Trouble brewing at Theatre For a New Audience — Page 2

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#26

Trouble brewing at Theatre For a New Audience

Posted: 7/15/16 at 12:26am

RippedMan said: "What's the difference between adaptation and cuts? Adaptation means, to me, that they're going to rewrite a few lines, which with Shakespeare, seems just wrong and weird. "

Cuts means deleting words, lines, scenes. (This is virtually always done with Shakespeare, and especially with Hamlet.)

Adaptation means taking one thing and using it as a base for making something else. This can be minor to extreme. Shakespeare has probably been adapted more than any playwright in history, and some of those adaptations are among the major masterworks of our theatre. (e.g., West Side Story) The last SITP, Shrew, was an adaptation.

#27

Trouble brewing at Theatre For a New Audience

Posted: 7/15/16 at 2:44am

newintown said: "
But seeing the play as written (or what we call "as written" ), one notices that Laertes and Fortinbras have much more important roles than we usually get to see; all three are in similar circumstances, with murdered fathers and an obligation to avenge them, and all three respond differently. Who wins, ultimately? Fortinbras. And there's a reason why.

"

I believe it was Adam Long, of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who broke this down as the Three Stooges theory of Hamlet - Hamlet/Moe, the Man of all thought and no action (the thinking Man's stooge), Laertes/Curly, All action and no thought, and Fortinbras/Larry, the middle of the road stooge who rarely gets anything worse than getting his hair pulled. And thus ends my extremely helpful addition to this conversation. :)

In all seriousness, I do feel that Hamlet is one of the rare shakespeare plays that is better the less it is cut. There's very little you can cut without damaging the audience's understanding of who the characters are - Claudius, especially, seems to suffer if you remove even the most long-winded passages of the Fortinbras subplot. Kenneth Branagh was onto something with his uncut (if overblown) film version - the details emerge in very sharp relief.

Updated On: 7/15/16 at 02:44 AM

#28

Trouble brewing at Theatre For a New Audience

Posted: 7/15/16 at 9:07am

ChairinMain said: In all seriousness, I do feel that Hamlet is one of the rare shakespeare plays that is better the less it is cut. There's very little you can cut without damaging the audience's understanding of who the characters are - Claudius, especially, seems to suffer if you remove even the most long-winded passages of the Fortinbras subplot. Kenneth Branagh was onto something with his uncut (if overblown) film version - the details emerge in very sharp relief. "

I think there is plenty that is cut-able without damaging the Fortinbras subplot. Most familiar cuts, however, eviscerate it.

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