Hamlet starring Jude Law

I went to see a production of Hamlet starring Jude Law this evening. It was three hours and ten minutes long with one intermission. Which, when your day started at 645am with a visit to the gym (look how I make myself seem virtuous and industrious!) means that your eyes are closing circa the beginning of, oh, Acts 1, 2, 3, etc. means that you just want to yell at the stage saying, "To be or not to be/ That is the question," and "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" and "Get a move on it."

Which is probably not the best frame of mind, all things considered.

I didn't love the production. I think there are two big reasons why. First, when I watch Shakespearean plays, I'm acutely aware that I'm not watching something that is supposed to be a representation of what's real in the world as I know it. In other words, I'm watching the play to fall in love with the complexity of emotions, the imagined situation and circumstance, the way with words. But I am well aware that the play is not my life because, well, it's set a long time ago and, more significantly, the actors speak in Shakespearean verse. So it's very hard for me to lose myself in such a production. It's all artificial to me.

Second, the character of Hamlet is hard to execute. This is a guy that is going increasingly mad as the play progresses. And it's hard to depict mad. Rather, it's hard to depict mad in a natural way. I could see Jude Law trying to be mad. I could see him hunching over, I could see him twitching, I could hear him modulating his voice from really loud to really soft, I could see him be physical with characters in a sort of flamboyant, uncontrolled way . . . and all I could think was, oh, this is you depicting the descent into madness. Which did not please me. I wanted to see mad as mad, not what it was like to be mad.

I think Ophelia completely sucked. I mean, I haven't seen a production of Hamlet before, but in my mind, when I read the play in high school, I Imagined Ophelia as a character with great, great emotional range. Not so much this actress.

Overall review: Glad I went because it's good to do New York things when in New York. And, you know, it's good to watch plays about a young man going mad because he thinks that his mother might have had something to do with murdering his father and then God forbid it but she married his father's brother, and then a young lady go mad (eventually killing herself) because her father was killed accidentally by the man she happens to love. It's like, Oh you get me and you know what my life is like.