Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet at The Barbican starring 

Benedict Cumberbatch

My earliest memory is being at the theatre. I remember being captivated by swirling fabric rippling pink, orange and sunset red twisting through the seemingly magic space of the proscenium arch. This was a production of The Mikado at my local theatre, The Everyman in Cheltenham when I was just past two years old. My mother recounts to people to this day how I sat on her lap enthralled at what was happening. She had complained to my father about how inappropriate it was to take a toddler to the theatre but was astounded by my fascination with the stage. Since then I have endeavoured to see as many plays and productions of all sorts; professional and otherwise, as possible. To this day, theatre is my passion.

The NT Live screening I watched on Thursday night  is one of the reasons I love the theatre. This is an impressive production and an interesting adaptation. Of course there was a massive amount of attention directed at Turner's production because of stellar star Benedict Cumberbatch's appearance as Hamlet and unlike The Guardian's reviewer Michael Billington I didn't find the play an anti-climax after the hype (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/25/hamlet-barbican-review-benedict-cumberbatch-imprisoned-prince). Whereas Billington thought that there was too much focus on special effects over textual investigation, I think that the 'visual conceits' highlighted the cast and crew's textual investigation.

This is particularly evident in the final fight scene between Laertes and Hamlet with its explosion of light at the crucial moment and another example of their use of 'slow-mo' very physical acting, which punctuated the performance. The acting really was quite brilliant and while there was concern that Cumberbatch would steal the show, this was not the case as Hamlet's mother played by Anastasia Hille was touchingly maternal whilst yet shown to have been easily manipulated by Ciaran Hinds' Claudius, her new husband and deceased first husband's brother. Hinds' performance is strong and powerful as Hamlet and Hinds' Claudius regularly butt heads. Hinds' Claudius even clearly manipulates Rosencrantz and Gildernstern and is a truly formidable opponent for Hamlet. Ophelia played by Sian Brooke is truly disturbing but not altogether convincing. The role of Ophelia is a gift for an actress as it offers such an opportunity for emotional creativity and artistic licence. Her portrayal of a mental breakdown was moving but it did not feel real and so it rather fell flat. The rest of the supporting cast are strong performers, particularly the Ghost (Karl Johnson).

I was surprised to see the infamous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy moved from the opening as was the case the first night of the premiere. The 'To be or not to be' scene is infamous for wandering. The Second Quarto of 1604 is the closest to the  one we use today and in this edition the scene is moved to Act Three Scene One from Act Two immediately after Polonius has set up the 'accidental' meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia to test his theory to Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet's madness was a result of his love for Ophelia. Having this transient scene move to the opening for the premiere was to get 'it' out of the way so that the audience could get past their excitement regarding Cumberbatch's appearance and then the rest of the play could commence but the backlash saw it quickly move back to its 'original' setting of Act Three Scene One (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/hamlet-solioquy-moved-back-after-backlash/).

I loved seeing this change, it's part of the joy going to see a production of any Shakeaspeare play for me. I love the omissions, alterations, insertions of invented characters or scenes. Shakespeare is the writer with whom the most artistic licence is possible because there are no lasting manuscripts that we know of written by him and because of the number of versions of the same play, such as Hamlet, which has a First Quarto (1603), Second Quarto (1604) and First Folio (1623). As such the joy of Shalespeare lies in its possibilities and Lyndsey Turner does everything possible with her Hamlet, flooding the stage with a hurricane of leaves, having Hamlet fire shits at the court from a toy fortress dressed up a soldier, the grim fairylike military palatial stronghold that they live in, Karl Johnson's comic, extremely uncouth gravedigger and the visualised corruption taking over the court in the second half with soil filling the rooms and corridors.

Turner's production with all its hype and expectation is as impressive as it was expected to be and the buzz will continue with NT Live encore screenings starting on 22nd October and the run ending on October 31st. If you haven't seen it already them definitely join in with the positively festive atmosphere at your local cinema where 5 year olds and 95 year olds alike sit with mouths agape captivated at the screen.

Votes for Women!

