Hamlet & Me (Part V)

"It's me. Hi."
Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie
Hamlet, 1996

Look. I come to bury Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, not to praise it.

But how can you argue with success? It’s a brightly colored production with manically animated set pieces and swirling camerawork – Hamlet as an action film, which is fine! The character has long been described as a man who cannot decide, who is unable to “take action.” But he does! He’s always on the move! And Branagh makes him vital and exciting, not brooding and torpid.

I visit schools all over, have done so for years, and if there is a film version of Hamlet most shown in these schools, this is positively that one.

However, in the act of presenting the complete text, a four-hour endeavor, the entire undertaking feels rushed, under-rehearsed and not carefully considered.

Watching the film for the first time in a recently renovated Centrum Theatre on Coventry, I was impressed by the first soliloquy, “O, That this too, too solid flesh …” Not for the rendition itself (which is fine) but how long the take is. Branagh delivers the piece without a cut, and then the scene continues unbroken as Horatio, Barnardo and Marcellus enter to share the news of the ghost.

Long, uncut takes like this allow an actor to display the range of their stagecraft, and it’s like watching a good play, up close. Take for example Claudius (Derek Jacobi) seducing Laertes (Michael Maloney) into committing acts of treachery. It’s a great scene from the play, and one usually cut to the bare facts.

Unfortunately, as the film goes on these long takes feel like a method to rush the filming along. For the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, which should be one of the high-points of any production, Branagh thrashes about with his limbs, frantically gawping as he trashes a map room. It may be emotionally appropriate, but the director in me wanted him to try it again. I was led to believe the whole production was so big he decided that there wasn’t time to get it right.

Other crimes, in no particular order:

• Scary, scary Brian Blessed
• Sexy Dane sex
• Rapier javelin
• Smushed Ophelia face
• Christ pose exit
• Jack Lemmon

And perhaps most egregious, the speech “How all occasions do inform against me” is depressing, not rousing. It is not “St. Crispin’s Day.”

As my father once told me, “If you aim at a king, you must kill him.” That summer I had already started to fantasize about staging some future production of Hamlet, and I would take my time in conceiving it.

To be continued.

Hamlet & Me (Part IV)

Brian Blessed & Kenneth Branagh
Henry V, 1989

At the age of 26, Orson Welles directed and starred in what is generally regarded as the best film ever made, Citizen Kane. That was in 1941.

At the age of 26, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in what is generally regarded as the best adaptation of Shakespeare to film, Henry V. That was in 1989.

Side note: At the age of 26, I directed my first Shakespeare, Guerrilla Theater Company’s production of "Romeo & Juliet" and lots of people liked it. That was in 1994.

An independent film, and therefore not widely distributed, I believe I first saw Branagh’s Henry V in early 1990, and we all lost our shit.

Recently acolytes to the genius of Shakespeare we, the magnificence and success of this movie heralded nothing less than a renaissance of Shakespeare on film, which indeed came to pass. Whether or not you choose to credit Branagh with this achievement, 1990s cinema (and beyond) was fairly awash with Shakespeare, including Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990), Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995), Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), Twelfth Night (1996), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) as well as adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), O (2001) and She’s the Man (2006).

Branagh’s next cinematic Shakespearean outing solidified his reputation among Gen X aged theater nerds. Much Ado About Nothing is a bright and goofy take on what has become one of my very favorite of the Bard’s scripts, and this time Branagh expanded upon his acclaim by casting a number of high-profile American actors including Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves and Michael Keaton.

This is one of the truly impressive things about Branagh; great actors and movie stars want to work with him, a trend which continues to this day as his Poirot adaptations pop with familiar names and faces.

Even before Henry V, Branagh had staked his reputation with his Renaissance Theatre Company. Like Welles before him and his Mercury Theatre, the work began onstage. Branagh directed and starred in stage versions of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and others as well as classic works by other playwrights. He also produced radio adaptations for R&J, King Lear and Hamlet, all of which I acquired and listened to on cassette.

I could go off on how his audio adaptation of Romeo and Juliet inspired me to direct a production myself, or how I read that John Gielgud was unhappy with how Branagh insisted on recording King Lear (Gielgud played the lead) with scant rehearsal. This last detail will be relevant later.

Michael Maloney (center) & ensemble
In the Bleak Midwinter (1995)

For his third Shakespearean outing onscreen, I had hoped Branagh would choose, well, absolutely any title but Hamlet. Much Ado, for all the adoration heaped upon it, is not great. There is a lot of mugging and eye-rolling meant to indicate to an American audience which lines are meant to be funny, and before that he had directed the modern noir mystery Dead Again (1991) which is unintentionally hilarious. I didn’t think he was yet a good enough director to summit the Dane.

When it was announced that Branagh’s Hamlet would feature the complete text, entirely unabridged, it was clear he was pointing to the bleachers. He wouldn’t be merely directing a Hamlet, he wanted to make the Hamlet. I was very worried.

In 1995, Branagh wrote and directed In the Bleak Midwinter (US title: A Midwinter’s Tale) a brief, black and white comedy about the company of “am-dram” performers putting on a holiday production of Hamlet. It’s a silly and delightful piece of work, full of inside baseball for thespians, and Branagh doesn’t even appear. His surrogate is the film is Michael Maloney, who opens the film with the monologue about the anxiety of acting as a profession, a performance which is all the more enjoyable when you realize Maloney is doing a spot-on impersonation of Kenneth Branagh.

Midwinter is a celebration of the act of creation, a love-letter to theater artists everywhere, and in its way, I felt the film was an apology for the grotesque and unhappy excesses of his Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). Maybe Branagh's Hamlet would be good after all.

To be continued.

Double Heart: Costume Fitting

 

Pene: hideous dogsbody

Costumes for Double Heart are designed by Great Lakes Theater costume shop manager Esther Haberlen, who is all kinds of totally damnright awesome. Let me tell the story again, for those not paying attention ...

We first collaborated for the tour of On the Dark Side of Twilight, which had a cast of three actors who, over the course of one hour, play twelve characters. The story spans 200 years, and so the challenge was to create a wide variety of historical looks, that in many cases looked expensive and chic, and could be thrown on and off in a manner of seconds, with or without assistance.

From "On the Dark Side of Twilight"
The Count, upstaged by a dress.

I'm not even going to mention how incredible the wigs are. Esther has designed every tour since, including last year's Mysterious Affair at Styles, though I did grow and maintain my own mustache.

For Double Heart, our two protagonists, Beatrice and Benedick, wear (mostly) the same thing throughout. However, I have the dubious honor of playing four characters, and in some cases I must walk off as one and right back on as another. My pain is Esther's pain.

Who wrote this thing?

 

Don Pedro: upstanding officer

Did I mention the hats? The hats are just outstanding. I get to wear that hat!

Just a little background ... Double Heart, as written, takes place in the mid-16th century, some fifteen years or so before the events of Much Ado About Nothing. At that time, Italy was still largely a number of city-states, and had recently gone from French "protectorate" to that of Spain. Part of the story involves a large and successful sea battle against the Ottoman empire, part of  series of military events which lead, eventually, to the idea of Italy as a single nation.

However, as Esther informed me, the dress at that time was a great deal less colorful, and for the purposes of our production she moved her design two hundred years later. Part of that inspiration came from Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version, which is also modeled on Italy of the 18th century.