#hiddlehamlet

[maryxglz]

(x)

[imaginaryboyfriendcollection]

HiddleHamlet: A firsthand account (part I)

Okay guys. Here goes. I’m going to try to remember and describe as much of the experience as possible, so you can all feel a little piece of it too. This is your warning... this is going to be a long post.

Disclaimer: this review is going to be very little about the play, and very lots about how mindblowingly gorgeous and excellent Tom was in the play. If you’re not in this to hear a dissertation on that man’s thighs in his tight-ass jeans, don’t read further. I love and deeply appreciate theatre (this is the 14th play I’ve seen since moving to London 10 months ago), but this is tumblr and I’m not really here to be a theatre critic or to dissect various interpretations of Shakespeare. I’m here to drool over sexy men. It’s right there in the title.

So, to get that boring, non-thigh-centred discussion out of the way first - the play was seriously great. I enjoyed it hugely, even apart from the magic of Tom’s Hamlet (and somehow in spite of the distraction that was my brain screaming “HE’S RIGHT THERE!!!” for 3 hours straight). I saw a similarly intimate staging of Hamlet back in January, which I found... overly intense. This one was much better. I especially liked the touches of humour throughout, which helped to break up the heavier moments and moved the story along in a nice rhythm, and brought out the humanity and likability of the characters. The cast were all fantastic, and the sparseness of the stage worked well - the focus was fully on the actors and the words they were saying. 

We were sat in the front row, far stage left...which was basically on the stage. The theatre is teeny, with no raised stage, which meant the actors were walking by us close enough to touch. Being that close to Tom for an extended period of time was full-on exhilarating. When he’d run by us, we’d get a waft of air and could actually smell him. I didn’t get to last time, so I breathed in deep this time...and it was absolutely delicious. I’m sure we were visibly swooning after each inhale.

(I’m really sad that only a limited number of people will get to see this, and I know there’s been much discussion over the supposed “exclusivity” of this show, but I must say, in being one of the lucky ones who got to be there, that it was magical how intimate this was. It was immersive - a unique and beautiful theatre experience. I feel incredibly grateful.) 

Important things must be addressed, so: couch humping. Was SO FUNNY. It wasn’t a full-on dry humping (oh god…I just had to take several minutes to think about what that would be like. I’m back now) but rather a couple of energetic thrusts. Which was enough. This was met with laughter and tons of quietly imploding vaginas, I assume.

In this same scene (a great scene), Hamlet sits on the recently-violated couch with Polonius and laughs loudly with him. It’s rather forced (he’s putting on a show here), but also - seriously adorable. Because Tom. It gifted us with a huge Hiddles grin, which is so damn infectious (as you well know). In the third bout of this laughter, Hamlet dissolves into tears. One of the best things about Tom’s Hamlet was how perfectly and naturally he navigated the quick shifts in his mood - swinging wildly between grief, rage, lunacy, amusement, earnestness - and it all felt incredibly deft and real. Also, that man is gifted when it comes to crying. I think there were real tears in his eyes for about 75% of the performance. At one point, you could see the tears falling, illuminated by the stage lights. It was beautiful. I managed to stay seated and not run to throw myself on him and cover him in kisses, which was obviously what first instinct was telling me to do.

Okay...let us talk about how good he looked. IT IS GROSS, AND MAKES NO SENSE. My brain can’t compute this level of attractiveness, and I have no appropriate words to convey it. It’s even worse in real life. And truly, this is Peak Tom, look-wise. I missed probably large sections of dialogue due to thinking about his hair (I wish this was a joke). I could not stop staring at it. The curls are entrancing. It is perfection. I will cry when he gets a haircut. THIS IS THE HAIR HE WAS BORN TO HAVE. Also, THE JEANS. Holy fucking hell. I could write a Hamlet-length soliloquy about those jeans. Maybe it was because I was on the side, so I spent a good amount of time looking at the back of him, but...I have never appreciated a view more. Those jeans were, um, very tight, and I have zero complaints. I think I could actually see his thigh muscles flexing through them. I was equally entranced by his legs and thighs throughout the whole thing. My stream of consciousness went something like this: hair-legs-thighs-jaw-eyes-voice-words-legs-ass-kill-me-now...!

Yeah... his ass in those jeans. Specifically when he was moving or jumping around a lot. I leave it to your imagination.

