Hamlet on Vinyl

A local library was unloading some old vinyl recently.  The shopping excursion became yet another Hamlet experience.  Among the acquisitions was a promotional album for Derek Jacobi's BBC performance from 1980.  The single disc has a Behind-the-Scenes listen on Side A and a few excerpts on Side B.

Side A features several actors and the director discussing various aspects of the play.  Derek Jacobi, who played Hamlet, described his role as that of a "Man with a capital M."  For him, Hamlet is a man of spontaneous action who cannot commit the non-spontaneous killing of Claudius.  Later on Side A, we hear Jacobi performing the "To be or not to be" soliloquy.

The director, Rodney Bennett, describes Hamlet as a "God and Thunder" revenge play.  It was Shakespeare, he states, who added the character of Hamlet to extant sources.  The play for Bennett is not about Hamlet's delay.  If that were its sole focus, it would be a "dull play."  Rather, he sees Hamlet as a man of action, a dangerous man who could do it at any moment.  For him, Hamlet, the play, is a thriller.

Patrick Stewart portrays Claudius in this production.  That interested me immediately as I had already seen the RSC production in which he played that role.  (See 2/23/14 post.)  He speaks on this album of playing Claudius as a loving man:  one who loves his people, his queen and his stepson.  It is not until the nunnery scene when Claudius begins to suspect that there could be issues with Hamlet.  As Stewart quotes Shakespeare, "There's something in his soul/oe'r which his melancholy sits on brood...."

Rodney Bennett concludes the brief discussion with his opinion of why Hamlet has remained so popular.  It "asks a lot of questions and doesn't answer very many of them."  It is up to the audience, the scholars, the actors to answer them.

After listening to the album, I did some research and discovered that this version is commercially available on video.  It has been added to the blogger's ever-growing "to do" list.  Aside from the obvious draw--it's Hamlet--it will be interesting to compare Patrick Stewart's portrayal of Claudius in this production with that of the RSC production.  "If it be not now, yet it will come."