Word: hamlet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...CHOOSING TO SET WILLIAM Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in a vaguely 1930's, vaguely military society under dictatorial rule, director Eric Simonson gives the audience more access than is usual to the social world of the play. But his interpretation also burdens the play with a sense of decorum it doesn't need. This production's overly civilized environment fails to depict human passions that function outside society, a necessary element of a truly successful tragedy...
...fact, all the conservative Republicans, from Newt Gingrich to Pete Wilson, who have sought political advantage by exploiting white resentment should come and stand in the charred ruins of the New Liberty Baptist Church in Tyler, a tiny hamlet 10 miles east of Selma, and wonder if their coded phrases encouraged the arsonists. Over the past 18 months, while Republicans have fulminated about welfare and affirmative action, more than 20 black churches in Alabama and six other Southern and Border states have been torched...
...saga of bullying and oppression that now make up our royal family. With typical heavy-handedness, they've just behaved like morons again. But she is an English rose with thorns, and she will have her revenge. Charles' future? Shoot him--put him out of his misery. He is Hamlet. He is a man who equates being worried with being intelligent, and of course they are not the same thing." JULIE BURCHILL, novelist, founder of the Modern Review, a satirical journal...
...TIME IS CHRISTMAS. THE PLACE, a disused church deep in the English provinces. The characters, half a dozen profoundly marginalized show folks determined to put on a play. Not just any play, mind you--Hamlet is what Joe Harper (Michael Maloney), their director-producer-star, has maxed out his credit cards to mount...
Branagh also shares with Allen a belief that actorly self-absorption is a dish best served cold sober. How sublimely unconscious of their own silliness are Nicholas Farrell's Tom, engaged to play Laertes, but full of intellectual pretense ("Hamlet is Bosnia..."), and Julia Sawalha's Ophelia, stumbling about because she refuses to wear glasses onstage. Joan Collins does such a nice turn as a high-powered agent that one fancies she might make a go of acting if writing novels continues to sour for her. Branagh sometimes sacrifices bite to the sentiment so endemic to show biz. But this...