Posts Tagged ‘doctor who’

Posted on August 5, 2008 - by MG

David Tennant - a Hamlet you can actually like…

Thanks to my friend Susie Day and her two last minute spare tickets, I found myself driving me and my teenage daughter up to Stratford last week for the previews of ‘Hamlet’ at the Courtyard Theatre.

Obviously I’m a Star Trek fan and obviously Patrick Stewart played the best-ever Starfleet captain. And my daughter is at the impressionable age in which Her Doctor will always be David Tennant. (I’m on the Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker cusp…)

So, pretty much of a double whammy for us…

Here then, is my review of the lovely, slender Mr Tennant’s performance…

David Tennant plays Hamlet as a likeable, energetic, frenetic and often funny young nobleman. He can get a laugh from his delivery of lines such as ‘It is VERY cold’. That’s not to say he doesn’t brood - he does - he angsts and broods quite prettily at the beginning. The scene with the ghost and his first Loony Hamlet scenes (the famous soliloquy with all the conscience-ridden talk) are bewitching - at that point I truly believed that Hamlet would wither away from anticipatory guilt and distaste for the murderous act his father’s ghost has demanded.

But once the travelling players arrive and Hamlet hatches his plan - he is neither believably dysfunctional nor ruthless. And that makes him a very different Hamlet than any I’ve ever seen.

He is full of glee watching the play-within-the-play (itself a major highlight - wickedly bawdy, grotesque - with costumes so gawdy and camp that they make up for the austerity in the rest of the production). He plays ‘mad’ with gusto, is chillingly disinterested in having dispatched Polonius, and passionate in the counter-(quasi-)seduction of his mother. He seems to relish the irony of his fate of being sent off to England with the super-preppy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It’s all great.

But deep down part of me was rebelling. You’re not meant to like Hamlet - are you? You’re meant to be fascinated with his downward spiral into obsession, indecision and revenge.

So this is a very new take on the role. My 15-year old daughter was a Hamlet virgin  - she didn’t even know how it ended! Maybe for her this will be the definitive performance.

Sadly though the one Big Scene which didn’t quite deliver was the ending. Played as a nice clean fencing match with the likeable, roguish Hamlet and the very brooding Laertes (he Did Brooding much better than H), it seemed to wind up as a sort of unfortunate series of events in which everyone accepts their fate (death) with not much more than an ‘oh well’. I can’t help feeling that this scene needed more work and hopefully it’s improved since the previews.

Granted, we don’t need to see any Olivier-esque wailing of ‘I am dead!’ from Hamlet, but in this Hamlet the failings of the writing (yes! see how I DARE criticise Shakespeare!) were brought into relief. In the end a bunch of people we don’t much like all die. Okay in this case we like Hamlet but he doesn’t seem to care enough about staying alive for us to care. And Laertes with his last minute apologies…please!

Patrick Stewart, on the other hand, is utterly faultless as Claudius. It’s a much easier part than Hamlet with all his contradictions. Stewart is charming, smooth, stern and ruthless without coming across as either a camp villain nor thoroughly evil. So he coveted his brother’s gorgeous yummy-mummy wife and his throne, and let himself slip one afternoon in an orchard with a bottle of poison… At least he’s sorry - well at least he wishes he were sorry.

By contrast Hamlet comes across as outraged and self-righteous when it comes to judging his uncle’s and mother’s behaviour while his own murderous impulses run unchecked. His attention-grabbing sobs at Ophelia’s burial are seen for exactly what they are when we think back to his merciless treatment of her in the ‘get thee to a nunnery’ speech.

Spoilt mummy’s boy, cowardly boy-man, disturbed, vengeful and utterly selfish - Tennant’s Hamlet has it all. And yet also, somehow likeable.

