Audience to This Act in David Tennant´s Hamlet

Everyone knows the story of Hamlet: Hamlet’s father is killed, Hamlet’s mother marries the evil Uncle, everyone thinks Hamlet has gone mad, and almost everyone dies at the end. In David Tennant’s version of Hamlet, the use of the characters’ physical antics, interactions with each other, the stark similarities between the characters, and the way they dress, changes how the audience interprets each character’s actions and contribution to the play as a whole, which then determines how successful this version of Hamlet is.
The physical antics displayed by Hamlet and Ophelia are seen throughout the play, which portray these characters as childlike and emotionally unstable. The antics displayed by Hamlet give us a better view of his true character, which is feeble, unpredictable, and insane. He jumps around as if he were a small child trying to get their mother’s attention. His wild antics in front of the court show us how fleeting his thoughts are, and it pays tribute to the fact that he has lost his sanity. Hamlet’s antics also include physical contact or nearness, and that behavior is usually shown when he is mad about something, an example being when he discovers that he has been spied on by Polonius and Claudius, and puts himself in Ophelia’s personal space (Act 3, scene i). Hamlet’s disregard for personal space was very apparent when he was called to his mother’s chamber after the play-within-a-play (Act 3, scene iv) in which he gets mad at his mother, about her marrying his Uncle, who does not fully understand why Hamlet has such a vendetta against Claudius. Ophelia also showed a tendency to have physical antics, which took place in the scene right before her death when she sang a song for Gertrude and Claudius, and started runn...

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...udius wear very formal gowns and suits, but they are not from an specific time period, an example being Gertrude’s blue gown and Claudius’s dress-suit in their marriage scene (Act 1, scene ii). The way Hamlet and Ophelia dress are also timeless, but they also have more distinct times, like Hamlet’s jeans and muscle t-shirt (Act 3, scene i) which can be related to the more current times, while his suit in the wedding scene (Act 1, scene ii) is more classic, yet both formal and modern. Ophelia’s clothes from the scene where her brother Laertes warned her about Hamlet (Act 1, scene iii) is more modern, but her dress for the play-within-a-play scene (Act 3, scene ii) was, like Hamlet’s suit, classic and modern. The clothes are a way for the audience to relate to the characters, and in a very subtle way, say that the story of Hamlet can be related to by many generations.