Overall, there is truly just something about him. We have not been imagining that. His physical presence is undeniably, overwhelmingly attractive. He’s all legs and cheekbones and curls, and the way he moves is impossible to look away from. He’s so damn FIT. His body, his face, his every movement...it’s all just sex incarnate. I can’t be eloquent about it. What the fuck do you say about this. Just. Ugh. Fuck me up.

Will you look at this? GOD.

Wardrobe stuff: I love his new peacoat. It’s really nice and looks so soft, so he looks super huggable in it. I will continue to swoon over the upturned collar look on him - it works so well with his long neck and impeccable jawline. I also like how well he rocks the hoodie-and-peacoat combo. Really, is there anything that doesn’t look good on him?! Oh, and...there was no appearance, sadly, of the beloved grey boots (those boots are like a secondary celeb spotting for us by now). He was wearing dark brown boots through the whole thing. But they looked really good too no duh, so, no big loss.

Uh-oh... this post is already very long, and I have at least 26 more things to say about all of this. I’m think I’m gonna stop here for tonight and write a part two tomorrow. Coming up: tummy peeks, dancing, leather gloves and the opinions of the lady sitting next to me on Tom’s ass in those jeans (you didn’t think I was done talking about that yet, did you?)

[damnyouhiddles]

Hamlet • Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre, RADA, September 2017.

[twh-news]

Kenneth Branagh interview: ‘Tom Hiddleston and I were always honest about Hamlet’

Kenneth Branagh has directed the theatrical event of 2017 – but there will be no encore, he says

Kenneth Branagh is bounding about on stage at RADA’s Vanbrugh Theatre in Bloomsbury, central London. As well as being one of the country’s best-known actors and a feted film director, he’s also president of the oldest, most prestigious drama school in the UK, and everything about his bearing suggests confidence and an ownership of this plush space. But at this precise point, he’s recalling the moment in 1979 when he recited a soliloquy from Hamlet – “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I…” – in front of the Queen and Prince Philip to mark the school’s 75th anniversary.

He gestures round the intimate auditorium, incredulous: “There was John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Edward Fox, John Hurt, all these people – and the Queen of England! I was about 19. Talk about learning to deal with nerves!” At the end, the Queen asked him how he managed to remember his lines. He meekly replied that he didn’t know.

In contrast to that daunting rite of passage, Tom Hiddleston – playing the Dane under Branagh’s direction in a special fundraising production at the school, where Hiddleston also trained – might be thought to have got off lightly. Yet he too has felt the heat this past month. A huge talking point, “Hiddleham” has eclipsed this year’s putative standout account of the part from Sherlock star Andrew Scott.

Hiddleston, 36, became a household name in the UK on the back of his brooding (and bottom-baring) turn on The Night Manager, and has gained an international fan base playing Loki in Marvel’s Thor series, a role Branagh cast him in when he directed the first of three Thor films in 2011. Tickets for his pop-up performance at RADA – allocated by ballot for the three-week run – have been like gold dust and there has been much wailing and teeth gnashing from those, including critics, excluded from this collector’s item event. Even the Guardian’s film critic pleaded for the production to be “beamed into Britain’s movie theatres”.

That’s not going to happen, Sir Ken affirms as the final performances loom this weekend, arguing that the 160-seater Vanbrugh “isn’t set up to do a big-screen transfer – though I embrace that idea in other venues. I am pro accessibility”. He also rules out the production having a further life. “We have been honest from the word go. No one was in an option to go to the West End – and there have been no conversations with Tom about doing it again down the line.”

Rather incredibly, neither he nor Hiddleston seems to have fully anticipated the demand. “I’m very, very surprised at the amount of attention it has got,” he confesses, suavely dressed in dark blue blazer and jeans, still boyish at 56. His leading man even worried there might be empty seats. “We thought we should do a ballot, because we knew he had fans, but Tom was very sweet about it and genuinely asked ‘Do you think we’ll sell out?’”

Branagh was the golden boy of British theatre who slightly got people’s backs up in his heyday, what with his get-ahead work ethic, the precocious age at which he penned his autobiography Beginning – just 28 – and the public relationship that played out between himself and first wife Emma Thompson, popularly referred to as Ken and Em. Has he got people’s backs up again?

“I hope not. Of course, you never want to disappoint anyone,” Branagh protests. “You have to accept a choice has been made. It was about being here, using this setting, for this purpose. We wanted to do an intimate, psychologically focused staging.”

