Ato Blankson-Wood Performs Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" | Hamlet | Broadway's Best | GP on PBS
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- Ato Blankson-Wood performs Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy during the Public Theater's production.
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#AtoBlanksonwood #Shakespeare #Hamlet
I knew him maaaannny years ago when we were kids! Congratulations Ato! So proud of you! Such an amazing achievement! Wonderful performance 👏 👏 👏 🎉🎉🎉
Great performance. Thank you.
BRAVO 👏👏👏👏
He's a talented performer, but I don't really like this interpretation of the soliloquy. The way it's delivered here makes it quite difficult to follow the actual questions Hamlet is grappling with. For instance, 1:39 is this passage:
"...and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?..."
He performs this as if it's one isolated logical construction, but those "spurns" are a part of the list that precedes it, and the "when... bodkin" section is an answer to _the whole list,_ not just this one element. He also goes through it so quickly, that the importance of those last two lines gets kind of buried in the rest of his phrasing. The whole question should really be "here is a whole long list of burdens," but "here is a quick and 'easy' way out of them--see how simple it is? Why wouldn't you take it?" The "way out" should have equal grammatic weight to its counterpart--the entire list of burdens.
I think the entire next section (1:49) after that is very muddy, too.
The passage:
"...Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"
I think the part, "But that... puzzles the will," in particular gets kind of lost in the emotionality of the presentation. This is supposed to be the "aha!" moment, where we finally understand the answer to the _"why"_ question he is asking in the previous section, "why wouldn't you take the 'easy' way out?" But in the way it's performed here, he's not really coming to an understanding, he's having an emotional breakdown, choking out the lines between breaths. We, the audience, aren't given the emotional space to understand that the answer to that question is, the "quick and 'easy' way" really is not that easy, no matter how comforting or alluring it looks. That message is too disguised by the emotion of the performer.
It's kind of funny, because the way Mr. Blankson-Wood does it here is kind of a 4th wall break, which this soliloquy doesn't necessarily need to be. 4th wall breaks usually bring you into the headspace of the character, but ironically, I feel like this one actually drives a bit of a wedge between the character and the audience. We are made to feel sympathetic instead of empathetic to his plight, because we _see_ his reaction, instead of _understanding_ his conundrum.
I don't think it's impossible, or wrong, to perform this soliloquy with a lot of emotion, but I do think it's quite difficult, because the text really suggests a more introspective, intellectual contemplation on the nature of s*c*de than an emotional climax of how the preceding events have nearly pushed Hamlet over the edge. A good, emotion-driven performance should still be able to get the text across to the audience clearly.
Anyway, that's a lot to say that I think this needs some tweaking.
Do you have a favorite version of this? The way you broke this down was very interesting to me and I would love to compare.
This is Great Performances, yet there's merrit, in it! Why so few feathers, of a soft reply?😞.