Blog Response 8 - Play Review

Overall, I felt that there were some good performances by individual actors in the Hamlet that we saw on Friday, Hamlet himself being the most convincing. There were, of course, also some bad performances – Gertrude and her immovable expression of sadness in particular comes to mind. While the actors performed to various degrees of quality, it was the directing that struck me as the most off from the text. For example, the depiction of the Ghost put me off at the start of the play. He was covered with heaps of gray rags, over what could have been some armor – I couldn’t tell. He tried to do a typical ghost voice, which ended up sounding a bit evil, and closer to the Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars than a revered general. Even though the ghost is not one of the more complex characters, I thought they could have done better than a stereotypical ghost, which neither fits in with the reading that the dead King was honorable, or that he was a sinner who did not have the chance to repent. If the older Hamlet was indeed magnanimous, then he would have not spoken in such a voice or been ignominiously covered in rags. If he was a sinner, then his anger would have been of a more emotional and less demonic nature. The ghost could also have spoken in a more regretful tone as he described his murder for this interpretation. The ghost was simply too cartoonish for my taste.