"T Paine and Lil Hamlet"

Rarely posting now, but decided to put this up. Hilarious. Class agreed. (Just finished teaching Hamlet again. FYI. Since of course you would no doubt be wondering about that).

Recently put a site meter up. Happy to report people are finding this site from as far away as Turkey, Israel, India, Australia, Hong Kong, Spain, Venezuela, Argentina. Someone recently used google-translate to read the "memento mori" post in Dutch.

Hamlet is back and he is not happy.

"To be or not to be...."
(pause, light a cigar, explosion in background)
"Not to be."

Muslim Hamlet, II

I was flipping through the Voice on the train the other day and found an article about Sulayman Al-Bassam, a director staging a Muslim Richard III at BAM this summer. (Called "Richard III: An Arab Tragedy.")

Prior to Richard III, Al-Bassam re-envisioned Hamlet as "Al-Hamlet Summit." It won awards at both the Edinburgh Fringe Festival & the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre. Read an interview with Al-Bassam about Al-Hamlet Summit here.

The names of each act in Al-Hamlet Summit are those of the five daily prayers in Islam. Ophelia is re-imagined as a suicide bomber.

From one of the reviews: "The moral conundrum posed by the ghost in Shakespeare (is he to be believed, and what is his provenance?) finds its ingenious equivalent in the People's Liberation Front, which claims that the old king was murdered by his successor. Instead of a visitor from beyond the grave, this Hamlet (the handsome, intense Mohammed Kefah Al-Kous) is waylaid by a suited Western arms-dealer, who, in the fashion of such folk, is quite promiscuous about whom he's prepared to deal with."

Al-Bassam has directed/written other Hamlet variations as well: "Hamlet in Kuwait" and "Arab League Hamlet," all through his London-based theater company, Zaoum. Three Hamlets. So fascinating.

From his notes about Al-Hamlet Summit:

"Hamlet as an expression of politics…

This has been the driving force behind this work as it moved through its various stages of development that began in January 2001. The following text is a cross-cultural piece of writing in which I have tried to capture a sense of geographical context and contemporary resonance.

As performed by my London-based theatre company, Zaoum Theatre, it aims to allow English-speaking audiences a richer understanding of the Arab world and its people, and how their fates are inextricably linked to that of the West's.

I have endeavoured to avoid the polemic; favouring a concrete and poetic formulation of an Arab viewpoint.

The style of writing combines aspects of the Arab oral poetry tradition with the rhetoric of modern-day politics.

In directing the piece, I sought to bring out a precise and grotesque hyperrealism in the work. The conference chamber that gradually slides into a war room directly illuminates the political setting of the piece. It is a huis-clos that parodies the so-called 'transparency' of today's political processes and it is a deadly arena of internal conflict.

It is not a piece about any specific country in the Arab world.

Rather, it presents a composite of many Arab concerns that affect peoples from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond…"

From his notes about Arab League Hamlet:

"I will try to describe briefly the concerns which I myself was trying to address in the shaping of the piece:

We are living in an age of political charades, where the emphasis on 'spin', public opinion focus groups and the so-called transparency of government hides a callous agenda of economic and political barbarism. In the recent scramble to unite world opinion behind 'America's War on Terrorism', the slogan mentality that pitches good against evil, crusade against jihad presents us with a world split into two halves each baying for the other's blood.

The politicians that surround us are actors, grotesque frontmen for corporate interests and venal puppets of sham democracies.

This Hamlet is about these things, but also about a world where televised diplomacy reigns supreme, where the terrible paralysis of political discourse reaches epileptic heights, from which it is impossible to conceive what damage is being done to human beings on the ground.

Inside the Kingdom of Denmark, the delegates are consumed by vanity, overwhelmed by their own sense of self-importance, insouciant of the dangers threatening them from outside their borders and concerned uniquely with in creasing their stockpile of armaments to defend themselves against each other."

Yorick for kids.

Read about the Animaniacs. Thanks to the bard blog for this.

B or not a B.

Thanks to the bard blog for this.

Tiny Hamlet

Love this poster, from Tiny Ninja Theater's production of Hamlet. They've also produced Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, all to very good reviews. From the group's site: "Tiny Ninja Theater is a New York City-based company dedicated to the principle that 'there are no small parts, only small actors.' It was founded in 1999 by company director Dov Weinstein."

The Ghost is played by a mouth with a ninja in it.

Excerpts from Curtain Up's review:

"Tiny Ninja Hamlet, oddly enough, is just what it sounds like -- Hamlet performed with tiny plastic ninja figurines, all manipulated by Dov Weinstein. It's just what every eight-year-old boy does with his toy soldiers, only this is, you know, Hamlet."

"It's one of the most inventive shows I've ever seen. Using televisions, small pin lights and smaller cameras, the tiny plastic world is writ large for the audience. The figures (mostly ninjas, but there are other sorts of figurines) are moved about on three briefcase-size stages."

"Weinstein does an excellent job of maneuvering the ninjas, and of providing clear, distinct voices for each one even though each is no more than an inch tall."

DIY Hamlet

"Monologue by Craig Bazan in Camden NJ." He does the rogue/peasant slave speech. Cool.

Of our time...For our time.

Wow. I was doing a random Hamlet image search and found this. From 1969. I'm netflixing this. Looks like Hamlet is a vampire, like this could've been a poster for a Hammer film--Hammer studios in England churned out lots of vampire flicks in the 60s & the women were always shagadelic-Brit-chicks in diaphanous wench-type-dresses. With cleavage for days. Like in this poster.

