http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/11850949/Hamlet/Product.html

That's great! Thanks for the link.

The DVD will also be on sale via the RSC (with limited edition merchandise for pre-orders) and via the filming company, Illuminations.

My money is going to go to one of these two companies who did the deal, and put in the work.

https://www.rsc.org.uk/buyonline/shoponline...x?catcode=63110

question - i'm in the US - can i buy this in the us? and will it play on dvd's players here? thank you

sarita in california

Illuminations, the producers, say that they will release a US version after the US screening which will be later in 2010.

You can read a fascinating blog which includes details about filming if you look at the June entries at www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk

Any news on when it's going to be on TV?

It will be on BBC2 around Christmas, and definitely before the Region 2 dvd is out. Same pattern in the US, it will be shown on PBS at Spring 2010 and they will release the Region 1 dvd immediately afterwards.

Thank you kjb for the link to the RSC site; I've just ordered my copy.

Isis.

I have pre-ordered mine from the RSC. £14.99 is a little more than I like to pay for a DVD, but they lured me in with their offer of free postcards. Damn them. XD

Ditto!

Just in case anyone is reading this who doesn't already know, the release date for the DVD has been put back to 4 Jan 2010.

Why bother? The whole production was vastly over-rated. The best performance was by the Player King.

Probably because, regardless of its quality (I didn't see it), there is a huge audience for it? If this sells well and results in more stage productions being filmed and released on DVD, great!

Those who didn't get to see David will want to buy it. I gather a lot of those who saw David in it want to buy it also. Also, people might get into theatre through this DVD release. 'Vastly overrated' is a bit strong, isn't it? The acting was strong all round and most reviews confirmed this. The arguments seem powerful for why they ARE bothering to release it...

I really enjoyed it...and have very fond memories of it so am looking forward to the DVD.

It's going out on BBC Christmas Day

Christmas Day hasn't actually been confirmed yet.

Although Michael Boyd is reported to have confirmed 25/12 in a newspaper report last week, Greg Doran (Director) and John Wyver (the producer of the film) who have spoken publicly and directly since then, have no knowledge of it being 25/12....just that it will be on 'over Christmas.

I'm glad, as I think 25/12 wouldn't be a good time. And as Greg Doran said at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Sunday ...words to the effect of 'There was some talk of it being on Christmas day but watching Doctor Who in the afternoon, and then turning over to watch the Doctor do Hamlet wouldn't be the best scheduling in the world'

Hmmm let me think! Just one (of many) reasons is that the thousands of people who missed Tennant because of his illness will now have a chance to see his performance. Simples!

Seb

Illuminations has confirmed that it's going out on Boxing Day at 5pm on BBC2.

I have booked the slot on the sofa!

The exact timing is now on the BBC website as 5.05pm-8.10pm:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/...#bbc_two_hamlet

I forgot to book the DVD in time to get the postcards. Words cannot describe how annoyed I am at myself!

So did anyone else watch this? I enjoyed it very much, particularly liked the little camera tricks as I feel it made it more than just a 'play on film'. Thought Patrick Stewart and Oliver Ford Davies were excellent and whilst I did really like David Tennant's Hamlet, I think I might have preferred the broodier Jude Law version.

Law was good but the supporting cast was far less strong than the RSC one. I can hardly remember any of them except the annoyingly bad Laertes.

Seb

Curled up with the cat and a laptop (I don't have a telly) for a very happy boxing day evening with this one. I was prepared to be disappointed (stage to screen rarely works with Shakespeare, I find) but definitely wasn't.

The surveillance stuff went a little OTT at times, but mostly worked well. And his 'to be or not to be' was beautifully restrained.

Agree re the Law version. It was Penelope Wilton who really annoyed me. Wooden. Funnily enough, I saw the mediocre Laertes (Alex Waldmann) in Rope at the Almeida last night - much better in that play.

I thought this telly Hamlet was super. What I enjoyed so much was that it was for the telly and all the views were telly friendly. I loved the observation cameras and the video blog idea that Hamlet had with the camera. I liked Ophelia more here than in 'real life' and I think Polonius earned another accolade - best on telly! And power to Ed who did his Laertes proud. I loved the grave scene and the fact that tv close ups gave us, for example, the expression on Claudius's face at the right moment. V well done.

Of course, I'm still troubled by the absence of Fortinbras at the end, but there you are, can't have everything.

I had always championed Branagh's version which led the way in Hamlet on screen and bravo Branagh for that, but this one tops it.

