Alphonse Mucha, Bournemouth, & Hamlet starring Maxine Peake, nationwide cinema release

Alphonse Mucha – Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth

Hamlet – cinema production – Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre starring Maxine Peake

Alphonse Mucha was a Slavic artist, originally from Moravia, who remained a lifelong supporter of national identity for a Czech, or in his time, Czechoslovakian, homeland.  He is most identified however for his association in the 1890s and early 1900s for Paris and the movement of Art Nouveau, a term which he himself derided.  Nonetheless, his swirling colour lithographs of Sarah Bernhardt and seductive female subjects, advertising everything from plays to cigarette papers, are instantly recognisable.  The Mucha foundation, family descendants who have sought to preserve his art from pastiche and plagiarism, have staged exhibitions all over the world.  Looking at the beautiful images they have brought here to Bournemouth one has the feeling that it can only be a matter of time before the Royal Academy becomes involved.  So if you are on the South coast between now and September this is your chance to see the originals, including some exquisite pen and ink drawings and some photographs of models in his studio which in their realistic poses create the curves which were later applied to the lithographs.  Here is a small sample of imperfect reproductions of what is on show.

The Seasons

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Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet

This last image, of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, is appropriate because it illustrates the maxim that there is nothing new under the sun and leads me on to discuss...

Maxine Peake as Hamlet

Sydney Smith stated ‘I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so’.  Despite temptations I haven’t read the critics’ reviews of this production which started life as a Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre play and has now been filmed.  Why no critics?  Well, I have something of a preoccupation with the play, having acted in it, read almost every major book about it, seen the Russian film 5 or 6 times, most of the other films, and several major stage productions (Albert Finney at NT; Jonathan Pryce at Royal Court; Derek Jacobi at Old Vic; others which I can’t remember but were probably less compelling), and a punchy First/Second Quarto version which carries more of the action but less of the poetry.  It’s always interesting to see a new interpretation, and there is usually something novel which the director has come up with.  To read a critic’s view is to focus on what they saw, rather than what you can see for yourself.  About the only teaching I remember from Dr William Gooddy, famous neurologist at UCH, was his remark during a teaching session one morning that ‘To be a critic you have to positively enjoy being second rate’.  Famous neurologist he may have been but his teaching was frustrating in that it was almost never anything to do with neurology.  We learnt more from his brilliant senior registrar Chris Frears...

So let’s deal with the play’s direction first.  It had some interesting quirks!  It’s certainly the first time that the graveyard and earth have been represented by discarded clothes, and poor Yorick’s skull a folded up sweater, but this at least allows the gravediggers to prepare burial space for Ophelia pretty quickly.  Fortunately we didn’t have that Russian pianist’s skull on stage, the one whose final ambition was to play Yorick, which of course he did very well indeed since Yorick doesn’t have any lines to speak.  This is not true in the Russian film of Hamlet in which Yorick is shown in flashback, a sort of amiable Rasputin figure bearing Hamlet on his back, true to the line ‘He hath borne me on his back a thousand times’.  Most of the strategies used in the direction of this play worked, though when the curtain metaphorically went up and we had guards in dayglo jackets with walkie talkies I thought ‘Oh no here we go again’, but the modern setting didn’t detract too much.  It did jar oddly when all of the weapons until the fencing scene were revolvers.  I was beginning to wonder exactly what weapons Hamlet and Laertes would use, especially after Polonia (yes, Polonia, the female alter ego of Polonius) had been shot by Hamlet.  Fortunately she had not been hiding behind the arras so H got a clean shot in and Polonia crumpled instantly.  I remember that when we acted in the school production (King Edward’s, Bath, mid 1960s) we had some childish but enjoyable wordplay with the direction ‘Polonius got stabbed in the arras’.  The revolver jarred most when Hamlet soliloquized that he could end it all ‘with a bare bodkin’.  I resisted the temptation to point out that he/she didn’t have a bare bodkin handy.  The director also made some strange cuts – ‘These are but wild and whirling words, my Lord.’ went; as did Hamlet’s retort to Polonius as he leads the players off, ‘... Use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping.’  Horatio’s wonderful lines, ‘But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill’ etc. are mysteriously allocated to Marcellus (Marcella in this production).  How do I know this?  Well, Marcellus was the part I played – pretty small you will agree, and it would have been nice to have those extra lines.  In a school production however, being a soldier guaranteed you walk on parts at every other stage of the play.  ‘Where are my Switzers?  Let them guard the door...’ (Yes, I was a Switzer); ‘Go, take up the body...’  Yes, I was a pallbearer.  A role I would have carried off with my other three colleagues with some aplomb, but for Pete Rickard, the overweight one of our soldiers.  Our Director, the incomparable Trevor Elsom Rhymes, had a brother who worked for the RSC.  We were loaned RSC imitation chain mail bodysuits.  But the RSC had not bargained for the bulk of Pete Rickard.  At the dress rehearsal there were sounds of strain as we bent to pick up the lithe form of John Oliver, a majestic Hamlet to my mind.  At the first performance, Pete’s bodysuit ripped from stem to stern, an eerie noise in the solemn silence...  We carried John off with heaving shoulders, our sobs being sobs of laughter and not sorrow.  How did we not drop him?  In the Manchester production the sex changes didn’t matter much; I didn’t find them distracting. When the director has chosen the prettiest boy in the school to play Ophelia, and Gertrude has a mellow alto voice it matters little to the true connoisseur.  At King Edward’s we were Shakespearean to a T.

