When I still attended school and we were talking about Hamlet in English, my teacher, Hans Nijs, handed me two video-cassettes telling me to have a look at those two Hamlet performances. I returned them with a look of `What have you been putting me through?' on my face. He commented: "No good? Were the actors not handsome enough?", which infuriated me a little bit more, but also made me smile. "No, the performances were bad.", I retorted.
One recording was done with a pretty young cast of students and the lead's looks were not bad, as far as I remember, dark curly hair - nice. But his performance as Hamlet was too cool in his emotions, he had this attitude of carelessness about him, later on there would come along the expression 'Cool Britannia' and he embodied it. Regretfully this resulted in me feeling like I couldn't care less.
The second one, quite the opposite, and also a performance that was hailed as being outstanding at the time: Derek Jacobi's Hamlet. But alas, he lost me quite at the beginning during the ghost scene, Act I, Scene 5, when he uttered the line: "Oh, my prophetic soul - my uncle!" and he put so much feeling in it that he almost breaks down. Just like the ghost had said Boo and scared the living daylights out of him. In my mind I would rather have a Hamlet reaching out for his dagger and imagining killing Claudius. So Jacobi lost me there and never regained me. Summing up my experience I told my teacher that the funny thing was that these performances were absolutely contrary, but also absolutely bad, both lacking what the other had too much of - too much commitment versus too little.
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