How best to film a stage production? You can, of course, simply have multiple cameras present at a performance as in NT Live. You can recreate the original as in Richard Eyre’s fine film of his Almeida version of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Or you can reimagine the whole thing, as Sean Mathias has done in his film of the Ian McKellen Hamlet first staged at Windsor in 2021. I not only find the film far more cohesive and exciting than the stage production: it also raises big issues about the relationship between theatre and cinema.
Mathias’s method is to film Hamlet in every nook and cranny of the Theatre Royal, Windsor. The one exterior shot shows McKellen roaming round the building as if anxious to be part of the action within: what follows could plausibly be seen as an ageing actor’s dream of once more playing Hamlet. But what really hits you is Mathias’s inventive use of the theatrical space. Hamlet has his own retiring-room complete with exercise bike and foils. Claudius wines and dines Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a hospitality suite. Having publicly mocked Polonius in the theatre foyer, Hamlet, after killing the old man, is held captive in one of the toilets.