Please, please can we have more such well thought out tv productions - Simon Russell Beale, anyone?

I seem to have a curse affecting this version of Hamlet. First I missed Tennant by a day when he was off sick for the London run, then I set the DVD recorder to record it boxing day and it doesn't work, then I download it from Iplayer to watch and my computer
decides to crash every half hour or so!

I'm actually scared to buy the DVD in case the building burns down or something....

O M G poor you

Get the DVD, it is really good. And go break a jam jar in the garden to break the curse!

I thought the camera tricks just came across as self-conscious tricks - stage directors generally have no real mastery of TV or film directing, they just copy things that more accomplished directors in those media have done (often decades before). The acting was OK - but if you cast TV stars then that is the least you expect.

Incidentally, did anyone see the exciting "South Bank SHow" with Melvyn Bragg interviewing Michael Boyd in the Ukraine ? No ? Me neither. I suppose that is why they have cancelled this series.

Yes, I did watch the South Bank Show and it was a bit scary. I didn't find out anything about this new Ukrainian playwright or the context in which she is writing nor why Boyd picked her out of a whole world of dramatists. I thought the idea that we should all know about the famine a worthy one, of course but this was going a bit along the path of propaganda drama, ok, using the same concept against the baddies this time but still, scary. Is this what we want the RSC to be doing now? In that lovely new theatre which cost several arms and legs? Hmm at the risk of being branded racist , can't we find a writer in English...ooo sorry it just slipped out.
Bragg was useless...maybe a bit better than...but his in depth questions displayed a thin knowledge of the subject and no real kick in the teeth. Shame really, opportunity lost as usual. Bragg always looked hopeless in the face of real operators, his interview of Billy Joel for example was just a huge plug for the man and had nothing in it that you couldn't read off the back of the packet. We won't miss the show and as he said he will be back with all that 'revisited' tosh.
The bits of the play did not make me feel sad that I had dumped the tickets, having seen The Drunks which was truly awful [ don't argue, you know it was] I was sorry to have missed Kathryn Hunter as I would usually turn out for her to read the proverbial phone directory but I look forward to her Fool anyway.
This was studio theatre albeit with a huge cast [ o what a nice job it looks, all that voice and movement stuff..] and I hope Boyd recovers his commercial instinct and doesn't continue to educate us in the misdemeanors of the Soviet past . Maybe this has got it out of his system and I suppose as he has dragged the RSC out of the doldrums with that year long festival and the Histories, he deserves a little treat for himself.

I didn't see the South Bank Show either but is this the same famine that London theatre-goers do know all about because Tony Harrison took three hours to expound upon it in Fram? Which certainly desn't inspire me to see another play on the same subject.

Over the long decades that the show ran Bragg managed a few good ones about theatre - I recall one long one with Olivier, and one about Peter Hall (rehearsing the McKellen Coriolanus). I have not watched it for years though - I prefer Bragg's other vehicle - "In Our Time" on the wireless (if you avoid the ones on the Lake Poets and similar where Bragg keeps butting in himself, and the ones on science where he never gets beyond repeating the most simple questions due to his own lack of understanding) - there were pretty good ones on Marlowe, and Revenge Tragedy, and King Lear for example (you can download them all from the BBC web site).

People generally seemed to have liked this Hamlet but I found the same problem as I always do with Shakespeare on screen - any screen version, including full-blown films, not just stage-to-screens - i.e., it just doesn't work for me. It never really has, and continues not to. I've found over the years that I have to be in a theatre, or some kind of live setting, with it right there in front of me for it to work at all. I'm not 100% sure why (but have a rough idea), although I can at least say I'm in good company as Peter Hall said the exact same thing during a talk he gave at the NT a few years ago.

You are right.

I wonder what it would look like if they took an entirely opposite approach - make it obvious that it is a stage play that is simply being filmed and do away with all the TV/film trickery, and tacked-on location shooting, trying make it something that it isn't - I'm thinking of the best stage-to-screen version I have ever seen "Vanya on 42nd Street" where it is presented as a filmed rehearsal of the stage play with the director on screen for part of the time - it really is quite brilliant (and of course all quite calculated by a real film director Louis Malle - interesting that a real film director doesn't attempt to make it anything other than a stage play).

Or, even more radically, like Lars von Triers' Dogville, in a rehearsal room with the set marks taped out. Interesting thought - I can imagine that working better for me than a full-on film.

Watching a performance in a mark-up would feel very busman's holiday to me!!

I was slightly bandwidth-limited circumstances in Japan, but by bouncing an iPlayer connection through my home machine to appear UK-based I managed to get a copy onto my iPhone to watch on, of all places, a Shinkansen from Kyoto to Hiroshima. Which seemed somewhat appropriate, somehow.

Anyway, I thought it was competent, perhaps a bit more than competent.

* Compared to sitting in the Courtyard, you're more nervous about laughing at OFD's superb Polonius, because you know what's going to happen to him and you don't have an audience around you to say it's OK.

* Again compared to sitting in a theatre, you lose the energy of Tennant's movement, and indeed you lose that great RSC sense of movement and ensemble that's a hallmark of their better productions.

* Why the RSC is so beholden to Mariah Gale is a total mystery to me. She was clearly out of her depth on stage and is more so on TV. I thought she was an excellent Miranda opposite Sir Patrick, but he was giving her a lot of space; against Stewart at his top game and Tennant's charisma she's hopeless. It's even more obvious on TV than on stage. I have tickets for her thirty year old Juliet, but I can't say I'm enthused, and opposite Katy Stephens (mmm, Katy) in the As You Like It last year she was again blown away.

* It's a shame they couldn't find a way to maintain the tension of where they put the interval.

On the topic of the South Bank Show, I was waiting for a mea culpa from Boyd that at the time the reality of the Ukrainian Famine was being denied, he was working in Moscow being paid by the government doing the denying. There is more joy in heaven, etc, but given his career had a fairly USSRphile basis in the 1980s, his new-found enthusiasm for decrying Stalinist murder perhaps needs a little context. But unlike a lot of people here I thought The Grainstore was excellent. Oliver Ryan talked my 13 year old into talking me into taking her, and I had no expectations beyond having bought the text a few days earlier when we were in for something else, and I was knocked out by it. Someone on my OU course went as well and enjoyed it.

She was particularly well-directed in that - for example did you notice how she was constantly copying Prospero's mannerisms and vocal inflections, just like she would if he had been the only person she had ever seen in her whole life.

No. I didn't notice.

Just to say that read Tennant is off to Hollywood to emulate Hugh Laurie in a legal soap.

Hey ho.

Just curious, why do you say "soap" and not "drama"?

:lol Presumably because a soap is what House is, where the star does the same 3 expressions week after week extremely well (just like in Dr Who actually, though I wouldn't call popular sci-fi a soap). It's only a pilot Lynette, and it has a bloody awful name, so with a bit of luck (for theatre fans, not for DT) it won't be taken up.

I meant a series that goes on and on..exactly like House. Or Friends..til an end comes about. I actually wasn't meaning to be disparaging as House is according to the devotees I know, very good. I sincerely wish him the very best of luck and expect he will do well : we might get him back, after say 17 years, to play the biggies, Macbeth etc..o and a double act Godot with Rory Kinnear..

and just in time to collect his knighthood!

It's neither - my understanding is it's a sitcom. Most US sitcoms don't make the second season. Perhaps this will be the exception though, for the reasons Lynette gives, I hope it isn't.

Actually, it's not a sitcom. Not the 25-30mins studio based format anyway. It's an hourly drama (45mins without the ads) with comedy undertones. Whatever that means. I don't think the survival of dramas to a second year is much better though.



Now that's a depressing thought. Can we negotiate down to a couple of years?

Oh, fame is very ephemeral, in 17 years no-one will remember who he is and no-one will cast him. Maybe, like David Warner, he'll come back and play Falstaff and no-one will know why.

I thought, not having seen him before, that Warner was dreadful as Falstaff in The Histories. I only saw each play once, as part of one of the Glorious Moment weekends (the Stratford `historical order' one), and I thought he just looked exhausted and under-rehearsed. But a friend of mine saw his Hamlet in the late sixties and speaks of it with religious awe, saying that along with the Peter Brook Dream and the Michael Gambon Lear it was one of the finest things she ever saw.

Yes, that was my point really, he was undeniably and sensationally the Hamlet of his generation but his Falstaff, after decades of third-rate Hollywood work, was feeble.

But part of my point was that Patrick Stewart came back after 17 years with a bang. And it will a pity if we have to wait so long for David Tennant. Incidentally it is nice to see for her fans such as I am, that Kelly Reilly is making it in a tv way, the La Plante detective person. La Plante v complimentary towards her in fact. Better than those teeny bit parts in third rate Hollywood movies .