(As a coda, I should say that it’s lots of fun watching Hamlet with someone who doesn’t know that all those now well-worn cliches like ‘neither a lender nor borrower be’, ‘the lady doth protest too much, ‘to be or not to be’, etc etc, all come from the same play…I kept hearing little gasps of recognition from my daughter…rather nice)

Posted on May 7, 2007 - by MG

Bank Holiday In The Telly Zone

I’ve never been comfortable with the English obsession for fresh air and walks but my English stepfather did a good enough job impressing these as ideals for the family weekend that I still feel guilty if we haven’t put the time in on one such activity.

“I don’t want to go for a walk,” our little five year-old says. “I want to watch TV.”
“You’re not expected to enjoy it,” we tell her, tersely. “It’s just the rules. At weekends you have to go for a walk.”

Rain, of course, is the big saviour in such a situation.

I looked at the sky hopefully this morning, for any sign of being rained in. But no. Then I thought, heck, why can’t I watch TV all blessed day, if I want to? I’m grown-up now!

So I did. Ahh, bliss. Three episodes of Doctor Who season three - which I’d been saving up, and the final two episodes of Stargate SG1. Yes, that’s how far behind I was on my TV viewing, on account of Cuba and writing and even reading.

I like the new Doctor Who assistant, Martha. I like that she’s allowed to be smart and ask technical questions and actually understand the explanations. I loved “As far as I’m concerned you have to earn the title ‘Doctor’” Too right, Martha; ask to see his MD/PhD certificate!

“Smith and Jones” was a good new-assistant introduction episode. Hospital teleported to the moon because it’s beyond the Earth-bound jurisdiction - pretteh, pretteh good. Haven’t seen that before.

“The Shakespeare Code”…hmmm. Liked the Harry Potter references and the witchy magick as another manifestation of alien power, but the ending… “You’re dead clever, Shakespeare, you’ll think of the right thing to say!” The problem is that it’s a strategy that can only disappoint in execution. What would the writer of Shakespeare’s plays say in such an event? We can never know…we can only guess and that just can’t be good enough.

“Gridlock”. Brilliantly original concept, or at least I’ve never come across its like. Stuck in traffic for years…the obvious solution would be to walk, but as we understand at the end, walking ain’t an option. That Face of Boe…he’s such a tease. “You are not alone…” Could that mean that the Master is still around? The Black Guardian? White Guardian? Rassilon? All of the above?

I don’t get why the Doctor can’t go to Gallifrey in the past. Maybe I’m missing out on some bit of DW lore here, not that the RTD version is necessarily sticking to old DW canon (and that’s fine with me), but is there some reason why if Gallifrey is destroyed in the year, lets say, 1 billion, it can’t exist in the past? Did the Time War erase Gallifrey from the space-time continuum for all time? If so how can the Daleks come to exist in the first place? The Doctor was present at the Genesis of the Daleks and if I remember correctly he was sent there by the Gallifreyans.

I’m painfully aware that all of the above will be discussed at length on some DW discussion board. But I’m not going to look. I’m NOT.

The Stargate-SG1 finale was inspired. Wow, Sam Carter has to take a realistic amount of time to work out a solution to a fiendishly difficult problem! What’s wrong with you, woman? Ten seasons of performing scientific miracles, coming up with solutions of pure genius with nothing more than “Major Carter, we need that fix right now… ten seconds before the galaxy explodes…” to spur her on. But finally, finally, finally, she goes “Hmm…tricky one…gonna have to think about that.” Fifty years later, she figures it out.

Yes, you see that IS how long scientific advancement actually takes.

Luckily, Rodney McKay of Stargate Atlantis can still be relied upon for the just-in-time Nobel-prize-worthy fix. Wait until he hears how long it took Carter to solve that problem. His ego will finally rest easy - he IS smarter than her! It may be all that’s needed for him to finally be able to woo her - an excuse to drop all his insecure posturing when he’s around her.

I can still get a couple of episodes of “Life on Mars” in before bed, to make today a day in which I’ve watched as much TV as in the last month.

I didn’t do my chores. And we ate a whole bag of Thorntons peanut brittle.