This time the rest really is silence

In amongst all the various showings of episodes of Doctor Who, interviews with DT, radio programmes, quiz shows, etc etc, I'm sure it can’t have escaped your notice that the RSC/David Tennant Hamlet was also shown over Christmas. Yes, the BBC let us watch David Tennant die in two different roles over the holiday period, and, yes, I have wept a lot of tears over this (and it will probably be a long time before I can watch The End of Time without crying again).

A story which I thought had ended in January 2009 actually came to it’s conclusion on Boxing Day. Having said on here that it needed to be filmed, well, there was no way I wasn’t going to watch it. I pretty much planned my day around it.

Although the setting was opened out a little, so that it wasn’t just a film of the stage production, it retained much of the feel of the stage, with the use of mirrors, though the surveillance cameras gave a more intense sense of being watched.

Basically, the things I liked on stage, I still liked, and the things I didn’t like, I still didn’t, with one exception. Seeing it produced in a different medium got me annoyed about the cuts all over again. Watching the supporting Learning Zone programmes (hidden away in the early hours of the schedules but sleuthed out thanks to following David_Tennant on Twitter) provided insight into the reasons for some of them, so that even where I don’t agree, I now have more idea why they did it. For the record, I still don’t think a lot of them worked.
Whilst nothing will come close to that magical performance on 1 November 2008, I did love David’s performance. Though the soliloquies didn’t quite have the freshness that they had on stage, when it really did feel like he was saying the words for the first time, they were still immensely moving. He still broke me with 'the readiness is all', though I did manage to hold it together till that moment. I thought the closet scene was tremendous, and he and Penny Downie were magnificent, balancing the horror of Polonius's murder and Hamlet's accusation of Claudius with the mundane 'Goodnight Mother'. If I had been giving the supporting actor awards, they would have gone to Penny’s Gertrude, and Oliver Ford Davies’s Polonius, which were the two performances which still stood out, though I do have a soft spot for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who deserve a much better epitaph than they get.

The performance which to me came across better on film than it ever had on stage was (Sir) Patrick Stewart's Claudius. Perhaps his performance was always more filmic? Ryan Gage was also good in the small role of Osric, his interplay with Laertes marking him out as someone else who is party to Claudius’s’ scheme.

I still didn’t like Ophelia at all. Apparently most of her mad scene was improvised so that the other actors didn’t quite know what she would do each night. Whatever, it didn’t work for me, and she failed to touch the heart. Similarly Mark Hadfield’s Gravedigger remained a very ‘hammy’ performance from an experienced RSC actor. As I’ve liked other performances of his, I can only blame the director.

I did think that you got a sense of the ensemble in the film, though not to the extent that you did on stage, though it was also clear that some actors were much more comfortable, and experienced in working with the camera than others. The doubling of parts seemed a little odd in a film, though it's a very familiar stage convention, I did wonder if some viewers would be puzzled by it.

Overall, it's a great reminder of the production, and it's also wonderful that so many others will now have the chance to see it, including those who ended up watching Ed Bennett's Hamlet (good, by all accounts, but I'm glad I didn't see it), rather than David's. Hopefully it might attract more new people to Shakespeare.

Just always make sure you leave a seat in the theatre for me.