Hamlet adaptations

Gregory Doan (2008) RSC: David Tennant

Shattering set: Chandeliers, action reflected in glossy black mirror-like floor with full length mirrors at back of stage, shattered when Polonius was shot → surveillance state and observation, Hamlet as beginning to break this.

• filmed in 2009 - theme of observation with CCTV monitor used for some of the shots, with Hamlet filming the performance of the players with a Super-8 Camera

Revenger: Interval when Hamlet with knife-aloft ready to stab → possibility of revenger, but also continued delay of this

Laurence Olivier (1948) Film

“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind”

• political elements of play cut; Fortinbras, Rosencrantz + Guildenstern → intensely psychological performance

Oedipal: Casted 28 year old Eileen Herlie as Hamlet’s mother, with himself aged 40 as Hamlet.

Cavernous sets: narrow winding stairwells, correspond to labyrinths of Hamlet’s psyche. (J. Lawrence Gunter - film also owes style to German expressionism + film noir)

Grigory Kozintsev (1964) film

Russian adaptation, informed by post-Stalinist era in which it was made. Political and public.

• broad avenues, populated with ambassadors and courtiers

• camera often looks through bars and grates: Ophelia image in iron farthingale symbolises fate of the sensitive and intelligent in the tough political environment

• Douglas Brode has criticised the film for presenting a Hamlet who barely pauses for reflection: with most of the soliloquies cut, it is circumstances, not an inner conflict, that delay his revenge.

  • less of the revenger here - inexorable fate?

Sheen 2011 (Young Vic)

Set inside a psychiatric hospital → madness and psychological. Sheen plays all the parts.

Kenneth Branagh (1996)

Every word, 4 hours. Internal scenes in colourful setting, throne room has lots of mirrored doors. Noir but with the lights on.

• Harry Keyishan has suggested that the film is structured as an epic, courting comparison with ‘Ben Hur’, ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘Doctor Zhivago’

• flashbacks to dramatise elements that are not performed in Shakespeare's text, such as Hamlet's sexual relationship with Kate Winselt’s Ophelia

• These flashbacks include performances by several famous actors in non-speaking roles: Yorick is played by Ken Dodd, Old Norway by John Mills and John Gielguld as Priam and Judi Dench as Hecuba in a dramatisation of the Player King's speech about the fall of Troy.

  METATEXTUAL CELEBRATION OF ACTING THROUGH ACTORS WELL KNOWN

• Referenced wars beginning in Eastern Europe indirectly, ending has soldiers dismantling Old Hamlet's statue but implies cyclicality of tyranny. Chess board style of court floor suggests political 'game' of Elsinore. Both Hamlet and Claudius have bleached blonde hair - lines blurred of hero and villain.

• Snow around the death of Ophelia - purity in death

RSC 2001 - Hamlet is Sam West

• modern dress, black hat low over face as though trying to escape video surveillance

1997 Matthew Warchus RSC (Alex Jennings Hamlet)

• family tragedies of Hamlet & Ophelia as the focus.

• Opened with Hamlet scattering his father’s ashes at the front of the stage while an old black and white home movie showed him as a boy playing in the snow with his loving father. Action cut straight to party celebrating his mother’s wedding and Claudius’ speech.

• Mark Thompson’s set model for a chapel set had a statue of Old Hamlet in a Christ like position

• Hamlet had a gun to his head in 2b speech production photos

Joanne Pearce's 1992 portrayal of Ophelia

Wears the clothes of her dead father, infers her madness draws from his death and therefore Hamlet, but also a symbol of inescapable patriarchy

‘Joanne Pearce’s Ophelia, moving enough initially to earn forgiveness for the mad scene which she plays in her dead father’s bloodstained evening suit and goes clean over the top.’

Lyndsey Turner's 2015 Play (Benedict Cumberbatch)

Ophelia plays music in a piano, madness suggested by snatches of tunes and discordant notes

Hamlet is a rewrite of what play?

Amleth → by Saxo Grammaticus

Shakespeare adds:

• matching father and son names: Fortinbrases, Hamlets

John Shakespeare was…

Catholic → charged with recusancy (not going to church)

intellectual sons v Catholic fathers

children of the Reformation

Godwin's 2016 Play

Subversive 'graffiti prince' (Billington) transported to Africa. Heightened sexual tensions in 3.4 by splattering paint on Gertie's face.

• ghost does not appear in scene 1

• Barnardo and Marcellus wear militaristic uniform

• portrait a portrait of Gertrude and Claudius hangs at back → off-centred (symbolic) Also Claudius’ throne

what does Hamlet not wear in Simon Godwin’s version, but does wear in the 2009 film?

a suit!

different adaptations think he has different levels of authentic Ness

In Gregory Doran’s 2009 film, Patrick Stewart plays…

both the Ghost of Hamlet and Claudius!!

In Gregory Doran’s film, Gertrude has to whisper to Claudius that Hamlet went to school in…

“Wittenberg”

downplays the cosy family

in GD film, Hamlet changes into …

a t-shirt with a body on → symbolic of the mask = closest Hamlet can get to being authentic / without clothes, but still masked

or the illusion of authenticity?!?”

in GD, Horatio wears … vs Hamlet wears…

Hamlet starts in a formal suit, whereas Horatio wears blue-collar uniform

R + G in suits too → part of Hamlet’s privileged possie

GD

Horatio is…a Catholic!?!? says his rosaries?!??!

• who else is Oedpial?!?! → Laertes + Ophelia → sexual corruption runs deeper than just Hamlet and Gertrude. Ophelia inspects the condoms in Laertes’s suitcase

• ghost is on fire and wears sulphurous flames and an army uniform

• Hamlet and Horatio try to find Hamlet’s ghost and there are fireworks from Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding

• Polonius pays Reynaldo when he goes to Paris (spying) also pays Laertes - transactional

• Hamlet delivers soliloquies to the camera → psychological insight

  • Ophelia speaks to the sky - to GOD

• only ever wears variations of floral outfits

• Before ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’, Hamlet does what…

  rips down the CCTV, and says: “now I am alone”

• play within a play actually happens in the middle of court - unlike Hastie’s

• Polonius is shot through a mirror, not arras

 when he holds the sword over Claudius’s head, what does Hamlet do?

1. wear a crown askew

2. and his lines come from within his head → not out loud → psychological insight (pair with soliloquies to camera)

what do Horatio and Hamlet play on the recorder when H tells R and G that they are “a pipe to play on”

Three Blind Mice → link to ‘eyes’ and surveillance? Oedipal blindness?

2025 National Theatre Robert Hastie → Claudius + Gertrude wear…

white

in Robert Hastie’s 2025 National Theatre, Claudius and Hamlet both have..

guns → emphasises that this is a tragedy of psychology, not of ability

in Aneil Karia’s 2026 Hamlet, Hamlet delivers ‘to be or not to be’ while…

driving at speed down the motorway

in Aneil Karia’s 2026 Hamlet, ‘Elsinore’ is graffitied…

on the wall → Elsinore dominated by all classes, making Shakespeare’s inclusion of mostly nobility more claustrophobic

in Aneil Karia’s 2026 film version, in the play within a play, the King actually has…

blood on his hands!!

Steven Pimlott, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 2001: Horatio…

Horatio films the play within a play

David Farr, 2013: Royal Shakespeare Theatre → new setting!!

1960s run-down gym

Simon Palfrey: “Ophelia remains…”

“Ophelia remains tantalisingly unknowable”