After the sob-inducing, multi-Oscar nominated Hamnet, which argues that Shakespeare’s most famous play was inspired by the death of his son, comes Riz Ahmed in the real thing, albeit a Hamlet that has been pared down to less than two hours and with radical changes. Inevitably they are not improvements.
Screenwriter Michael Lesslie has done away with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He has given Ophelia (Morfydd Clark) significant scenes, which gives her more screen time but a sort of “friends-with-benefits”, less well-defined role. Meanwhile, Timothy Spall’s Polonius is more ageing gangster than doting father.
What grips is the setting. We are in London’s hinterlands of roadside verges and building sites. This is the domain of Ahmed’s Hamlet, not a prince but the gilded son of a south Asian family who own a property dynasty called Elsinore. This take begins intriguingly. Hamlet is washing his father’s body as a priest incants the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. This begs the slightly niche question of whether there might one day be a Jewish Hamlet, which of course, there was.
In Bernard Kops’s play The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1959), the patriarch of a Jewish East End family is no Danish royal, but a hypochondriac pickled-herring salesman. It is a Hamlet with more kvetching than killing.
Despite the crossover interests shared between diaspora Jewish and south Asian cultures – family, business, food and graft – Ahmed is much more Shakespeare’s Hamlet than Kops’s, called Davy Levy, was.
Ahmed’s resentful gaze towards his mother and uncle could push doors open so heavy is it with moral judgment. Yet that power does not translate to his voice, which speaks Shakespeare’s language in a husky cracked whisper that is sometimes difficult to understand.
The most notable exception to this is the “To be” speech, which the Sound of Metal star delivers while driving a BMW like a bat out of hell on the wrong side of a fast London road (didn’t know there were any).
This is a watchable but wearying version of Hamlet. Director Aneil Karia uses the quick-cut, hand-held aesthetic that he used to great effect in his film Surge starring Ben Whishaw as another coiled, troubled male. But here the camera is so close to everyone’s face you yearn for a wide shot to let you, and the film, breathe.
This happens belatedly in the play-within-a-play scene performed by a terrifically choreographed Indian dance troupe whose red-painted palms link to depict streams of blood as Claudius (Art Malik) watches in horror while a version of the murder he committed is played out in front of him.
By comparison Hamlet’s climactic confrontations are clumsily handled, as if this BBC Films co-production ran out of budget, time and ideas.
Hamlet
Cert 15
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