A couple of weeks ago we went to see Hamlet at Yale Rep courtesy of Sean's friend Shane, who works there and gave us the tickets. The title role was played by Paul Giamatti, and I (like many other people, including apparently actors originally approached to co-star) had initially been dismissive of the idea that a jowly, paunchy, middle-aged man was appropriate to play a character who is still in university when we meet him. I was delighted to be wrong, because Giamatti was excellent in the role. I was still leery during his first appearance in Act I, but I think that's because you meet Hamlet as such an emo whiner, sniffling about his mom's remarriage, that he's not instantly a winning character--you don't care about his angst just yet. The angst is to come, of course, but what really surprised me was how much humor lies within the play, not only in Hamlet himself, but also, for example, in Polonius (the second-best performance, by the guy who played Uncle Fred in Home Alone), who I have always found pendantic and boring both on the page and the screen. During intermission I ran into Richard Regan, my Shakespeare professor from Fairfield, who did not remember me. He did give me a stern look when I admitted surprise at the amount of humor, and say "Well, it is a very funny play. You just have to know how to mine it." Eep.
This was my first time seeing the play on stage, though I've seen various film versions. Sean had never even read it, so it was all new to him. He pointed out that although we all know that we owe so many of our turns of phrase to Shakespeare's invention, it's still really incredible to realize just how many are packed into a soliloquy like "To be or not to be", which seems to contain at least one well-used phrase per line, if not more. For my part, I was surprised during that speech to hear the phrase "to sleep, perchance to dream" spoken not in the gentle lull we often hear it in modern usage, but with a clear note of dread, the fear of the unknown waiting beyond this life. It was another impressive reminder of how different the act of reading a play is from the experience of watching others interpret those lines before your eyes.
Sean told me just this morning that the NYTimes gave a pretty lukewarm review to the whole production, with the exception of Polonius. Apparently they couldn't get past the clear lack of age gap between Hamlet and his parents. I would have agreed with them last month, but now I just think, where's the suspension of disbelief? Plus, if Hamlet was first enacted in 1602 (they're really not sure, apparently), the star, Richard Burbage, would have been 35 years old. Not quite Giammati's age, but no spring chicken, either.