If you've followed me thus far, please allow one further indulgence, while I deliver a eulogy to John Oliver, our school Hamlet.  John was the late Minister in the difficult and troubled parish of Cape Town; a man so loved and admired in South Africa that Bishop Desmond Tutu gave the eulogy at his funeral.  John was an aesthete; he was immensely gifted.  He played the clarinet exquisitely.  He arranged Sidney Bechet’s ‘Si tu vois ma mère’ from soprano sax to clarinet and played this wonderful piece at a school concert.  His voice was one of pure poetry.  The nearest Hamlet I have heard to his was Derek Jacobi’s poetic interpretation.  In fact, his voice was so wonderful we used to get him to read poetry to us in the Prefect’s room during break.  Not for us the strains of Dylan Thomas or T S Eliot; I’m ashamed to say that we got him to read sections of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or the less salubrious bits from Terry Southern’s ‘Candy’, a novel of the time girded with marvellous sexual obscenities.  I still remember the beautiful way he said “‘Oh gosh’, said Candy”.  These gifts apparently stood him in good stead in the pulpit in the townships of the Cape...  When John took on the role of Hamlet in our school production, Trevor Rhymes wrote in the programme that ‘Only once in a generation is one privileged to find a schoolboy actor who can take on this role’; and in the programme for this film, Sarah Frankcom echoes this and writes, ‘As a director I think you can only begin to think about doing Hamlet if you are absolutely passionate about a particular actor...’  (Not too passionate I hope Sarah).

One other directorial surprise in the Manchester Royal Exchange production.  At the interval, after harrowing scenes in Gertrude’s bedroom, I commented to my long suffering wife that I was surprised that the Director, Sarah Frankcom, had cut the best known speech in the play, ‘To be or not to be...’  But it turned out that she had merely shifted it to a later part of the play.  It did not seem to suffer by its transposition.

And so to the cast.  The reason why I initially became captivated by Hamlet, even before acting in or seeing the play, was an interview on TV with Laurence Olivier, where he was asked about his interpretation, and how he maintained the intensity of his performance.  He replied that he had read the book ‘Hamlet and Oedipus’ by Ernest Jones.  Ernest Jones was a psychiatrist, a disciple of Sigmund Freud’s, and in fact worked at the hospital which I would one day explore as a medical student.  I read the book.  It all seemed to fit perfectly.  Olivier said that for better or worse he believed in that interpretation, right or wrong, and he stuck to it, and it made every scene easy to play.  This is a long winded way of saying that Hamlet is in love with his mother, and it’s important therefore that Gertrude is sexually alluring to him.  I know that almost nobody is going to read this review, which is fortunate, because sadly Barbara Marten is too old.  She looked a million dollars, elegant and refined; but in a post menopausal way, and her diction and acting skills were superb, which one could not say of the entire cast.  If one subscribes to the Olivier/Jones view then she was miscast.  Claudius was played by John Shrapnel.  What a trouper!  When one reads his acting CV, it’s not hard to understand why he was in many ways the best actor in the production.  Training with Olivier, and working with NT and RSC, his acting and diction were a joy.  Excellent support came from Ashley Zhangazha (Laertes) and Thomas Arnold (Horatio).  Ophelia is such a difficult role, I should pass over it, but Katie West in the madness scene, elicited sympathy as she tore off her clothes and sobbed in a semi-catatonic state.  Finally I should mention Gillian Bevan, who was superb as Polonius, sorry, Polonia.  She must have had great fun with this role and as senior politician in the court, more than once a flavour of Margaret Thatcher came out.

Before I move to Maxine Peake, I should mention that in our politically correct times, the Film Censors insist that we should be forewarned about what we are about to see.  I snorted with amusement (I mean the phrase) to see that the pre-show warning stated, ‘Drug taking; mild violence’.  With five murders and a suicide how could it be otherwise?  But the drug taking?  Problem solved.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, punky student pals of Hamlet’s turn up with some white powder in a packet; unsurprisingly our Hamlet turns it down.  She only has to prevaricate for another couple of hours before stabbing Claudius and she doesn’t want her judgement clouded by cocaine.  And why did the censor not mention ‘sexual references’?  Hamlet’s mock masturbation with the book she’s reading when Polonia finds him, sorry, her (the ‘Words, words, words’ speech)?  Appropriately the book is Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’.

So Maxine is a very compelling actress to watch.  She acts superbly.  But in the energy and the vigour, a little of the verse speaking goes.  Compare the pacing of John Shrapnel’s delivery...  The trouble is that she has a lot to get through – the uncut version of Hamlet runs to 4½ hours, so something has to be speeded up.  And Maxine’s enunciation of the letter R and a terminal T at the end of a word are sometimes not as clear as they could be.  But it is a play that begs to be cut.  The Russian film achieved this superbly.  It ran to 140 minutes in a screenplay by Boris Pasternak with music by Shostakovich.  Peter Brook admired it greatly.  The sonorous and beautiful Russian sounds are accompanied by subtitles, so diction is not a problem.

You may think I didn’t like this production.  On the contrary; it had energy and was compulsive viewing.  It was the fastest selling production in the MRE’s history – but this surely has a lot to do with the novelty casting and the fact that Maxine Peake is such a well known figure on television.  I cannot say whether the other recent celebrity Hamlets (David Tennant; Jude Law) were successful.  I try to avoid celebrity productions.  For example, having twice been to see Daniel Radcliffe in the West End I will go out of my way to avoid him and his Harry Potter groupie audience, whatever the play.  One day, heaven forfend (‘Angels and ministers of grace, defend us...’), no doubt he will play Hamlet and I will not be there to see it.

If you have read this to the end, congratulations.  ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, but not here alas!