SHAKESPEARE IN THE EXTREME

A year on from its initial conception, the latest film version of Hamlet, directed by Alexander Fodor, is unleashed at a West End press screening on Monday 23 April at the NFT, London.

Attendance details are below.

From the outset, the aim was to produce Hamlet on a low budget. It was shot almost entirely in one room, above a pub in North London (a former Fringe venue) and follows the underlying concept of the London Film Fringe in that it is a theatre play developed into a film.

Spartan the film is not. Feedback has universally been focused on how well it is shot. Without a hint of suspension of disbelief, a surreal, Kafkaesque otherworld has been created - but a world that viewers feel exists (or existed). One comment about the style of the film was, "if David Lynch shot Shakespeare it would look like this".

Probably the most striking departure from the norm is the abandonment of textbook definitions of characters. Old men become femme fatales, lords become vicious, brutal louts. But the original text remains. In this respect, Fodor's Hamlet betrays its London Fringe roots in its shear experimentalism.

Director Alexander Fodor set out from the beginning to appeal to people who had never known Shakespeare. He coached the actors to deliver the text as natural speech, and developed themes and subplots never witnessed in the play. To the casual viewer, the strongest of these are the supernatural elements, Machiavellian undercurrents and vicious brutality.

The production cost just ¢G15,000 (¢G9,000 was stolen when an executive producer literally went mad!) and yet all cast and crew received payment. There was no room for any sort of delays or re-shooting and filming took place over a mere 15 days last summer. Not a single day was overshot by more than an hour.