1981 February 9
London
Actor

One is so aware of the size of the play [Hamlet] and the significance of the role, it's like a silhouette that you get to step into. And you're aware of the famous speeches and you're aware of the number of the things that were coined in the English language in that play. And then when you approach playing it, you have to meet the play head on and confront it. And then you realize the story of the play, the play itself, is such a great thriller.

There's a refrain in Cymbeline in another funeral scene ..

.. and there's a kind of beautiful meditative resignation that encountering the inevitability of death there's an instigation of life. Some relationship with death that is peaceful makes you feel more alive.

All you have to do really is try and align yourself on [Shakespeare's] perspective on being alive: the crazy things we do. And we fall in love, we fall out of love, and we get in our own way. And we get jealous, and we get proud. And we're funny and we're tragic. And Shakespeare's got the most forensic and compassionate angle on that. The camera can be very intimate with an actor's face so there's more opportunity to play against the text or to play alongside it, so you can play with the possibility of subtext: ya know the flick of an eye, the curl of a lip can say as much as a line, but actually it's all in the text. Shakespeare had it down, as long as you speak it. How do you say it? Speake þe Speech, trippingly on þe Tongue, don't saw þe Ayre. Hamlet's speech to the Players (in Hamlet) is the best sort of paragraph of acting notes you could possibly hope for.

Associated Plays: