Hamlet (2010), Royal Shakespeare Company

If nothing else the Royal Shakespeare Company's latest production of Hamlet, broadcast in the US on PBS, has finally given me an appreciation for Mel Gibson. Two decades back Gibson channeled Martin Riggs in his unfortunate attempt at tackling Shakespeare's knotty title role. I thought casting an in-over-his-head and long-in-the-tooth Road Warrior as the wacky but lovable Danish prince was a screwy idea, but credit where credit is due. The 1990 Gibson film version of Hamlet looks like...well, Shakespeare next to this latest filmed adaptation of the written word's most famous tragedy.

Let's get right to the heart of the mess, Hamlet himself, David Tennant. Good Lord, who is this gangly freak and why is he bugging his eyes out all over my TV screen? Apparently -- and appallingly -- he's received praise for this performance. (I suspect I know why, but more on that later.) Please, people, don't encourage a guy whose acting Jerry Lewis would insist needs to be taken down a few thousand notches.

I've seen David Tennant "act" exactly one time before in a bit part in a Harry Potter movie, and he was over the top there too. Let that sink in for a moment: This guy was over the top in a Harry Potter movie. Yet someone somewhere for some unfathomable reason thought it was a good idea to cast him as the lead in a Shakespearean play. Next season, the Royal Shakespeare Company Proudly Presents Gary Coleman as Othello!

As a play Hamlet succeeds only if the guy playing the eponymous prince can pull off his whole "to be or not to be" shtick. Tennant isn't up to it -- not by a longshot -- and with his utter failure the entire production collapses.

Hamlet's first soliloquy takes place fairly early in the play -- the "O, that this too, too sullied flesh should melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew" one. I don't know who is to blame -- Tennant or director Gregory Doran -- but some simpleton decided that it'd be a boffo idea for the actor to play the scene squatting on his haunches in the middle of the floor. This is more or less our introduction to Hamlet, at least our intro to what's rattling around inside his head, and Hamlet delivers the soliloquy squatting on the floor like he's a naughty dog about to make a mess on Elsinore's best carpet. And it's all downhill from there.

Maybe Tennant is a good actor in the right role. I understand fans liked him in the role of Dr. Who, so maybe he should stick to flying around outer space in telephone booths and leave roles that require subtlety and discernible talent to people who don't look like the creepy gas station attendant who passes you the men's room key attached to a cinderblock. Creepy, Tennant fails to realize, isn't synonymous with crazy. Not that I don't realize he was probably shooting for crazy, but on him crazy wears like creepy. He jumps around a lot. He bugs out those googly-woogly eyes at everyone. He rolls around on the floor. But he's more like a carnival barker or that guy who sells ShamWow! on TV than a real actor.

And Tennant is not the only thing wrong with this production. Yes, the play sinks or swims depending on who is playing Hamlet, but even with a competent actor in the lead this production might have failed anyway. Like last year's weirdly updated Royal Shakespeare Company version of King Lear, this Hamlet has been ridiculously modernized. Instead of tights we get business suits, instead of swords we get guns. Mostly guns. Although sometimes swords too, 'cause you can't stage the climactic sword fight with a poisoned bullet. There are videocameras hidden all over Elsinore to pick up the action we're witnessing, and we are given occasional glimpses from their black and white perspective. Sometimes Hamlet talks to them, sometimes he rips them down and smashes them. (Had Hamlet only smashed the BBC cameras that were recording actor David Tenant as he twisted his mouth like a stroke victim and jammed his eyes out at me I would have been spared this awful production.)

Crossword puzzle enthusiasts will be upset to learn that there is not an arras to be seen, so Dr. Whomlet doesn't jab a sword through the tapestry in his mother's bedroom, harpooning hapless Polonius who is hiding on the other side. This Hamlet instead grabs a pistol from his mom's night stand and blasts away a la Dirty Harry. Instead of an arras, Polonius is lurking on the other side of a mirror and although the bullet cracks the mirror the broken pieces remain stuck fast to the mirror's frame. Thereafter, the cracked mirror shows up in the background of every scene. No, this is not a joke; yes, this Hamlet has the depth of a junior high school girl doodling "Ashley 'N' Laertes 4 Ever!" in the margins of her Playbill. See, everyone who looks into or is reflected in the mirror is shattered into a hundred broken images. Wow. Isn't that something? Isn't that just super-clever? As the hippies said of Herman Munster, "Man that cat is deep."

One is left wondering at what audience this Hamlet was directed. Those of us who actually enjoy Shakespeare and expect his plays to be staged as appropriate period pieces sure wouldn't like it. If the theory goes that modernizing the sets and props (but not the dialogue) will bring in the audience that makes Avatar and Dancing With the Stars hits, that sure ain't happening. There can only be one crowd for whom this kind of affected, self-conscious Shakespeare is made, and that's the Frasier and Niles Cranes of the world. Pretentious snoots, professional apple polishers, poseurs, bores and New York Times reviewers. So to those of you who pretend to like this crap from those of us who actually enjoy Shakespeare as it's supposed to be, I say, feh.

There's not much more that can be written about this dreadful production except to say that I'm forced to eat a little bit of crow. The play also stars Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father. I've always found Stewart to be a big stinky ham of a blowhard actor. When he's kept on a short leash he can be competent in a by-the-numbers way, but when he's allowed to spread his ACK-TOR-LY wings he makes Mr. T look like Lawrence Olivier. So the biggest surprise was that Captain Jean Luc Picard actually is not terrible in this play. If not for the fact that he was playing against a simply dreadful Hamlet in Tennant, he might actually have been very good. Unfortunately for the actors as well as those of us in the viewing audience, we will likely never know how good Professor X could be if only he shared the stage with a competent Danish prince in a traditional production of Hamlet.

If there is something rotten in the state of Denmark (you knew I wouldn't resist the cliche forever) it's not just the dump Hamlet took on the carpet in the first act it's this fecal version of what, despite David Tennant's and the Royal Shakespeare Company's best efforts, is still my third favorite Shakespeare play.

The Film Cricket