(no subject)

Saw Hamlet staged for the first time, heavily cut, by the local beach troupe. The lead was oddly cast, a tall skinny ugly man with a raspy voice, and clearly not terribly intelligent. He got most of the intonations right, of the passages spared, and was surprisingly interesting in general. I found myself thinking less of this mild overachievement than of the effort that must have gone into it, the immersion. What the play and part must mean to him. Something like scripture, surely, wandering in and out of comprehensibility but charged all through with importance, with scent of lost findable crucial meanings. What conversations has he had with his girlfriend about it, how often will he read it as the years go by, what snatches will he repeat to himself drunk and in trouble?

Genuinely intolerable were the interpretative dumb-show bits where Gertrude looks at Claudius thinking "could he have?", Hamlet leaves his rant to kiss Ophelia so We Know He Loves Her. And the cuts, yeesh. At least Stoppard's comical hackdowns kept the good lines. Slightly less offensive was its being modern-dress, one of the Four Acceptable Choices for Shakespeare periodization (1. Time play's set in, 2. Shakespeare's time--one of these two for preference; 3. Modern dress to save money, 4. Timeless jumpsuits for that BBC sci-fi feeling). In a write-up on a Columbus production of Much Ado the inane director was quoted as saying the reason she liked doing a Shakespeare play was because you could set it in any time or place you wanted to. Her choice was Jane Austenland, predictably. For that BBC-in-general feeling. Who started this insanity, Gielgud?