To be ought not to be the question. Perchance it should be whether it is noble in the mind of Kenneth Branagh to put a film audience through a four hour(!) shaggy dog story about a great Dane. RUTH HESSEY speaks to the man who has put the swash back in Hamlet's buckle.
Even Kenneth Branagh can't tell you what Hamlet is about. After making a four- hour talk-heavy film involving hundreds of scenes in which dozens of the world's finest actors stand around "reacting" to the angry prince, ask Branagh to put the play in a nutshell, and he's off on another monologue.
"Of course, I kept trying to reduce it the whole time I was making the film," he admits with the oddly likable warmth of an Irishman who has made it big in London.
Despite the monumental flop of Frankenstein, and a fairly lukewarm reaction to Peter's Friends, Branagh has had enough impressive success (with Henry V, Dead Again, and Much Ado About Nothing) to make him one of the busiest actor-directors in the world. Now his version of Hamlet is being lauded as the best thing he's done yet. Go, Kenneth.
"I think it's about what it takes to be happy," he continues. "And, of course, the loss of a parent which pitches you from youth into adulthood in a way nothing else does. At 30, Hamlet is in the middle of the most traumatic experience of his life - grieving for his dead father. He's also resisting life, his mother, Ophelia, and I think he only finds peace when he realises he is going to die. And he says the words: "Let Be.'"
Let Be! There are few actors in the world who could spend this long getting to the point and keep you in there (obviously Shakespeare wrote the original for an incredibly gifted performer).
When Mel Gibson took on the most coveted male role in the universe a few years ago, director Franco Zeffirelli had the foresight to cut most of the dialogue. In fact, the whole play is very rarely performed these days. Branagh says: "It is a huge challenge to listen this much. But the last time I saw it done in its entirety on stage, I realised the cumulative impact of the play depends on that."
If it is also a tribute to the worst excesses of male vanity (Hamlet manages to sacrifice everything and everyone he holds dear during the course of his musings about whether to live or die), Branagh insists he's a character whose "incredible self-involvement is redeemed by his intelligence, his constant striving for answers and, above all, by his great wit."
The fact that he does, as Branagh freely admits, "ride roughshod over people" never worried the actor. "I never felt I had to present an attractive man," he says. "He's a very troubled man, certainly not flawless. I think many of us share the unfortunate trait of hurting the ones we love."
If Hamlet need not be a paragon of virtue, it is traditional that he is a great male beauty. Branagh has never looked so sleek (his costumes, designed by Alexandra Byrne are superb). The sword fight at the end of the film is one of the most dazzling exhibitions of his career. "I'm glad you think so,"Branagh laughs, neatly sidestepping any confessions about weight training or diets. "I was absolutely knackered."
But it's not just the cracking pace of Hamlet's foot and tongue work that wore the star to the bone. "You have to take the audience through some very long speeches," he admits. And the ingenuity with which Branagh has tackled every single scene (to the point where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern actually turn up on a toy train), did leave him, he says,"with a brain like mental spaghetti".
The sword fight scene, as well as much of the action, was orchestrated in a hall of mirrors which, when you consider the need for three cameras yet not a single glimpse of one of them, obviously was "a stupid idea". However, he pulled it off.
As with all the directors before him, Branagh has made Hamlet his own - not just through his visual choices but with the period in which he has set the 400-year-old play.
"I didn't want the usual gloomy medieval look," he says. "The film is about power and ambition, not just a bunch of manic depressives."
To this end he cast Hamlet into a "sexy, glamorous" version of the 19th century - "a period when the scandals of Europe's royal families really affected people. I wanted that world of vanity and paranoia, of hidden doors and hundreds of mirrors in which people are always checking themselves out."
The price of power, says Branagh, is the loss of privacy, which leads the key characters to have big trouble "dealing with ordinary problems". Without comparing Hamlet to Princess Diana, the contemporary relevance is obvious. In fact, Branagh chooses one of the most famous moments in the play to pitch Hamlet's soliloquy at a mirror (now that's a love scene).
But the other astonishing aspect of Branagh's production of Hamlet is the quality of the bit-part players. Julie Christie as Gertrude, Derek Jacobi as the incestuous King, and Kate Winslett as Ophelia are orthodox if excellent choices. Things start to jolly up when Charlton Heston (almost God in Hollywood) arrives as the Player King. Jack Lemmon is a rather neat Marcellus. But, two hours down the track, just as your energy is flagging, all sorts of surprises pop up - from Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo, to Robin Williams as Osric and even Billy Crystal as the grave digger in the celebrated "Alas, poor Yorick" scene.
Top it all off with hectares of environmentally-friendly fake snow, 9,000 pieces of parquet for the floor, more than 30 gilt-edged mirrors, 7,500 handmade black and white tiles and a sparkling 70 mm print, and you have an opulent neo-classical Hamlet which will surely dispel the common image of the play as being about, as Branagh describes it - "a depressed man in tights".
Instead, this sumptuous new portrait conjures an egoist of extraordinary intelligence, verbal facility and, one has to admit, great biceps.