Hamlet – 4

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Britain’s National Theatre production starring Rory Kinnear was broadcast in Hahn Hall as part of UCSB’s Arts and Lectures series and disappointed for two reasons. One was that I couldn’t understand half the dialogue and Hamlet’s s’s and f’s sounded like lisps. One is more forgiving of live theater, but when it is a prerecorded presentation going around the world one would hope to concentrate on the performances rather than constantly be thinking, what did he say?
The second disappointment was Nicholas Hytner’s conception, dressing the characters in contemporary clothing and setting the play in a modern police state. Yes, there are numerous references to spying and “informing” in Shakespeare’s text, but what did this transposition gain us? The dialogue remained Elizabethan, so there was always a disconnect between speaker and what was spoken. Nor did the police-state allusion illuminate. If anything, it was distracting to have the Secret Service men speaking into their headphones and Ophelia hiding a microphone in her bible.
Ironically, it is easier to draw contemporary lessons when Hamlet is presented of its own time, just as the human figure can be sexier when scantily clothed than when shown nude.

Theater: A View from the Bridge

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The contrast, on back-to-back nights, between Donald Margulies’ new play, Time Stands Still, and a revival of the Arthur Miller chestnut, A View from the Bridge, made me reflect that a golden age of drama, like the Greeks experienced or like the Rodgers and Hammerstein era of the musical, has passed. Margulies’ work was facile and shallow, presenting issues and emotions scattershot, at sound-bite length; while Miller set a simple table and let it play out at length, without diversion, into tragedy.
Both plays were set in a Brooklyn living room; both were animated by an arrival from overseas; and, for my purposes, both starred actors famous from film (viz. Scarlett Johannson and Laura Linney). Maybe because the 1950s were a simpler time, it was easier to write a play with timeless punch. The inclusion of lawyer Alfieri in the role of Greek chorus added as well to the timelessness of the play. More likely, it is Miller’s brilliance as a dramatist that has not been replicated. I think of Tom Stoppard as a living author whose work may still be shown fifty years hence. No one else.
And after paying $117 plus Ticketron charge for the evening, I am reminded again how superior a value a good movie is.