ΑΝΑΖΗΤΩΝΤΑΣ ΤΟΝ ΤΕΛΕΙΟ ΑΜΛΕΤ!

Καθώς ο David Tennant προετοιμάζεται να παίξει Άμλετ, ο θεατρικός κριτικός των Times παρουσιάζει τους δέκα κορυφαίους ηθοποιούς που ερμήνευσαν το ρόλο, αλλά ακόμα περιμένει κάποιον να τον παίξει τέλεια!

Benedict Nightingale, The Times, February 18, 2008

Laurence Olivier in Hamlet

Watch classic versions of Hamlet's famous soliloquy by Laurence Olivier, 1948 I Derek Jacobi, 1980 I Kevin Kline, 1990 I Kenneth Branagh, 1996 I Ethan Hawke, 2000

At last count I'd seen 40 Hamlets, beginning with Richard Burton, of whom my boyhood memory is simply that he scowled and throbbed and would rather have been drinking in Swansea than dying in Elsinore. God help me, I've reviewed 35 of them. I've seen virtuous Hamlets like Simon Russell Beale and baleful, brooding ones like Nicol Williamson, mad ones like Mark Rylance, sound-minded ones like Toby Stephens, and several so mentally ambiguous that they justified Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's summing-up of the prince in Tom Stoppard's Shakespeare spin-off: “stark raving sane.”

Derek Jacobi: Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1

I've seen some manage the near-impossible, which is to be dull, and some become highly eccentric. I've seen Paul Rhys's willowy, weepy Hamlet scrub his nails and Yorick's skull in a bath while orating about destiny, Jonathan Pryce internalise his father's ghost into a deep voice that burped its demands up from his stomach, Samuel West's scruffy student prince share a joint with the Rosensterns, and Frances de la Tour, my first female Hamlet, mooch lankily about in clothes best suited to a transport cafe specialising in soggy chips. I've even seen George Anton's druggie prince (isn't he said to be “blasted with ecstasy”?) rape an Ophelia whose corpse was also used by a necrophiliac Horatio; but that time the director was Calixto Bieito, the Catalan maverick of whom the rest should be silence.

Hamlet - Act III, scene I (Kevin Kline) To be or not to be

Who is the best Hamlet I've seen or, to put it another way, the worthiest heir to gentle Garrick and ferocious Kean, sensitive Gielgud and ballsy Olivier? That's a question well worth asking now, with David Tennant soon to emerge from his Tardis to play Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh directing Jude Law's prince next year, and Jonathan Miller staging the play in Bristol next month. But it's hard to answer because the search is for a complete Hamlet and, really, there's no such being.

Kenneth Brabagh: Hamlet Act3, Scene1 Soliloquy

His own testimony is that he is very proud, revengeful and ambitious, Ophelia's that he is the glass of fashion, the expectancy of the state and a noble courtier, soldier and scholar, and Fortinbras's that he would have “proved most royal”. But every claim needs qualification.

He is loving, callous, fastidious, coarse, contemptuous, considerate, vindictive, prudish, indecisive, tough, incapable, philosophic, violent, melancholy, resilient, vulnerable, intense, detached, humorous, aristocratic, demotic, articulate, self-hating and much else, including a stage director and Denmark's premier theatre critic. He is Dr Jekyll and perhaps he is also Mr Hyde, in D.H. Lawrence's words “a repulsive, creeping, unclean thing”. He is a success, for he gets his man, and a failure, for he leaves behind eight bodies, including his own, when there was meant to be one...

Ethan Hawke: To Be or Not To Be