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May 14, 2024

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Don Z. Block

A New York Times critic is eager to see a Peruvian theatrical company's "take on Hamlet" because "this staging of the Bard's most popular tragedy features rap and improvisation, and is performed in Spanish with English supertitles by an eight-person cast, all of whom have Down Syndrome" [August 3, 2O24, C3].

Don Z. Block

Films can screw up, too. Olivier's "Hamlet" seems all wrong in insisting that it is a play about a man who cannot make up his mind. Once Hamlet proves with the mousetrap that the ghost is his father and that Claudius is guilty, Hamlet makes up his mind to kill Claudius. When he kills Polonus by mistake, the cries, "Is it the king?" Olivier's stage version of "The Merchant of Venice" to me fails because it modernizes the play, causing it to show Shylock brandishing a knife while preparing in a fairly modern courtroom to cut off a pound of flesh from the merchant.

Couldn't agree with you more about directors foolishly trying to make a play agree with what is going on today. In Hamlet, the ghost is not only real but possibly something resembling Hamlet's father sent from hell to ensnare Hamlet. The idea of Hamlet being a minister or scourge is not exactly a modern one, and to minimize or remove the ghost scenes from the play is to kill the play and to make nonsensical what Hamlet is trying to do. In "King Lear," does not the idea of the great chain of being enable the audience to judge what Lear is doing when he divides his kingdom? Only the Supreme Court of the United States today would seem to accept the idea of a great chain of being.

Carol Saturansky

Query: if I'm so disdainful of live performances, how is it that I'm so fond of Shakespeare on film.
What a great question! I think, perhaps, this relates to your preference for reading the plays in order not to have the interpretation of theatre performance interfere with your own imagination and involvement with the play's setting and characters and action. It's more personal, the read. It's YOUR interpretation and subjectivity without the intrusive stage business of actors and a director and set getting in the way.
The film? Film is a closer, more direct and immersive version of reality (if it's any good) that we can get lost in, like when we read. It's immediate- our brains take it in without mediation. The stage offers some distance with which symbolic and abstraction and dazzling human experience in the moment come to play--all within the context of and relationship with an audience.
Live theatre and film are as different as ... a zoo and a safari... or maybe a visit to the Acropolis and looking at photos from that visit.

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