Are you a scifi+ Shakespeare dork?
I just found out that the stage version of Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart has been made into a film, and it will air on BBC 2 on December 26th. The BBC has the info (look to the right, fourth panel down). I hope they come out with it on BBC America, or Blu-ray! I wish I could’ve seen the stage version (oh, outrageous fortune! — but we all suffer slings and arrows sometimes) but this’ll do in its stead.
Still, I’ll always like the Harold Hecuba interpretation the best.
Tip o’ Yorick’s skull to John Ellis.
December 5th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I had the fortune to go to England to see this production in November of last year, and it was fantastic. Stewart and Tennant are both phenomenal actors, and watching work them together made for one of the most powerful stage experiences of my life. Seeing Captain Picard and the 10th Doctor in person knocked a couple of items off of the bucket list too!
December 5th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Awsome, can’t wait!
If you want to watch another cool movie with David Tennant, you’ve got to see “Einstein and Eddington” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995036/
December 5th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
December 5th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I will be in the UK — Stratford-upon-Avon no less — on Boxing Day. I think I know what I will be doing that evening. I will be with my parents, who have seen the live stage production, and are the biggest David Tennant fans. He won them over when they met him during a theatre event about 10 years ago. It also helps that they are lifelong Doctor Who fans.
December 5th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
you only just found this out ? where have you been ? John Wyver from Illuminations, the company that did the filming, blogged/tweeted the entire production in June. You should go find their website and read the whole 18 days worth of entries. It was fantastic!
December 5th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
How did I not know about this? !
December 5th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I believe that this Hamlet is going to air on PBS sometime in 2010 (exact date not known)
December 5th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I’m definitely going to watch this! One of the advantages of living in Belgium is being able to watch the BBC…
December 5th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
You can’t appreciate Shakespeare until you’ve read him in the original Gallifreyan…
December 5th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
DVD will be good enough for me (as I don’t have a Blu-Ray player, and not planning on getting one).
Come on BBC, get this to the US!
I do believe the only version of Hamlet I’ve made it through was the version that was featured on season 10 of MST3k.
December 5th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Blu-ray? I thought you had a mac…..
December 5th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
I believe that ‘Hamlet’ will air in the states early in January, and will be available on DVD shortly thereafter
December 5th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
I live in the UK, and this US-based blog is fast becoming my go-to site for interesting UK television. (plus astronomy)
Thanks, Phil!
December 5th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Here’s a fun story about Tennant’s Hamlet (the stage version):
Bequeathed skull stars in Hamlet
The skull held aloft by actor David Tennant in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet was a real one, it has been revealed.
Pianist Andre Tchaikowsky left his skull to the RSC when he died in 1982 in the hope it would be used on stage.
But since his death at the age of 46, it had only been used in rehearsals.
Tennant held it on stage during the famous “Alas, poor Yorick” scene in 22 performances at the Courtyard Theatre, in Stratford-upon-Avon.
December 5th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
*singing* Hamlet, dear, your problem is clear, avenging your father’s death
You seek to harm your uncle and mom, but you’re scaring me to death!
I’m not sure what’s scarier, that I know who Harold Hecuba is, or that I remember the words to those songs.
And that the Tennant/Stewart Hamlet will be aired is great news.
December 5th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I saw the Production in Stratford-upon-Avon and I also thought it was incredibly good. I read somewhere that when it’s on PBS it will be an episode of Great Performances. Cannot wait to get my hands on the DVD.
December 5th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
At least you got to meet Tennant at SDCC! I’m still totally jealous of that.
December 5th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Roger and Maura, I can confirm that the Tennant Hamlet will be on PBS in 2010. It’s on the Website. Tennant will also be hosting Masterpiece Contemporary, taking the reigns from Alan Cumming.
December 6th, 2009 at 12:39 am
That’s interesting. I guess since he will be in the US anyway next year, attempting to follow in the footsteps of Hugh Laurie by breaking into network television, he might as well stop in to a PBS studio somewhere on occasion.
December 6th, 2009 at 12:41 am
I was so jealous of everyone in the UK when Tennant and Stewart were doing Hamlet. Hamlet is my favourite Shakespeare tragedy and I have always wanted to see Patrick Stewart doing Shakespeare.
I am hoping the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp) will pick this one up and soon.
December 6th, 2009 at 3:47 am
Tennant and Stewart — excellent. “Hamlet” — fabulous.
But why is David dressed as a dustman, or as an Aussie friend would put it, “a garbo”? What a shame…
December 6th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Can’t wait to see this when it comes to the States and yes, I will get the blu-ray and the DVD! If he’d brought it to Broadway, I would have gone to see it–I just could not get over to see him in London. It would be wonderful if some of David’s other Shakespeare roles were put on film, especially Much Ado About Nothing and The Comedy of Errors–He was brilliant in these audio recordings.
btw–I think that Alan Cumming is the Masterpiece Mystery Host. David Tennant was only the host for the Masterpiece Contemporary films. He took over for someone but I can’t recall the actor’s name.
