Word: claudius
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Apart from Williamson, the cast is uneven, with Anthony Hopkins' Claudius and Judy Parfitt's Gertrude lacking sufficient force, maturity and sensuality. But Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia is remarkably affecting. She is ethereal, vulnerable, and in some strange way purer than the infancy of truth. Yet the granitic power and sweep of the film rest with Williamson. Here are antic wit, sly, sarcastic irony, erotic longings, a sentient intelligence that lights up thought like the sun at dawn...
Mike Sachs as Claudius and Kathy Allyn as Gertrude were not as good as some of the others. I was told that Sachs was trying to play Claudius as a Machiavellian Prince. He succeeded only insofar as he was extremely unemotional and dry throughout, save for occasional shouts and arrgghhs. Miss Allyn wasn't bad. She played Gertrude a little like Kanga in Winnie the Pooh. Which may be about right, because Gertrude is always so concerned and motherly, even, we suppose, as she helps murder old King Hamlet...
...desperate need of geriatric drugs. Rabb is too monotonous for eloquence and too weary for anger. The rest of the cast is almost uniformly inept. Horatio is played like a lost Boy Scout, Gertrude as a matronly simp and Ophelia as an epileptic. Only Richard Easton's Claudius has the dignity of a solid stage presence, and Philip Minor's First Gravedigger has wry antic authority. In view of his acting and directing, perhaps Ellis Rabb should really be listed as the First Gravedigger...
...surface, Stoppard has devised an astoundingly clever theatrical trick. We see only the few scraps of Hamlet that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern see. Since they see so little, Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia and the rest become merely bit parts in Stoppard's play. We see a mammoth tragedy from the worst possible vantage point, and what little of Shakespeare remains in the play seems ridiculous and funny in this context...
...Godot they wait for is some sign, some clue, as to the meaning of their existence. They do not understand why they have obeyed Claudius' order to come to the castle; they do not have a clue to Hamlet's madness; and when, on a ship to England, they discover that their missive no longer calls for Hamlet's execution, but for their own, they do not know how to explain death...