I found one review through imdb, from Time Magazine. The review is hilariously gushing.

On Williamson: "His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier and Burton. Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature. Williamson holds a mirror up to the soul."

On Marianne: "Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia is remarkably affecting. She is ethereal, vulnerable, and in some strange way purer than the infancy of truth." (ed. note: ummmmmmm)

I have to say, though, I love the opening paragraph of the review. The guy who wrote it obviously just loves Hamlet and is effusive from the start. This is lovely:

"Hamlet has obsessed the Western mind for 369 years. Why? It is not because most people love great works of art. On the contrary, most people find great works of art oppressive, since such works invariably center on the nature of human destiny, and that destiny is tragic. Quite simply, Hamlet is a world, and like the world, it cannot be ignored. Every man has lived some part of the play, and to be a man is to be inextricably involved in the play. Hamlet probes and grips the profound themes of existence—death, love, time, fidelity, friendship, family, the relationships of a man and a woman, a son and father, a mother and son, murder and madness. Above all, it probes the value of existence, man's most anguishing question put in the form that every man knows from the time he first hears and ponders it—to be or not to be."

Graphic Hamlet

Two pages from No Fear Shakespeare's graphic novelization of Hamlet. Very cool art by Neil Babra. The second page is the beginning of Hamlet's famous "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" (II.ii.535) speech -- would have much preferred to see this in its original language:

Is it not monstrous that this player here...
instead of
Look how this player here...
etc.

Why not use the original language? Plenty of room in a project like this to allow visuals to flesh out meaning (and in that way make the language more accessible, as opposed to "translating" the language into present-day English).

But, love the art.

taH pagh taHbe'

Hamlet is available in Klingon.

Reviewed at Siskoid's Blog of Geekery. Available through Amazon.

DIY Hamlet for kids

Beautifully done. And so simple. From the creator's website:

"An 8-minute, animated short for kids, adapted from Shakespeare’s play. This film has been shown in film festivals around the world, including Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, Redcat Film Fest, Nashville Independent Film Festival, Toronto Images Festival, the Boston Museum of Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and more. I made this film in three weeks in 2001 for a high school project."

Muslim Hamlet

This is the CD cover of a Hamlet soundtrack--Bosnian director Haris Pašović's version of Hamlet, music performed by East West Orchestra. The music is "oriental/ambiental, improvisations based on classic Turkish themes."

Song number 3 is: "She's Conjunctive To My Life." (Sounds like a John Mayer title, if he wrote in Elizabethan.)

Claudius speaking about Gertrude (IV.vii.14-17):

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her.

Pašović's Hamlet is situated in a Turkish court instead of Danish. See a CNN World clip about this production here. From an interview with Pašović, on why he set it where he set it:

"It is a story about power, about rebellion, about human essence in all its greatness and all its irrelevance. Since this play is so universal that every epoch has its own Hamlet, I decided to refer to an empire that was a super-power during a certain period of history – the Ottoman Empire. It became interesting to me to view the whole story from the perspective of a powerful empire that encompassed several dozens of different peoples, cultural identities, and from the perspective of the Muslim world."

He continues:

"It may sound paradoxical, but I think that if he were to write Hamlet today, Shakespeare would set it in the Ottoman court . . . The structure of the Ottoman state is absolutely Shakespearian. That is something about which Shakespeare wrote in all his plays. I did not change the story, I have not changed anything in the story, I did not change the names, I only changed the titles; instead of king and queen, we use sultan and Valide-sultan, and where in the original there is a Christian religious reference, we have translated it into Islamic references."

DIY Hamlet

This is pretty great. Total DIY, zero-budget Hamlet. Done for a 10th grade English class. Hamlet meets The Godfather in eight minutes. They hit all the key points and are able to fold in "Godfather" elements pretty smartly, actually.

Instead of smoking Claudius out with a play that depicts the murder Claudius committed, Hamlet goes up to Claudius (who is now called Godfather) and asks him, hey I'm thinking about taking a hit on this guy by putting poison in his ear. What do you think?
I asked the star/director a few questions:

1. Your name.
Giordan Diaz

2. Where was this filmed?
This was filmed in Hialeah Gardens, Fl. In the house of the girl that plays Gertrude. In 2006.

3. Why Hamlet?
Well I didn't have any other choice. My 10th grade English teacher gave out the assignment. He wanted us to adapt and modernize Hamlet in any way we wanted.

4. Anything you like about the play?
I filmed this movie 3 years ago, and its been just as long sense I've read it, but I'll give it my best. I like the concept of a family slowly but surely destroying themselves little by little. The character of Hamlet himself is also very important to me because I don't think you can ever run out of ideas when analyzing this character. As an actor myself, I see why Hamlet is "the" role to play. I wish I would have known half the things I know now back then. I would have done this film differently.

5. What made you decide to give it the Godfather angle?
I'm a HUGE film buff. I really enjoy classic filmmaking more then the average person my age. So I had recently finished reading and seeing The Godfather that very same year. When this assignment came up I realized there are many similarities between a crime family and a royal family as far as titles of nobility and things of that nature. So I just decided to sit down and write down the main characters I needed and write down a very condensed version of Hamlet as if it were set in that particular world. Basically this little film is an Ode to the greatness of The Godfather.

Casting Hamlet

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