Sherry Chandler » Kevin Kline’s Hamlet
Kevin Kline’s Hamlet
I spent yesterday dealing with the several hundred e-mails from my inbox (mostly spam) and putting the finishing touches on some work I’d started on retreat. Toward the end of the day, I settled down with the family to watch Kevin Kline’s Hamlet.
This production is a filmed stage play. It was done for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990, then filmed for Great Performances. This was before the famous and infamous movie versions. Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branaugh. I’ll let you pick which adjective goes on which.
Kline’s is a stark production (he directed himself), done on a mostly bare stage with a few stone-looking columns to indicate a castle. There is time to study the beautiful wide floorboards and wonder where they came from.
Sometimes a few chairs or a table are brought in. A double row of candelabra form the footlights for the Mousetrap, looking pretty dangerous. Lighting effects are used indicate a change of location. Modern(ish) (say 1940s) dress, Claudius uniformed like a generalissimo, Gertrude (Diane Ivey) with her beautiful red hair dressed in a elaborate snoodish twist.
The result, it seems to me, is a play that must be about the language. And the language, in Kline’s mouth, is magnificent. “Rich in vocal music,” to quote Frank Rich. The supporting players are strong. Josef Sommer as Polonius is both foolish and hatefully manipulative of Ophelia and Hamlet. Brian Murray does a sympathetic Claudius but not as much so as Derek Jacobi in the Branaugh movie. Diane Venora as Ophelia has a beautiful alto voice but she tends to bray a bit in the mad scenes. Peter Francis James (Horatio), Michael Cumpsty (Laertes), Philip Goodwin (Rosencrantz) and Reg E. Cathey (Guildenstern) are fine.
Such a stark production must be more-than-usually about the actors’ physical presence. “Energetic,” says Poppysmatus. Frank Rich speaks of Kline’s “balletic grace of body and speech,” and they are much in display here. Hamlet sometimes flings Gertrude and Ophelia around as though they were rag dolls. They seem to have the physical stamina to endure it. I found it a little distracting. Still, as Rich says of the 1990 stage production (of which the DVD is a studio performance):
A born creature of the stage, he is, as Shakespeare would have it, in action like an angel, especially when black costumes set off the pale skin and Byronic features that make him a storybook prince.
Indeed.
In fact, I sometimes felt that he was channeling Olivier just a bit, though he had the wisdom not to go blond.
As the hamlet blog puts it:
Kline’s is a very moist Hamlet. By that I mean during much of the play its rare that he passes through a scene without welling up, the sheer weight of Hamlet’s endeavor and its psychological effects dwell upon his face at all times.
“How does he do that?” asked #1 son.
Kevin Kline, in fact, did Hamlet twice in 4 years. Critiquing the 1986 production, directed by Liviu Ciulei, Rich says this about Kline’s Hamlet:
This is a scholarly Hamlet, who, in his first appearance in a long 19th-century coat, suggests a garret philosopher out of ”La Boheme.” This is also a Hamlet who feigns his madness; Mr. Kline leaves no doubt that he really does know ”a hawk from a handsaw” when it suits his purposes. But what is most stirring about Mr. Kline’s performance is its conversance with the metaphysical despair of the role. The actor opens his palms as if to weigh life’s nothingness when declaring that ”the time is out of joint”; his ensuing lament that he ”was born to set it right” is delivered with a sinking, fatalistic shudder of foregone defeat. Contemplating man as the ”quintessence of dust” or, indeed, deciding whether ”to be or not to be,” this Hamlet is more than a little in love with death. Mr. Kline conveys his condition with an androgynously beatific facial pallor (his ‘’sullied flesh” does seem about to melt) and with grave notes of nullity in his voice (the ”weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” uses of the world are catalogued in a bone-rattling timbre).
Most of this description would fit the Great Performance production, except that four years later, Mr. Kline’s Hamlet is both truly mad and faking.
Not a perfect Hamlet but satisfying.
I’ll leave you with this exchange between Branaugh and Kline that I found at the CrankyCritic:
CrankyCritic: You’ve both done definitive Hamlet’s in your fields.
Kevin Kline: Well, one of them must be more definitive than the other!
Kenneth Branagh: (to Kline) Yours was more definitive.
Kevin Kline: (to Branagh) No, yours was, while you were doing it, was definitive.
CrankyCritic: Did that come up at all in your professional relationship.
Kevin Kline: (You mean) I’ll show you my Hamlet if you show me yours? And which one’s bigger and longer? Well, his was uncut so he gets the [our side of the table starts laughing. Branagh doesn't let Kline finish the double entendre]
Kenneth Branagh: It may not be the best, but it was the longest. Somebody once said about my stage Hamlet “It may not be the best but it’s the quickest” because I spoke about a million miles an hour.
Kevin Kline: No, the whole point is that’s the joy of doing the classics like that is that you are a link in the long chain that goes back four hundred years and the more people that do it, it’s fun.
Richard Burbage was the first actor to play Hamlet. Here’s a nice NYTimes overview from 1990 (before the moveis) of the actors who have played that role. And a Stage History worth reading at georgedillon.com.
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