Hamlet and Richard Armitage — first impressions?

One negative, two neutral, three really pleased! Read #3 only if you don’t can’t bear to read criticism.

1. 1-Click ordering MY FOOT. The fact that I am now listening to this is a sheer testament to my devotion to Richard Armitage. I don’t want to scare anyone off — probably if you do what they want and listen to it on your smart phone, you will have no problem. I have no smart phone. I have never bought a digital download that involved this much circumlocution to play on the iTunes on my MacBook Pro, which seems to be no problem for anything else that amazon sells. Went into amazon.com via RichardArmitageNet.com ‘s affiliate program, purchased, was then told to enter email to receive the app. Dude, I don’t want the app. I have iTunes on my laptop. No clue from the page as to how to download anything other than an app. Go to amazon orders to find no record that I’ve actually bought the darn thing, but I do have the screen that says I bought it. Finally go to audible.com to try to figure out if I have even bought it — am told it will download automatically into iTunes. Okay, but I don’t have the fricking link to download anything. Then discover I have a log in at audible.com although I’ve never created one. Creepy, and they don’t even offer to alert me to their terms and conditions when I log in for the first time ever. Then I download — no indication as to how big the files are. Unprofessional. Files don’t download and open automatically into iTunes, they have to be imported and I have to give in my amazon password to hear them. Is this going to happen every time? I have to use a proprietary password to access content stored on my own computer? That’s kind of nasty. Have I bought the book or am I just renting it? Finally, I’m listening, after ten minutes of aggravation. I hope the download onto audio CDs for my car doesn’t cause this much hassle.

2. The material — I need to listen to it a few more times, probably. The adaptation makes more than one assertion as a point of context in the first hour of the piece that I find mistaken, but none of it is that important to anyone’s enjoyment of this piece other than a historian’s, and so I’m going to remind myself forcefully that I’m not in the target audience for this kind of adaptation, something I already knew. Probably the big problem is that I don’t need Hamlet explained to me and this adaptation explains a lot in a clumsy way. It’s interesting that that this doesn’t bother me at all with regard to potential transgressions against canon in The Hobbit, but those are different kinds of transgressions, plot changes to a plot I know little about and am not invested in. I’m pretty familiar with Hamlet — although not, of course, on the level of a Shakespeare scholar — and I know a lot about its historical context, and there are decisions to be made in any “staging,” including an audiobook. I have a picture in my mind of what Hamlet means and this adaption, so far, does not conform. The things that are bugging me here are less about plot and more — atmospheric? environmental? contextual? I will have more time to think about this as I listen to it again.

3. And finally, (2) notwithstanding — I just love Richard Armitage’s voice and the way he reads. Unsurprisingly, that’s the big gift here. I’m not a member of the “I’d listen to the phone book if he read it” contingent. But everything about it is pleasurable, the pitch, his articulation of the consonants in particular, the pronunciation and the contemplative melody, the ups and downs of pitch and emphasis with which he reads. It’s interesting to listen to this as a contrast, right after the D-Day documentary that dropped yesterday, which is very much read in “presenter” style. We all have normal rhythms and cadences in our reading, and we expect to hear these in this things we listen to. In the documentary, we expect the style of war documentary with its alternative excitement, regret, contemplation, as well as a certain regularity of vocal movement that conforms to how people read for television. None of that is present here — which is a good thing.

Armitage aficionados are going to hear familiar voices here from earlier voicings. Such echoes are neither surprising nor troubling (how many female voices can a man do, after all?) Still, I think on the level of a pure reading, we can hear a significant gain in artistry here over the earlier audiobooks. The Robin Hood books show an Armitage very much caught up in the excitement of reading and sharing rousing stories with his audience — there are points at which he gets involved, perhaps against his own inclination as artist, and humorous moments that we can tell he enjoys as well. In Lords of the North, we hear a long, mysterious inhabitation of a single personality, Uhtred, and this is my favorite Armitage audiobook, but I have to admit that emotionally, I haven’t been able to make myself listen beyond disc 3. The Heyer audiobooks are delightfully mannerist — you hear Armitage fitting himself very much into the Regency style and one occasionally hears the wry smile in his voice and the light stepping and conscious avoidance of the potential ridiculousness of the entire affair. He realizes that beyond the stories, Heyer as observer is the main character of these works, but he puts a light touch on that awareness, with a presentation that is equally accessible to those who enjoy these works on the level of entertaining story and those who are thinking about them as middle-brow, neo-historical comedies of manners. A Convenient Marriage is intriguingly edgier, but if it departs from that pattern, then only slightly or almost indistinguishably (I’d wanted to write about this last summer. Maybe some day.)

Hamlet is something different for Armitage (and the fact that I react in this way despite my objections in [2] interests me).

First, Armitage shows (or has gained?) the ability to sustain the energy of a long literary ramble — the rhythm of an extremely long scene — and keep the reader’s attention. (It’s a bit hard to say whether this is a development because earlier outings didn’t offer opportunities like this one does). The impression for the listener becomes less the voices and characterizations (as in Heyer), than the trajectory of a particular section of the work in the entire drama. There was always something a bit gimmicky about all of the voices in Heyer — enjoyable, but as if we could see the tricks he was playing, so that Heyer for fangirls was something like CBeebies for children and their tired mums — part of the enjoyment lay in one’s amusement at the vocal antics. The voices are still here, but they fade a little, Armitage takes less pleasure in the performance of the trick and more enjoyment in the feeling of the interactions and dialogues creating a certain focus for the listener at the end of each scene. He’s often been a master of the vignette, as in much of the poetry he’s read over the years (even if one didn’t necessarily like the material he read, or the artistic choices he made, they were reasoned and masterfully executed). Here, he’s turning into the reader for the long game.

Second, and maybe because of that, because he’s not concentrating so hard on the seconds and thinking much more about the minutes and the hours, one gets a much better sense of how he might read a work something more like philosophy or high culture “literature.” I think one reason I’ve been less interested in the audiobooks, generally, than his acting, is that up until now I’ve gotten less idea of Armitage as mind from his reading than from his acting. There is a consciousness there making decisions, and it’s generally easier to contact it and see its provocative moments in his acting. But because of the pacing here — because it doesn’t feel like Armitage is oriented so much toward the perfect reproduction of the vignette, but rather toward the movement of the scenes — we get more of a sense of a spirit there behind the words than we do in the earlier material, in which he always seems to be performing and meta-performing.

In short — here, he seems merely and totally: absorbed. Richard Armitage as a speaker and interpreter more like I am a reader. Rather than telling and gesturing, as he does in most of the earlier work, he is observing, absorbing, reporting — musing. His voice is not so much motion and indication as it is a current of perception upon which he takes us with him. That effect in itself is a lie — because a reading like this, of such high quality and such sustained energy and direction, can never be casual. But in my opinion, it constitutes a significant gain over against the kind of enjoyable, but heavily controlled, illusion he’s been presenting in the past in his audiobooks. If his work occasionally seemed to result from the calculated pullback of the overlearner, he seems now to have gained a sort of artistic stamina that allows the illusion to move further into the foreground and the work to recede further in the back. As a result we as listeners become ever more easily lost in his voice.

~ by Servetus on May 20, 2014.