In search of the perfect Hamlet

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Who is the best Hamlet you’ve seen? Watch classic versions of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy by Laurence Olivier, 1948 I Derek Jacobi, 1980 I Kevin Kline, 1990 I Kenneth Branagh, 1996 I Ethan Hawke, 2000At last count I’d seen 40 Hamlets, beginning with Richard Burton, of whom my boyhood memory is simply that he scowled and throbbed and would rather have been drinking in Swansea than dying in Elsinore. God help me, I’ve reviewed 35 of them. I’ve seen virtuous Hamlets like Simon Russell Beale and baleful, brooding ones like Nicol Williamson, mad ones like Mark Rylance, sound-minded ones like Toby Stephens, and several so mentally ambiguous that they justified Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s summing-up of the prince in Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare spin-off: “stark raving sane.”

I’ve seen some manage the near-impossible, which is to be dull, and some become highly eccentric. I’ve seen Paul Rhys’s willowy, weepy Hamlet scrub his nails and Yorick’s skull in a bath while orating about destiny, Jonathan Pryce internalise his father’s ghost into a deep voice that burped its demands up from his stomach, Samuel West’s scruffy student prince share a joint with the Rosensterns, and Frances de la Tour, my first female Hamlet, mooch lankily about in clothes best suited to a transport cafe specialising in soggy chips. I’ve even seen George Anton’s druggie prince (isn’t he said to be “blasted with ecstasy”?) rape an Ophelia whose corpse was also used by a necrophiliac Horatio; but that time the director was Calixto Bieito, the Catalan maverick of whom the rest should be silence.

Who is the best Hamlet I’ve seen or, to put it another way, the worthiest heir to gentle Garrick and ferocious Kean, sensitive Gielgud and ballsy Olivier? That’s a question well worth asking now, with David Tennant soon to emerge from his Tardis to play Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh directing Jude Law’s prince next year, and Jonathan Miller staging the play in Bristol next month. But it’s hard to answer because the search is for a complete Hamlet and, really, there’s no such being.

His own testimony is that he is very proud, revengeful and ambitious, Ophelia’s that he is the glass of fashion, the expectancy of the state and a noble courtier, soldier and scholar, and Fortinbras’s that he would have “proved most royal”. But every claim needs qualification.

He is loving, callous, fastidious, coarse, contemptuous, considerate, vindictive, prudish, indecisive, tough, incapable, philosophic, violent, melancholy, resilient, vulnerable, intense, detached, humorous, aristocratic, demotic, articulate, self-hating and much else, including a stage director and Denmark’s premier theatre critic. He is Dr Jekyll and perhaps he is also Mr Hyde, in D.H. Lawrence’s words “a repulsive, creeping, unclean thing”. He is a success, for he gets his man, and a failure, for he leaves behind eight bodies, including his own, when there was meant to be one.

Coleridge decided in an opium haze that he was Hamlet, and so might you and I, for perhaps he is all of us at our most maddeningly unpindownable. And here’s the central problem. How can an actor make the prince’s inconsistencies consistent? Well, the answer is simple. He can’t. Derek Jacobi acknowledged this when he called the role “infinitely adaptable” but added that every actor could only bring his own “emotional bank” to the play and try to be spendthrift. Sadly, though, every actor is ultimately doomed to live within his means. Every actor’s resources are finite, however daringly he maximises them. … more>>

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Filed under Culture, Literature, Review, Theatre

Tags: Derek Jacobi, Ethan Hawke, Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline, Laurence Olivier