This sort of moment would be one of the hardest for me to play were I to play Hamlet. Mostly, gender is inconsequential for me in acting. I may be a woman, but playing men is no big deal for me. I’ve done it many times. But this is a young man’s quality that is hard for me to take on. At least I cannot possibility take it on in life – maybe it I had to PLAY it, I’d be fine – but I’m not sure. Like most young men, Hamlet here demonstrates an extreme confidence in his own self worth.

I listened to a podcast on Confidence  recently and it highlighted how often at work, men will declare competency in all kinds of things that they are not (yet) competent in. One guest described two tales of an internship. She described hers as “No big deal. I’m mostly getting coffee for everyone.”
While a male colleague described his as this incredible awesome experience that’s setting him up for life. She said she was embarrassed for him as he described it – it was so out of line with reality – but it paid off – and that blustery self-aggrandisement got him somewhere.
That sense of entitlement, that natural sense of “I deserve this” or “I’m better than” or “Everything’s mine” – THAT would be the hardest thing for me to take on.

The gardener in the black hat sneaks out at night under the cover of darkness. He twirls his mustache as he makes his way to his neighbors’ compost heap. The egg shells shine in the moonlight, showing him the way. He stirs the heap with his shovel a bit to find the richest compost below. From deep in the hill, he pulls out a shovel full and brings it over to the weeds that have sprung up around the flower beds. Tenderly, with great care, he tips bits of it around the weedlets, as if he were tucking children in for the night.
He repeats this action for the weeds ringing the vegetable garden and the berry patch. He is careful not to leave any obvious signs of his presence.
It is delicate work being a gardening villain.

I am VERY good at Avoiding things – even when they are inevitable. Difficult conversations. Inevitable conflict. I can skirt and edge. I can soften out of the scene. I can disappear. I can distract. I can be so nice nothing can get through the nice onslaught.

But I have discovered that I’m not alone in this. Even the most confrontational people will avoid difficult conversations of a type. We all have to learn how to address this sort of thing, I guess.

There’s not much in my past that I need to repent – at least as far as I know. When I look back and regret things, it’s almost always moments in which I said something dumb and slightly embarrassing. It’s like, “Why did I ask that exceptionally stupid question about Questlove?”
And it’s not worth going back in time to fix anything. It’s just a dumb thing I said one time in the past that just circles around to say to me, “Don’t get too high on that horse, cowboy. You’ve said some dumb things before.”
But I’m pretty sure I can stand firmly behind everything I’ve ever done – even if I no longer agree with my choices from the time.
But I’m a modern girl with no religion – I don’t really go in for judging things the church might want me to repent for. The church might want me to repent for all that sex outside of marriage or for helping my friend get that abortion she needed. The church might want me to repent for pleasuring myself or taking the lord’s name in vain. But goddamnit, I think masturbation is good for me! And everyone! Depending on which era of church, it might want me to repent for fighting for women’s rights or advocating for equality of all sorts. But given that none of the stuff that the church would accuse me of has anything to do with my belief system, I don’t really have any repenting to do.
Because I stand behind it all.

It just occurred to me that this could sound like a threat to Gertrude. And maybe it is meant to sound like a threat. It is something killers will often do before they strike. It’s very murder-y language, actually. At least the ones who have an interest in not damning the souls of their victims when they kill them.
Gertrude has already been afraid for her life in this scene once, there’s no reason for her to think that possibility has passed. She has, after all, just witnessed her son commit one murder – it’s not unlikely that he’s on a tear. His words are wild and whirling. He’s seeing things.
The terror of watching your son behave this way and be afraid for your life at the same time…well, I think I missed that a little bit when I played this role 20 years ago. I think I’d have a lot to work with were I to play this role again.
And, of course, if I were to play Hamlet as well. I’d want to experiment with how much of this to play as a threat. How much is he aware of how this looks to her? It would seem not much. But it would be a really interesting thing to experiment with.

Eeeew, gross, Hamlet! That’s gross!
But I guess that’s what you’re after…to make “that flattering unction” seem as useless and disgusting as possible. And given that the flattering unction is basically the idea that Hamlet is mad (an idea, by the way, that he came up with) it’s a little funny.

I think what he may be doing here is a little verbal slight of hand – pulling attention away from all that has just recently passed by leaning into the repulsiveness of this image. If he can make her feel disgusting instead of terrified, he’ll have moved her in some way – shaken her out of the just having (not) seen a ghost.

I wonder why Hamlet goes about this this way.
It is a rather roundabout way to talk about what is happening here. I mean, Gertrude has two legitimate concerns: 1) her son has killed a high ranking official without much remorse 2) He’s talking to the air, which he says is the ghost of his father.
The ghost has asked Hamlet to step between her and her fighting soul, which I take to mean that he’d like Hamlet to comfort her – which he definitely does not do.

If this scene went logically, Hamlet would say, “Hey – Dad’s ghost came to me and told me he was murdered by your husband. I’m supposed to exact revenge. Are you with me on that point or against me? Did you help him or didn’t you? I have a ghost whose word I trust. We’re dealing with a murderer here.”

But instead, he spends the whole scene blaming her. This, of course, makes for an interesting scene. But I am curious about that impulse to evangelize and accuse his mother in a moment where he could be explaining. Maybe he’s distraught about killing Polonius and is trying to shift responsibility for it away from himself – as in, “O you think sticking my sword in an old man is bad – well…you …you sleep with a bad man. So it’s YOUR fault.”

It is only the mad who really get to gambol in earnest. As one ages, one gets fewer and fewer opportunities to gambol, or rather, there are fewer and fewer gambol appropriate circumstances. You can gambol with children. You can gambol if you score a goal in a game. You can (maybe) get away with gamboling after receiving good news.
You can’t gambol away from the bus or while walking into the bank. There is no gamboling at the office or at school. Don’t gambol in the supermarket and definitely not in church or synagogue or temple or mosque. No gamboling in the Senate or at the Stock exchange. Unless you’re mad. Then you can gambol to your heat’s content. Which does make madness a little bit more attractive than it might otherwise be.

It is always nice to get approval on things that one makes – things like blog posts, or play, or songs or books or so on. Before someone gives you a nod, it can feel like maybe you’ve just created a bunch of nonsense. It feels like a blur – a mess of words or ideas that might, possibly be crazy. An approving gesture always helps one feel that one’s creations are not madness.

I like the sound of health being music.
In my work with people’s bodies, there is a harmony of a well organized structure and a dissonance in the troubled body. It seems like music when we find ease and order and the disorder sounds like noise.
A good session turns the noise of the body into music.