Hamlet

Well Craig, I say it takes alot of courage to stand up and correct a reviewer who has written an extremely positive report of your latest work. I will take this opportunity, seeing as you invited everyone, to lob a few balls back into your court... Danish or Yank-ish I'll leave you to decide which. Firstly, perhaps Gordon is very much mistaken... Maybe your production is not as clear as Gordon thinks it was. In which case I feel extreme pity for all those poor english teachers who will now be marking essays wherein Laerte's now plays Ophelia's father and correcting students who now think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the actors in "The Mousetrap". It surely follows dosen't it; if a man of Gordon's considerable play watching experience can't get the story line right from watching your production, what chance do your school audiences stand? "If the accents need explaining, Shakespeare very often set his stories in far off places, usually Italy (Venice, Milan, Rome, Verona, etc) so the English could wonder and marvel at the crazy goings on of its inhabitants, and not be too critical of the heightened reality of it all." etc. Well, here I can be of some assistance also. I have spent a few months now, studying the work of linguists like David Crystal who have attempted to reconstruct the english accent of Shakespeare's theatre. See, an Elizabethan audience is not so far removed from a modern audience. If you tell an audience "We're in Verona, Italy" then the audience understands we're in Verona, Italy regardless of accent. Indeed Crystal's work on the London accent of the 1600's when put into practice has bought to light just how well the rhyming now works, how much easier the text fits Iambic, Trochaic and other rhythms that Shakespeare writes in and it also speeds up the text. We can conclude from this that Shakespeare's actors very certainly would not have "put on an accent" to demonstrate that we are in a different place. I understand that you're saying, we being the bunch of Larrakin Aussies that we are, can only believe the events if they're happening in the middle of some american soap opera because otherwise we might not get why those blokes and sheila's are talking like a bunch of drongos. "As we're actively trying to avoid the story of international strife, it seems strange you should read that as being our intention!" Considering you're trying to give your audience a firm grip on the heightened reality of the play, I find it strange that you didn't include this. Seeing as the stories filtering through the media to our TV sets at home about the ongoing international strife could possibly help us to feel somewhat like Hamlet ourselves, aware and yet unaware of the inevitable storm of war brewing outside Perth's... Uh I mean Elsinore's walls. Certainly this would be the case for school students who are home in time to see the news and more likely to watch it than something as crass as Day's of Our Lives or another soap which finished long before they were born i.e. Dallas. "I think you're quite right about the sexual politics of the play, though it is not such a controversial reading. Hamlet has often been explained by Freudian theory. Hamlet is fixated on his mother, both loving her and hating her too much, which explains why he is initially so resentful of his uncle, and also probably why he finds it so difficult to relate to Ophelia and other women." OR as a friend of mine would say, if he wasn't there wouldn't be much of a play to watch. Or again in my own opinion perhaps he's just really really really F@#ked off that his uncle has murdered his Dad and may have done so in conspiracy with his mother, the woman whom he above everyone else is supposed to honour and love as the bible sets down for us. So one might begin to understand Hamlet's somewhat conflicting feelings when it comes to mummy dearest. And we do know that Hamlet is a good christian, after all he does refuse to kill Claudius while he's at prayer oh and I might tack on that murder is an infernal sin so again Hamlet's hesitation is understandable. Every critic berates poor Hamlet for his hesitation but my question for them is, how many people have you been asked to kill lately? So, I disagree with the freudian reading of Hamlet, I think he's a young man and being a young man is constantly torn between whether he is doing the right or wrong thing and this conflict does not make young men the most ameanable of creatures, as I am sure my mother would tell you. Also I refute that Hamlet must needs become a pop star to explain why he gets away with his odd behaviour. I behave oddly all the time and get away with it, it's just that my odd behaviour dosen't make headlines and incidentally neither does Hamlet's. I think all young people are prone to acting in very odd ways, some stop shaving and start protesting whale slaughter, some start living a much more hedonistic lifestyle and some... well some... Go to law school *shudder* and others become very odd and decide to become actors... Hmm got interrupted by dinner and have now lost my train of thought... I think it went into a tunnel somewhere near Switzerland, i'll let you know if I find it again.