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Mad Max Does Hamlet
| Article
# : |
18907 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
1,556 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
Of all Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet has been the most popular, ever since it was first performed at the Globe Theatre, probably around 1600. This tale of blood and vengeance was an instant hit, and apart from the Interregnum when Oliver Cromwell closed the theaters, it has continued to grip audiences over the centuries to the present day. Translated into many languages, made into a number of movie versions, Hamlet is familiar to theatergoers throughout the world. What literate person doesn't know who asked "To be or not to be?"
Actors have always thought of the title role as an ultimate goal: the consecration of their career. Through the centuries Hamlet has been the role of choice of leading actors of the day: David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, Sir Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Maurice Evans, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Peter O'Toole. And in the last month of 1990, in a splendiferous motion picture "based on the work of William Shakespeare" and directed by Italy's Franco Zeffirelli, from the Outback comes Mad Max himself, Mel Gibson, as the noble Dane.
American-born, Australian reared Gibson catapulted to instant international stardom with the George Miller film Mad Max when he was just twenty-four. By the end of the eighties, films like Lethal Weapon and Lethal Weapon II had put the actor into the multi million-dollar orbit of the highest paid performers in the world.
Massively Trimmed
How is his performance? Very honorable indeed. But first to the film itself. Director Zeffirelli, who cosigns the screenplay with Christopher De Vore, has stripped and pared the five-act, five-hour drama down to a taut, quickly paced two and a half hours. To the probable shock of Shakespearean purists, nearly all the soliloquies, with the exception of "To be or not to be," have been massively trimmed when not actually excised (as is the case with "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I"). This is an action Hamlet, a Hamlet for the nineties, but it is also an intelligent, skillfully arranged adaptation--no mere pandering to commercial tastes.
Shakespeare writing for a stage that used neither sets nor backdrops, gave his audiences many a passage of exposition, which the camera here has expeditiously replaced, legitimately justifying some of the textual cuts. Shot largely on location in Stonehaven on the Scottish coast,
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