Stellar core: "my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth"

Saw a play this night, Hamlet at Bard on the Beach, with Party the First and guest. This is my second-favourite of Shakespeare's plays, behind (in particular Kenneth Branagh's definitive edition of) Henry V. There was a lot to enjoy; our man Hamlet got to exercise much of his histrionic range and the rest of the cast generally turned in adequate performances with a few glimmers of more. They cut the text so that it finished by 11 after starting at 8. This is pretty short for Hamlet (Branagh's film is five hours), but it seems pretty long, since after Polonius dies (the gentleman playing Polonius seemed to have much fun with the role) with the cuts to the text it's more or less a very long funereal dive to the end of the story. They had a lot of energy in the first half, but some of this seemed to wane (or maybe I did) in the second.

After the play finished there was a talkback session (Bard's regular Tuesday feature) with some of the actors (but not production people). You can imagine that the questions varied from the dull to the plodding ("I noticed that the costumes dated to the 1960s, specifically to 1964" -- here I am paraphrasing, not inventing).The answers to such unprovocative questions were slightly more illuminating than the source material. One answer in particular interested me very much. The actor who played Hamlet said that when he spoke with other actors who had played the character in previous engagements they were reluctant or unable to speak about this, to vocalise their feelings about Hamlet and what he does.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Hamlet is a tremendous canvas awaiting projection by audience, cast, and commentator; it is Hamlet's personal power that makes us want to identify with him, and that makes it a personal identification, indeed.

For my part, I think of Hamlet as largely a fine specimen of humanity who suffers yet from allzumenschlich syndrome. (Lit.: "all too human.") He spends an eternity in desperation, oscillating between the existential ("what dreams may come") and the more raw ontological ("what is Hecuba to he") with raw wounds ("get thee to a nunnery!") displayed between. The madness that he pretends to is pretended only insofar as it is exaggerated: the core of it is real. His clever by-play ("you are a fishmonger"; "if like a crab I could go backwards") is an attempt to escape from this by confusing his interlocuters with equivocation and thus preventing the dangerous questions he has already realised he cannot answer, even attempting to deny that they are valid questions by denying them voice. But, he is still too clever by far to escape self-conscious reflection ("nothing I would more willingly part with, except my life") and he is unwilling to just surrender to nihilistic impulses (evidenced in the haunting repetition: "except my life, except my life, except my life"). Hence the extended conflict. Since all this is obviously an intensely private matter, in what sense can it be brought out? For this Shakespeare gives us some artillery in the play's set-up: a father murdered, supernatural circumstances, a mother's betrayal (Hamlet has obvious Oedipal feelings), estrangement from all his friends (save Horatio). To bring it all together, we rely on Hamlet's interactions with his numerous foils: Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, and most importantly Claudius. I save Claudius a special place because he is the only one who Hamlet cannot and should not forgive; moreover he is the only one who really is in opposition to Hamlet in spirit, besides happening to be the cause of the circumstantial ills Hamlet experiences. Therefore Claudius' strength underlies Hamlet's powerlessness and inability to resolve his internal turmoil and exacerbates the cracks along these fault lines.

That, in a paragraph, is why I still think Derek Jacobi has given us the "best Hamlet yet performed" (to borrow a catchphrase from Amadeus) in his 1970's BBC tape -- owing no small debt to Patrick Stewart's Claudius, because Patrick Stewart is the only man who could play Claudius as the titan he needs to be to make the fragmenting of Sir Derek's Hamlet credible, and tragic.

On a completely different note, I wish to register my extreme distaste for the frequency with which I am accosted while waiting for the bus late at night. I have had it with pathetically manufactured sob stories, Tourettes-induced blather, jocular threats, direct requests, star-crossed lovers, and invitations to join the Watchtower Society ("thousand years of peace!"). I don't want to have anything to do with you people. I just want to spend a little time with my friends on the town without remembering why I worry about stepping outside of my house in the first place. I forgive you everything but this. Beggars! It is annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give to them. That is all.

"Tomorrow" I have to fulfill a promise to tell you about my favourite integer, 37, which is a truly remarkable integer, but I definitely need to sleep between now and then. With the planned cutbacks to the existential meanderings we jumped at the opportunity to just throw in mathematical content. In the meantime you can enjoy the radiant glow of the stellar puns that just burst from me at 0130. (Obviously that doesn't excuse the last post that had a pun on 'stellar'.)