“Wahuhrah, wahuhrah…” exasperated pause, “words.” That, more or less, is how Rory Kinnear pronounces the immortal redundancy “words, words, words” in Nicholas Hytner’s new production of “Hamlet” for the National Theater in London. Those words (words, words) have of course been uttered more times than any calculator could compute.
But my ears pricked up when I heard Mr. Kinnear’s Hamlet mangle them, for strategic purposes, in speaking to David Calder’s Polonius. They sounded new. And, more important, when you thought about it, they sounded just how someone would sound were he trying to convince somebody else that he was out of his mind. Especially a listener like Polonius, who is a little slow on the uptake and could easily be toyed with by an impatient prince of quicksilver intellect.
I had the chance to catch Mr. Kinnear’s inspiring diction lesson last week in a movie theater in New York, where his “Hamlet” was broadcast from London as part of the National Theater Live series of performances. I went to the show with some reluctance. It was a cold and forbidding night; I had seen another London-born production of “Hamlet” (starring Jude Law) twice in the previous year; and I do believe that a filmed version of a stage performance is a pale substitute for the real thing.
But I was very happy to have seen this “Hamlet,” even in two dimensions. There were distinct advantages to watching this production on film, despite the absence of long shots that captured the full sweep of Mr. Hytner’s mise-en-scene (designed by Vicki Mortimer). All those close-ups of eavesdropping agents of the evil King Claudius (Patrick Malahide) tended to kill the subtlety in Mr. Hytner’s notion of Denmark as a 21st-century fascist nation where state surveillance was inescapable.
What a treat, though, to be able to hear so precisely the inflections that Mr. Kinnear and company brought to their readings of well-known lines throughout, and to see the thoughts behind the lines reflected so clearly in the speakers’ magnified faces. Mr. Hytner’s overall conceit of Hamlet’s Denmark as a latter-day Stasi state was justified and well thought-through (though I’m a little weary of seeing productions with Shakespearean kings preening for television news cameras). But it was the specificity and originality that the actors brought to the familiar words they spoke that made this filmed production worthwhile.
In the title role, Mr. Kinnear has the royal share of those words, and he kept surprising me with his spontaneous-seeming shadings of them. Even “to be or not to be” (delivered in the muddled, meditative manner of a man truly trying to sort out his thoughts) and “alas, poor Yorick” sound newly minted. And everything that the fabulous Clare Higgins says as Gertrude in the second half of her third-act bedroom scene with Hamlet has an unexpected spin. That’s because, in this version, you suspect that Gertrude has (contrary to the usual interpretation) seen the same ghost that Hamlet sees, though she may deny it.
And remember that oft-quoted saw of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true?” It’s cited out of context all the time as a pearl of genuine wisdom, but in the playing it’s traditionally rendered just one of the many aphorisms spouted by an old gas bag. Here, after Mr. Calder says it, he falls into silence, with an expression on his face that is close to shame. It as if Polonius has fully heard what he is saying and realizes how untrue he has been to his own self, in acting as the usurping Claudius’s right hand (and spy). And with that one sentence, or the pause thereafter, a fatuous fool suddenly registers as a figure of pained self-awareness.
And that’s part of the reason why we (or at least I) keep going back to see plays we think we know all too well: the possibility that those same old “words, words, words” will assume new meaning. I have experienced such moments with other Hamlets, too (including Simon Russell Beale and Mark Rylance). And I have been startled by revelatory readings from Rebecca Hall as Rosalind in “As You Like It” (saying, among other things, “I am falser than vows made in wine”) and Patrick Stewart doing “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” in “Macbeth.”
I might also mention Cate Blanchett reinventing the single word “Eureka” as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” or Kathleen Turner pronouncing “abandoned” as Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But I’m going to stop rummaging through my memory and ask you to look into yours. Have there have been instances where you feel as if you’ve heard for the first time a familiar line or phrase or even single word, thanks to a performer’s unexpected interpretation?
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