Blog Review of Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette

There are so many ‘feminist’ films and they all look at a wide range of women’s experiences, from motherhood, marriage, careers, sisterhood and also coming of age. Very few, however,  have charted the history of women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote, especially the events preceding the outbreak of the First World War. Emily Wilding Davison’s arguably heroic or insane act of throwing herself at the King’s horse during the race on Derby Day in June 1913 has been the subject of many documentaries, most recently by Claire Baldwin for Channel 4. But in Sarah Gavron's Suffragette it is central to the story and is shown through the eyes of poor, manipulated, working-class Maud Watts from London. It is her realisation of the importance of the right to vote and what that meant to women of all classes that is the heartbeat of the film. Gavron said that she had wanted to show the unsung working class heroes who had campaigned for the right to vote as the attention has usually been on the aristocratic or middle- to upper-class women in previous films. These working class women’s rights pioneers had so much more to lose than their more affluent counterparts. They already struggled to earn enough money to scrape by, with hard times and the possibility of starvation or living on the streets a very real, very near possibility. So to take on an additional risk that pushed those possibilities even closer to fruition shows how much they cared for and understood the significance of what they were asking for. Women who were publicly known to support the cause and be involved in the public demonstrations were shunned by society and even lost their jobs. The jobs that just about kept a leaky roof over their head and a stale crust of bread in the kitchen.

Maud (Carey Mulligan) experiences these eventualities but does not admit defeat. Her husband (Ben Whishaw) seemingly caring at first, has no sympathy or understanding of why women need the vote and turns out to be very impressionable to other people’s opinions. As such, he is the one who really breaks Maud’s heart. The relationships between men and women are not as often featured in the film as the relationships between women for obvious reasons, but when they are shown they are presented as relationships of heavy disparity between their positions in society both legally and physically. This highlights the real reason behind women's desire for the right to vote. It didn't just give them the right to expression and a right to have a say in electing political leaders, it meant that it would have been legally recognised that women had a different opinion and a voice entirely different to the men surrounding them. As such, it would also have meant that they were entirely separate beings from the men that they lived with and who controlled their lives. It was only in 1870 that the Married Women's Property Act ended the previously existing condition that on marriage any property, money, or more widely anything owned by a woman, earned or inherited, before or after the marriage became the husband's to dispose of, sell, keep as he saw fit. This included children; the father could do with them as he saw fit including preventing any access to the children from the mother.

Women's rights were slowly increasing through the nineteenth-century due to campaigners like Caroline Norton  and Josephine Butler  and so by 1912 the fact that women still did not have the vote despite over a hundred years of attention being brought to the fact that women were equal in every way really rankled. The Suffragists had been the first party to form and start raising public awareness to the issue but they used just their voices and their pens, dissatisfaction at the pace that this seemingly 'got things done' led to the break off movement of the Suffragettes. They were a more militant group who felt that enough talking had been done and that it was time to take action. They argued that because men were the ones who had been stereotypically seen as the gender capable of violence, that men would only respond to violent acts. They set about smashing windows, blowing up letter boxes and even bombing MPs homes. These are all documented in the film but what the film does not say is that these acts actually slowed down the process of passing the bill giving women the right to vote. For the men in power it was another reason to be used to argue that women were not capable of voting, they were too emotional, too hasty, too reckless, they needed men to control them. It was only in 1928 that women finally had the same voting rights as men despite the fact that in 1911 and 1912 there were many men in parliament who were actively supporting the women's movement. Interestingly Winston Churchill, Britain's hero, was not one of that number. He famously said

The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by fathers, brothers, and husbands.


This attitude is the one carried through the film (the quotation is even delivered at one point early on) and it is this belief that the women are trying to desperately overturn with their increasingly extreme actions.

The film features a truly star studded cast including Meryl Streep, Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai. It is superbly performed and poignantly written. It is. It's definitely the film to watch this autumn. It is also a must watch for everyone being categorically universal and extremely relevant due to many of the themes being as relevant today as they were in the 1910s. Such as:



1. Due to the gap in pay, women essentially work for free for 57 days a year  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/equal-pay-day-women-now-working-for-free-for-the-rest-of-the-year-9837965.html
2. UKIP have been connected with proclaiming  wide range of anti-feminist messages. Here's a link to just a snapshot of some of their statements:  http://leftfootforward.org/2014/05/15-reasons-women-shouldnt-vote-for-ukip/
3. Malala Yousafzai is drawing attention to women's rights to the same level of education as men in Pakistan
4. In the UK, the Home Office has estimated that there are 170,000 girls and women who are survivors of the practice and that there are another 65,000 girls under the age of 13 still at risk
5. 77% of Britain's MPs are men - nuff said!
6. 80% of university professors are men (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/15/gender-inequality-uk-women-feminism-young-foundation_n_7800388.html)
7. 80% of women are still doing more housework than their partners, invariably on top of working and childcare  (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
8. 89% of the accounts of domestic violence have female victims (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
9. Tim Hunt's outrageous comment regarding women in the lab (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-33099289)
10. Women are more likely to be victims of trolling   (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/15/dealing-with-trolls-make-young-women-sympathetic-hillary)

