"As old Hamlet said, 'the readiness is all.' I think I'm pretty ready".
Perhaps old Hamlet swore by beige, whereas new broom Claudius is a man who likes to think pink.
Old Hamlet's funeral is staged as a dumb show, with a clowning gravedigger slipping into the trench with the coffin.
("There are so many reasons why the dirt and the earth make sense," explains Ostermeier. "It's a playground, it's a cemetery, Old Hamlet's grave").
Shakespeare's famous ghouls, Old Hamlet and Banquo, recalled the 16th-century revenge tragedies in which many a bloody ghost pointed an accusing finger at its quaking murderer.
The whitewashed stone house, Baile an tSléibhe, or "the mountain town," which has a sea view from its quarter-acre garden, is set among the ruins of an old hamlet.
Old Hamlet hands may not discover anything radically new but Michael Grandage's production, the last in the Donmar's West End season, proves there is a public hunger for good, affordable Shakespeare.
With a busy summer that includes filming the movie version of the Broadway show "Rock of Ages" and preparing for a sixth season of "30 Rock," Mr. Baldwin, above, will tape his scenes as Old Hamlet's ghost for the New York-based Fundamental Theater Project's fringe production "3D Hamlet: A Lost Generation," said Fundamental's artistic director, Sam Underwood.
Just ask Horatio, who tries to prevent his reckless friend from chasing Old Hamlet's ghost at the beginning of Shakespeare's tragedy and who counsels an intellectual restraint toward its end as the two confront mortality itself in the graveyard.
