14 articles The Play’s the Thing

Reviews and discussions of past Hamlets on stage and film.

Transforming Whack-A-Mole

Posted on December 19, 2017 by admin

As the year trundles to a close, my posts are getting more and more infrequent. For a couple of weeks, I had a pretty good excuse: the term at CBU was wrapping up, which meant exams to mark, panicked students to assuage, and a sorely overloaded wife to support. Now, I am well past the…

Transforming Whitewashing

Posted on February 1, 2017 by admin

Othello is one of my favourite plays. I’ve taught it repeatedly and directed it twice – once in 1996, in a highly condensed three-person Fringe production, and once in 2003, with the cast expanded to six. I love its language, which soars to epic similes and plunges into grotesque raunch, sometimes in the same line;…

Transforming Kushner

Posted on July 4, 2016 by admin

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” Yesterday, slate.com published an “oral history” of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s magnum opus and perhaps the single most celebrated work of American art in the past quarter century. Since I recently wrote about my love…

Cumberbatch and the Shakesbrats

Posted on August 20, 2015 by admin

It’s not every day I can lay claim to having actual Hamlet news, but this is a special occasion. The most anticipated production of any Shakespeare play this year is the Barbican’s production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Star Trek Into Darkness, some Hobbit film or other). I enjoy Cumberbatch whenever I see him…

Hamlet on Film: 1921 with Asta Nielsen

Posted on May 22, 2015 by admin

In the internet age, it’s a marvel how something like Svend Gade and Heinze Schall’s 1921 silent Hamlet can be simultaneously ubiquitous and unheard of. The complete film is available on YouTube, making it probably the most instantly accessible film version of the play. Yet it’s not uncommon to see even detailed commentaries on the…

H2016: Hamlet Shall Sleep No More

Posted on April 16, 2015April 16, 2015 by admin

Now my project has actual humans involved in it, with actual faces and interests and (judging from Facebook) loads of excitement. In light of this, my Line by Line posting seems a bit tedious, especially since, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be stuck on Act 1, Scene 1 until at least September — and…

Hamlet in Ink: Classics Illustrated

Posted on March 21, 2015 by admin

This is another one of my earliest encounters with Hamlet, although I’m having trouble figuring out exactly when I would have run into it. Part of the problem is the convoluted history of just about any major comics publishing line, but particularly the history of Classics Illustrated. From the Wikipedia page: Classics Illustrated is a…

H2016: Cutting Scene 1

Posted on February 27, 2015 by admin

With less than 12 months to go before my production of Hamlet opens, I still don’t know much for sure. I know that I’d like my Prince to be young, and for both Hamlet and Ophelia to be a little bit goth and emo right from the get-go — lonely outsiders drawn together by their…

Ham and Sharp: Hamlet on Stage, 1992

Posted on February 23, 2015February 23, 2015 by admin

As I have already described, my first exposure to Hamlet (after Games Magazine, and the Black Swan) was almost certainly Zeffirelli’s film version, in 1990. I soon followed it with Kevin Kline’s version (on VHS). But it could be argued that you can’t really experience Hamlet until you’ve seen it performed on the stage. The…

That’s the Question: Soliloquy or Speech?

Posted on February 20, 2015February 20, 2015 by admin

Now it’s time to tackle one of the Big Questions in Hamlet — or, well, maybe we’re not ready to tackle it quite yet. But we’re definitely going to walk straight up and tweak it on the nose. Take that, question! Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, of course, is the one that begins, “To be or…