Discovering Hamlet: Two of Britain’s Greatest Actors Stage Shakespeare’s Greatest Tragedy.
1990 PBS documentary by Mark Olshaker and Larry Klein, reissued 2011 on DVD by Athena (athenalearning.com) with bonus interviews and cast biographies. $39.99.
Derek Jacobi is King Lear April 28 through June 5 at BAM (http://www.bam.org), in a Michael Grandage production imported from London’s Donmar Warehouse (where its two-month run ended in early February).
It’s an excellent time to check out the newly released DVD of the documentary Discovering Hamlet. The one-hour film, which originally aired on PBS in 1990, chronicles a Hamlet which Jacobi directed for Kenneth Branagh’s fledgling Renaissance Theatre Company.
This is the DVD debut of Discovering Hamlet, and features not only nearly three hours of uncut interviews Jacobi gave for the original documentary but a brand new chat—with the same interviewer, Mark Olshaker—looking back on a project which could easily have (but happened not to) set him on a new career path. At the very outset of the new interview, Jacobi says outright:
For anybody with aspirations to be a classical actor, one of the ways that you are judged, and given a membership card to the classical club, is the Hamlet, what I call the Hamlet hoop you have to jump through. And you are kind of judged on the quality of your Hamlet. And when you get old, as I am rapidly becoming, you have to go through the Lear hope—and I’ve got that coming up shortly. I had thought Hamlet was the most difficult role, but I am now convinced it is most certainly Lear.
In the older footage, he refers to Hamlet as “an actor’s and a director’s nightmare).” More so, one imagines, when one has acted it many times and then chooses it for one’s directorial debut.
The 1988 production starred Branagh (whose Henry V film was released the following year) in a role Jacobi himself had done several times—at the Edinburgh Festival while still a teenager in the mid-1950s (in a production that originated at his boarding school), at Cambridge University, for the Prospect Theatre Company in 1977, on a world tour two years later, and for a BBC TV broadcast in 1980. In a different role in the same play, Jacobi made his London theater debut as Laertes in 1963 at the then-brand-new National Theatre. When Branagh directed and starred in his own Hamlet film in 1996, he cast Jacobi as Claudius.
This was a loaded situation—a new company studded with hot young talent and buffeted by celebrity actors in the directors’ chairs (Judi Dench also directed a Renaissance show that season).
Discovering Hamlet isn’t particularly deep. It’s a mainstream documentary that seems intended for young audiences, trying to stir up a general interest in Shakespeare. The DVD comes with a 12-page “viewer’s guide” that reads like the study guides theaters prepare for school-group audiences. Yet this is nonetheless a distinguished documentary that pauses for important insights into Hamlet from a variety of sources. It’s wonderfully democratic in how it elicits opinions from cast members large and small.
Discovering Hamlet also doesn’t overlook the tension involved in one actor passing on a treasured role to another. That this tension never gets all that taut is immaterial, and a credit to the professionalism of all involved. The fact that Branagh and Jacobi worked together regularly as actors for years afterwards seems a testament to what Olshaker, in James Lipton mode, describes as a lovefest among the actors and directors. Jacobi is shown as an agile, hands-on director who often jumps onstage to physically illustrate what’s he’s after intellectually.
All of Discovering Hamlet’s interview segments show Jacobi to be an actor at heart. But knowing what we know of his career 20 years onward—Cadfael, Breaking the Code, Schiller’s Don Carlos onstage (which he says in the Discovering Hamlet bonus interview was a career highlight), and only recently a return to directing (for the 2007 film The Riddle), narrating kids’ TV shows and recording acclaimed audiobooks of C.S. Lewis and Homer, dozens of movies and TV shows (including Dr. Who!)— adds gravity and mystery to Discovering Hamlet. Instead of continuing to explore his vast range as an actor (perhaps culminating in this year’s King Lear), where might Jacobi have gone as a director?
This documentary is about a man at a turning point in his artistic maturity—yes, not unlike Hamlet. Makes you pine for a Discovering King Lear doc.