BBC's Lady Chatterley’s Lover review: A Lacklustre Reimagining of Lust and Love Across the Edwardian Classes

Mellors (Richard Madden) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger)

Jed Mercurio’s adaptation is so loose that it's really just a reimagining of D.H. Lawrence’s passionate, heated, earthy love story.  Mercurio has missed the mark on hitting the right fever pitch of emotion on so many occasions in this adaptation. The chemistry and fraught sexual tension between Lady Chatterley and Mellors just isn't achieved. The love story is certainly there but it simply doesn't capture the bestial nature of Lawrence’s presentation of their class defying relationship.

One of the real reasons for the book’s ban was the public’s disgust at Lady Chatterley’s relationship with the groundskeeper Mellors. It was considered to be extremely shocking for an aristocratic lady to be sexual attracted to and fall in love with a very lowly member of the working classes at that time. For over a hundred years the espoused images of femininity did not include having any sexual energy. It was commonly accepted that women did not experience sexual desire by doctors all over the world. Women who did experience this desire during the Victorian period could be diagnosed as mad and many unfortunate women were ‘treated’ for this disorder by having a clitirodectomy (surgical removal of the clitoris). The Edwardian period (the book was published in 1928 but is sent in the last years of the Edwardian era) was just beginning to move away from this belief but the strict class and racial barriers remained firmly in place, therefore it was permissible for a woman to experience desire but that would only  be for her husband, i.e., her social equal. Lust, or love, over the class barriers was considered perverse and was a transgression of the accepted hierarchy that kept the status quo of British middle- and upper-class power in place. It threatened the core of society and terrified the upper echelons. The Obscenity Ban on the book was really nothing to do with the florid language used by Lawrence. As such, that Mercurio fails to convey this integral theme is a massive failing in his retelling of the novel. It is the theme that the whole novel hinges on.

The issue with adapting a novel, or any story, is how to make it relevant to the audience today. Admittedly you could argue that Britain no longer permeates the same bizarre notions of female sexlessness, so retaining this theme would be meaningless for a contemporary audience but the lack of class mobility in this country still remains; Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world

(http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-mobility-data-charts). Anyone watching this adaptation, or reading the original novel, today would be able to relate to this feeling of entrapment.

The approach to the story that Mercurio has taken instead is to focus on the backstory of the characters. This worked well, making all of the characters relatable, especially Sir Clifford Chatterley (James Norton) whose struggles to come to terms with his disability are so poignant that they hit the very heart of the viewer. With the insertion of the invented scenes such as the opening with the explosion in the coal mine and the trench scene where we learn that in Mercurio’s adaptation, Mellors not only saves Sir Clifford’s life and also leads the charge over to the top into No Man’s Land that Sir Clifford should have done had he not been shot.

Mellors (Richard Madden) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger) are amiably performed but as I said the lustful magic just isn't there. The love story between them is evident, enforced by the adaptation’s conclusion where they waltz off into the sunset with each other after negotiating an agreement to divorce out of Sir Clifford. This dramatically opposes the ending of the original story. Mellors is still married to his wife Bertha (remember that woman who was flashing her naked bosom up against the window when Mellors returned from war at the beginning of the drama? Well, that was her!). He has to have his divorce from her granted so goes alone to work on a farm whilst he waits and Lady Chatterley goes to live with her sister until her divorce from Clifford is granted. Ultimately the novel ends on a massive cliffhanger, suggesting that while both of these “star-cross’d lovers” have the desire to oppose the accepted class barriers by being together, the system is too strong to break. There is hope, but it is very uncertain.

There are other crucial changes that Mercurio makes but they don't impact too much on the transplanting of the essence of the original story. The omission of some of the more marginal, but nonetheless important, characters, like Bertha Mellors is the most dramatic change but the trouble she wreaks in the novel is carried out by the Chatterley’s servant, Bolton instead.

Overall, it was a great night’s viewing but it's not a great adaptation. Mercurio does however show how much flexibility there is with adaptation as a genre. It's just a pity that he was so close to creating an extraordinary adaptation. It could have been up there with the likes of Andrew Davies’ 1995 Pride and Prejudice. In fact, I think a good adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover could become even more of a cultural phenomenon than Davies’ Pride and Prejudice because Lawrence is writing is so much more intimate, personal and emotive than Austen’s.