, I can’t believe that I’m the first one to mention how apt it is that this is the first place in TV that Doctor Who and Star Trek officially cross. Both shows referred to the play more than once, and irony of ironies, both actors come from the second incarnations of both shows. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, that are dreamed of in your fan fiction.”
Still, I’m pissed about the fardels.
As I recall from Shakespeare classes (the last being around 32 years ago), there has been much discussion about just how old Hamlet is supposed to be. According to the play, he has come home from Wittenburg University for his father’s funeral. In the play within the play, the king says (IIRC) that it’s been 30 years since he had the queen had wed. So, Hamlet can’t be more than 30. How old did Shakespeare intend him to be? As far as I know (but I’m no expert), that’s an open question. How old were university students likely to be back then? The reason this question usually comes up is that the actors who have played Hamlet in professional productions tend be older. Presumably a younger actor does not have the gravitas to pull off the role.
In the two best early texts of Hamlet, the second quarto and the folio, the gravedigger scene establishes Hamlet’s age as thirty. In the first quarto (which is a pirated, and generally fairly poor, text, but which some critics have suggested may be a bit closer to what was originally acted on stage), the same scene doesn’t establish a specific age for Hamlet, but it does seem to imply a younger Hamlet than the later texts. (Yorick, who died when Hamlet was old enough to remember him, died 23 years ago, according to the second quarto and folio, but “a dozen” years ago in the first quarto.)
My guess is that Shakespeare originally conceived of Hamlet as a young university student in his late teens or early twenties, but subsequently revised his age upwards because Richard Burbage (who was already in his thirties when the play was written) was getting too old to play a plausible twenty-year-old. If he had ever had occasion to revise the part for a new, younger actor, he would probably have changed it back without hesitation; he didn’t think his own words were sacred or set in stone, after all.
In other words, Hamlet is as old as the actor playing him 
Anybody interested in comparing early texts should check out the excellent University of Victoria Shakespeare site.
I agree. But am I the only one who, when Hamlet said, “The time is out of joint”, replied, “That’s because it’s wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey”? 
My students are studying Hamlet right now, and we’ve spent the past several class days watching Mel Gibson as Hamlet, which is by far my favorite version.* And, as I really like Tennant and Stewart, when I caught this early early this morning, I had to watch. I thought the leads did a damn good job, with the exception of the lady that played Ophelia–in many ways, that’s as tough a character as Hamlet, but I thought she overdid her insanity bit; it screamed “acting” to me.
I don’t tend to be a fan of modern stagings, but I did like the element of all the video cameras; that’s an excellent modern conceit to signify all the spying that goes on in the text.
I liked it well enough.
*I don’t want to hijack the thread, but I just think Gibson captures Hamlet’s feigned madness and sense of humor better than Olivier or Branagh, and although this might be blasphemy for a student of English, but I think the production is much tighter with the cuts.