To be or not to be...

[fajrdrako]

I saw Hamlet at the National Arts Centre today. How I love that play. It strikes me as exciting and wonderful - it draws me in every time I see it. (Except for the really bad productions!) It pushes every Romantic button I have - my love of heightened drama and poetry and swordplay and attractive men in Elizabeth boots. Men who play Hamlet are always attractive. I can't think how they do it, but they do. Hamlet is as sexy as Bruce Wayne is.

Hamlet in this case was played by Tom Rooney, whom I have only seen once before - also at the NAC - in A Winter's Tale, in which he played the sexy-but-sinister duke. His Hamlet was edgy and angry, very full of motion, very expressive. Good moments:

• at the end of the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude, after his anger and passion on haranguing his mother and seeing the ghost of his father, Hamlet lay his head in his mother's lap and wept. Then the conversation about him going to England was low-key and sweet, a nice contrast.



• Great costuming. It looked like late 16th century costume until you looked closely and saw that it really wasn't - there were distinct oddities. Hamlet of course was in black, with a white shirt; most of the cast was in subdued colours; but Gertrude and Claudius wore bright reds, oranges, yellows and greens. Ophelia wore a cream-coloured gown till she went mad, when she wore white. My favourite of the costumes was Hamlet's travelling coat, a long coat like a trench coat but with a square Renaissance-type square fur collar.



• Ophelia was young and bright and pretty and very, very good - most touching in the mad scenes. (The actress was named Michelle Monteith.) At times, I found her voice very ugly.



• Horatio, sadly, wasn't so attractive, at least, not to me. But from time to time the two actors' looks and body language, and their lines, made me think of Sam and Frodo.

Why is it I never get tired of this play, however many times I see it?