Oh cool! It really does sound amazing. I know what you mean by actors seeming disconnected from the language and meaning behind it. I mean, it's fully open to interpretation, and yet there's so many recordings of famous actors just reciting sonnets in sexy radio baritone... it seems more like an actor's rite of passage to 'do Shakespeare', rather than a chance to understand the text more deeply and help modern audiences understand it better. Is there any way to watch your Definitive Hamlet? Is it on DVD still? I'm really intrigued now! ^^ Also, did any of the people involved in that production see your fanart of it? It's a shame if they didn't, I looked through the Hamlet tag on your tumblr and I loved your drawings. ^^
The Russian adaptation is up for 7 more days on iPlayer if you still want to catch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03b7x2r/hamlet I read afterwards that it was considered by Kenneth Branagh to be the definitive film version and I thought 'uh oh', (because I slept through most of Branagh's Hamlet in high school, oops), but the Russian version has quite a poetic quality (visually and aurally) and it's interesting to hear the lines spoken in Russian. It also takes the Kurosawa approach of using music and sound, nature, weather, passages of silence and so forth to put across a character's state of mind. Probably not the acceptable way of adapting something as famously language-based as a Shakespeare play but I think this is because it's a) a Soviet era film and thus dialogue was cut out, in particular allusions to religion and b) it's Hamlet's story seen through a another country's cultural lens. ^^
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branchandroot
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Date: 2016-05-25 12:34 am (UTC)Also, did any of the people involved in that production see your fanart of it? It's a shame if they didn't, I looked through the Hamlet tag on your tumblr and I loved your drawings. ^^
The Russian adaptation is up for 7 more days on iPlayer if you still want to catch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03b7x2r/hamlet
I read afterwards that it was considered by Kenneth Branagh to be the definitive film version and I thought 'uh oh', (because I slept through most of Branagh's Hamlet in high school, oops), but the Russian version has quite a poetic quality (visually and aurally) and it's interesting to hear the lines spoken in Russian. It also takes the Kurosawa approach of using music and sound, nature, weather, passages of silence and so forth to put across a character's state of mind. Probably not the acceptable way of adapting something as famously language-based as a Shakespeare play but I think this is because it's a) a Soviet era film and thus dialogue was cut out, in particular allusions to religion and b) it's Hamlet's story seen through a another country's cultural lens. ^^