The text provides ample ground to play Claudius this way, but it's so rarely done.
I remember that production being incredibly good about the reality of its characters in ways that made sense as soon as you saw them, you just hadn't seen them before. Like Ophelia's madness: not north-northwest, but terrible and real. The flowers aren't right. She cannot tell rosemary from thistle from sedge; she holds out a cattail for a daisy, willowherb for columbine, barefoot in a mud-streaked shift, her arms scratched and bleeding—she'll look more decorous when she's dead. She unnerves everyone. She should.
(I don't remember John Woodvine's Player King being especially unusual, just wonderful: an old man in street clothes with his sleeves rolled up, speaking Priam and Pyrrhus and Hecuba to a loose half-circle of fellow-actors and one antic prince and it blows the doors off the scene, the simple, straightforward power of words. I have loved him ever since the RSC's monumental 1980–81 The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby and am always happy whenever he turns up.)
Macbeth: that is a terrific poem.
Thank you!
As a reader, I'm always convinced the ghost is there for that reason, but as a watcher, I've found I prefer productions where it's not.
That makes sense: it would be not distracting exactly, but overdetermined.
(And I definitely don't want to see any dagger, what the hell, Hollywood!)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2018-01-04 12:38 am (UTC)I remember that production being incredibly good about the reality of its characters in ways that made sense as soon as you saw them, you just hadn't seen them before. Like Ophelia's madness: not north-northwest, but terrible and real. The flowers aren't right. She cannot tell rosemary from thistle from sedge; she holds out a cattail for a daisy, willowherb for columbine, barefoot in a mud-streaked shift, her arms scratched and bleeding—she'll look more decorous when she's dead. She unnerves everyone. She should.
(I don't remember John Woodvine's Player King being especially unusual, just wonderful: an old man in street clothes with his sleeves rolled up, speaking Priam and Pyrrhus and Hecuba to a loose half-circle of fellow-actors and one antic prince and it blows the doors off the scene, the simple, straightforward power of words. I have loved him ever since the RSC's monumental 1980–81 The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby and am always happy whenever he turns up.)
Macbeth: that is a terrific poem.
Thank you!
As a reader, I'm always convinced the ghost is there for that reason, but as a watcher, I've found I prefer productions where it's not.
That makes sense: it would be not distracting exactly, but overdetermined.
(And I definitely don't want to see any dagger, what the hell, Hollywood!)
What, seriously? No!