From his first meeting with the ghost onwards, he is profoundly disturbed. 'Tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.

But I thought he was convincing nonetheless, particularly in expressing something that I've found central to my understanding of the play but I all too rarely see dealt with in Hamlet's portrayal, which is this: Hamlet IS quite mad.

And yet if he's portrayed too young, his depth of thought is almost impossibly precocious. He's 30 in the text (this version leaves out that calculation), but that makes some of his relationships (with Ophelia, for instance) seem a little. Mel Gibson was, in my opinion, too old to be Hamlet (making Glenn Close, by extension, too young to be Gertrude), but the issue of Hamlet's age has always been a problem.

And perhaps most importantly, it 'works' in the movie that the director is making. It is original to the movie, and yet the dialogue is still from the play it doesn't misrepresent anything about the characters in its new context. For instance, the little 'prologue' scene showing the internment of the dead king. Zefirelli's adaptations WORK as film-making, without detracting from (or unnecessarily supplementing) Shakespeare's language. Films unfold at a different pace than stage plays. And the use of film rather than stage allows (even necessitates) different types of dramatic development. All productions (except Branagh's) cut certain elements as a sacrifice to tighter (though narrower) focus. And the text per se, of course, will always exist in absolute form despite the number of hands that manipulate it.

I should begin by saying that I approve of ALL interpretations, because each choice reflects different possibilities all of which are supportable by the text no one vision can encompass every potentiality inherent in the play. I'd put off viewing this version of 'Hamlet' for a long time, because I'd heard that they'd turned this most cerebral of plays into an 'action movie', but I ended up quite liking it.

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