December 6th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Saw this production in London on its last night. Incredible show, well worth flying over to see — and not just for David Tennant who was an amazing Hamlet. This was a magnificent *ensemble*, which is not a word one normally associates with that play. And, yes, it’s coming to PBS at some point next year as part of the “Great Performances” series (WGBH Boston provided some of the funding, along with a Japanese network), most likely in spring. Also, for those who have region free DVD players, it is coming out on DVD in the UK January 4, 2010 (my copy is already on order from the RSC).
@Chris Hughes — he’s dressed like a dustman because Hamlet’s been making his way back from England.
Also, Illuminations is currently filming the Chichester Festival production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart. This is the one that played New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and garnered Stewart a Tony nomination.
Am I eager to see Hamlet again? You bet!
December 6th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
@Adrian
Good call on Einstein and Eddington! Not only is Tennant brilliant to watch (as always) as Eddington, but Andy Serkis is inspired as Einstein, a real tour-de-force. If that wasn’t enough, the story material is fascinating for anyone with even a vaguely sciencey bent!
Speaking of TV adaptations of romanticized stories from science, my all time favourite has to be “Longitude”. The book received a lot of press when it was published in 1995, and in 1999 it was turned into a TV film broken into three one hour long parts for serial broadcast on Channel 4 (in the UK). I mention this for two reasons; firstly, it stars Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons (in my opinion two of the finest British actors around today), and secondly because of the science. The story is absolutely magnificent, and if you don’t know it I beg you find out about it because very few stories of scientific advance moved me as much. If you can’t find the film, and don’t want to read the book I suggest at least checking out John Harrison’s page on wikipedia, a wonderful example of someone devoting an entire life’s work to solving a scientific problem (in this case, the problem of calculating a ship’s longitude at sea).
Links
TV film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/
John Harrison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison
More on topic, being a Londoner I had the good fortune to see Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen in a stage production of “Waiting for Godot”. The pair of them are spectacular stage actors, experiencing how they hold presence on stage is something that can’t be replicated on the big screen (although televising the stage performance here might do it some justice).
And from a nerd point of view it was hilarious to see Dr X. & Magneto (Or Picard & Gandalf) on stage as two bumbling senile old codgers was hilarious, and it turned out to be a wonderfully enjoyable production as well, double whammy!
December 6th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Damn, for a second there I thought that was Bruce Campbell doing Hamlet. But that would be a treat for horror geeks, not scifi dorks.
December 7th, 2009 at 2:19 am
I did get to see this production live at Stratford and just to be absolutely clear, it’s way better than you expect. And you probably have high expectations.
December 7th, 2009 at 3:25 am
My fiancée and her mum saw Patrick Stewart in The Tempest a year or so ago. He was, by all accounts, brilliant.
Me, the only Shogspar* I’ve seen performed live was some bloke called Kenneth Branagh doing Henry V.
* Historic footnote: this is not a spelling that was used by Will Shakespeare himself, but it is known that he never spelled his name the same way twice (well, from surviving documents with his signature on, anyway). Given the variations in spelling that were around at the time, this is likely to have been a legitimate variant.
December 7th, 2009 at 11:11 am
The Tennant/Stewart version of Hamlet hits DVD on January 4.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hamlet-DVD-David-Tennant/dp/B002PXHRFQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1260209366&sr=1-1
December 7th, 2009 at 11:47 am
I first saw Tennant in Look Back in Anger some years ago before he had done any telly, so at least I was’t expecting him to whip out a sonic screwdriver! It was slightly odd seeing Stewart in The Master Builder after I had been used to him as Picard.
Anyway, for extra geek points, the production of King Lear that starred Gandalf, whoops I mean Ian McKellen, also had a small part played by a former Doctor Who.
December 7th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Sadly, I don’t get BBC 2 out here in sunny Richland, WA. I’ll definately be looking for it on DVD though.
December 8th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I liked Hamlet when I read it in middle school, but I kinda fell in love with it when one of my astronomy professors pointed me to Peter Usher’s work, in which he argues that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as one big allegory for the ideological struggle between the competing cosmological worldviews in his time–those of Ptolemy (Claudius), Tycho Brahe (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who according to Brahe’s coat of arms, were two of his ancestors), and Thomas Digges (Hamlet), who was a friend of Shakespeare and extended Copernicus’ model by being one of the first to postulate that the universe was infinite (“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king / of infinite space…”).
I guess Usher’s been working on this in various papers and articles for the past 12 years, all of which are here:
http://shakespearedigges.org
December 9th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Read more about the Andre Tchaikowsky skull story on his website. http://andretchaikowsky.com.
February 6th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
FYI the DVD for this is available in the UK. (Region 2!)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hamlet-DVD-David-Tennant/dp/B002PXHRFQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1265497599&sr=8-1
Its going out in the US on pbs sometime
http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/news/20090802_pbsgphamlet.html