Hamlet with Ian McKellen
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Ian McKellen is having fun. He first played Hamlet at the age of 31, in 1971. Now he is 85, and having taken on all the heavyweight roles of the dramatic repertoire in a career which has already lasted more than 60 years, he’s entertaining himself by doing only what amuses him. And he’s earned it. So he’s doing it again, this time on video, for our amusement as well as his own.
This cinematic production starring Ian McKellen, Steven Berkoff, Jonathan Hyde, Jenny Seagrove and Francesca Annis, reimagines Hamlet as a psychological thriller set in modern times.
Directed by his favourite director and longtime partner, Sean Mathias, this is a Hamlet with an 85-year old man playing a university student with a mother young enough to be his daughter. The rest of the cast, fine actors all, are White and Black, young and old, gender cross-cast, (Laertes is a woman as is the Ghost of Hamlet’s father) and seemingly with no attention paid to the visual or historical intentions of Shakespeare’s play.
But, and I had to keep telling myself this as I watched it, William Shakespeare was above all a man of the theatre. He understood suspension of disbelief and the way experimentation could change expectation. This Hamlet deserves to be seen, not as a peculiarity or the indulgence of an old actor who has done everything as least once trying to find new meaning in a play he has known for a lifetime, but as a serious dramatic endeavour and an attempt to find something new in a play we know only too well.
The post Ruth Leon recommends… Hamlet with Ian McKellen appeared first on Slippedisc.