For Hiddleston, a formidable Coriolanus at the Donmar in 2013, the challenge was to stretch himself at close quarters: “He wanted to discover an emotional depth that might have surprised people who consider him a cerebral actor.” In an interpolated opening scene, the audience sees the black clad prince of Denmark at the piano mourning his dead father in song – “He’s this raw, grieving thing,” says Branagh.

No play in the canon has fascinated Branagh more. Seeing Derek Jacobi play Hamlet as a teenager in Oxford changed his life. He got the role outright at RADA in his final year, then made his name with it in the late Eighties with his trailblazing company Renaissance, reprising it again for the RSC in the early Nineties. Then there was his adieu to the part in his star-studded 1996 film adaptation that found little favour at the box office but a lot of admirers among critics.

“That I should have pursued the play’s mysteries so assiduously continues to puzzle me,” he wrote in a foreword to the screenplay. Reflecting on his obsession now, he says: “Gielgud summed it perfectly as being about the process of living, of having to deal with the problem of losing the people you love. At my age you feel that keenly.”

Some say there’s something rotten in the state of acting; that thanks in part to the profile of public school alumni such as Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Damian Lewis and Eddie Redmayne, it’s the toffs who get to the top. Branagh disagrees. “Tom will tell you that he was the only one in his year at RADA from a so-called posh background. Some 70 per cent of the people who come here receive financial assistance from us. No social group is excluded. The success of these actors resembles a wave but it’s not a trend. When working-class actors came to the fore in the Sixties, middle-class actors said: ‘Unless we have a regional accent and a rough diamond story, we can’t get a job’. But those are exaggerations.”

Things go in cycles, not least Branagh’s own fortunes. His Hollywood film career as both actor and director is burgeoning once more (after his critically slighted Frankenstein in 1994 he talked of having acquired “failure disease”, so pained were the glances strangers gave him).

He gave a sterling performance this summer as the visibly blanching naval commander evacuating terrified troops in Dunkirk, an opportunity for him to watch director Christopher Nolan in action. “It was remarkable seeing [Nolan] up there at the canvas, absolutely possessed by this thing, smart as a nut.”

His latest directorial project, a revamp of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, with a cast including Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi – and himself playing Poirot – is due for release in November. How can he improve on David Suchet’s performance? “You tip your hat to people who have played him before but it’s only the part that counts. I discovered Poirot is a surprisingly emotional character – compassionate and morally complex.”

For the moment, the “Branagh-bashing” as he himself called it in his autobiography – seems to have stopped. “My parents drummed into me not to get above myself, though that’s the sin I’ve been accused of throughout my career. I’ve had plenty of kickings, I will have plenty more but if you’re going through hell, the best thing is to keep going.”

At one point, the pressure was so intense it took all his courage to go back on stage. An actor friend of his, Jimmy Yuill, never forgot witnessing his opening night terror in 2002 at Sheffield, where Branagh was playing Richard III after a long hiatus from the theatre.

“I was in this contraption that was supposed to be realigning Richard’s spine. Jimmy told me: ‘I was coming down a corridor and heard this strange rattle and I realised it was your entire body shaking with fear’. I’m the other side of it now,” Branagh affirms, contentedly. The play is still the thing. “There are a few major Shakespearean roles circling and I hope to do more sooner rather than later.”

As for Hiddleston, fans shouldn’t feel distraught. “I’ve played Hamlet in four different productions, Derek Jacobi played it hundreds of times. And I’m sure Tom is interested in playing Benedick and Richard III. So, the public need to be assured that there will be a lot of pleasure coming our way.” Watch this space.

[thesoftkiwifruit]

👏👏👏

[musingsofclara]

Fabulous stuff. One of the best Hamlets I've seen.

[maryxglz]

Shakespeare Magazine‏ (@UKShakespeare): A word of warning. Do not under any circumstances click to the last page of the magazine. You definitely won't like it.

issue

[maryxglz]

The British star follows his Henry V and Coriolanus with Shakespeare's iconic Dane

For any devotee of Hiddleston, the chance to see him as Hamlet in a tiny central London theatre, nestled within the walls of his old drama school, felt akin to seeing The Beatles at the Cavern Club – the sense of a colossal talent scaled down while losing none of its potency. The result was little short of magical