Anyway, my first official outing as a non-smoker was to see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark at the Malthouse in Anna Tregloan's fantastic ersatz cinema (complete with fake distressed walls covered with tags and 17th century posters for Hamlet, and wheelie bin lights pierced with some kind of coats of arms). I love this film. The wobbly camera hurts my eyes and the film, like the play, is demanding and difficult. And on this viewing, a couple of minor technical problems - fuzzy, bled-out vision and slightly muffled sound - made the film more difficult than it need be.
Yet it is, if anything, better on a second viewing. Reader, by the time they got to the final line "good night, sweet prince", my heart was broken. There are moments in this film - among many, a couple of Richard Pyros's soliloquies, Adrian Mulraney as the Player King, Beth Buchanan's speechless despair as Ophelia, Heather Bolton as Gertrude weeping in a tiny bathroom, the final few seconds - that I think are completely breath-taking, as good as anything I've seen. I feel about Hamlet a little like Tynan when he claimed that he couldn't love anybody who didn't love Look Back in Anger; but I can't say that, of course, because I'd end up with no friends. For those alive to its rewards, however, it's a wonderful, vital film of one of the great plays of the western canon.
Meanwhile, I am running slow on a review of Kit Lazaroo's Asylum, now on at La Mama, which I hope to upload later
Good luck, Alison, on the no smoking! It's a new life, really. You'll get used to it. Eventually.
ReplyDeleteThanks, George. I am so ready. It's a new life now!
ReplyDelete