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To believe or not to believe

Thursday, October 8, 2009

WELL, IT SEEMED quite a likely story. And the source had some credibility, having revealed some truths of public interest in the recent past.

Trouble was, eighty-one year-old poet and memoirist Maya Angelou (left) was not dead, despite the report.

 

She wasn’t near death, either, nor even hospitalized. She was, as we all know now, alive and well, spending time quietly at home in St Louis, well away from Los Angeles where she’d been reported as being rushed to treatment.

 

This disinformation from the celebrity gossip site TMZ.com had to be retracted – but not before it was amplified by Twitter, which by its very nature generated whole battalions of booster-transmitters for the “news”. Many of the tweets had appended that inevitably abbreviated (indeed 3-characters only) stamp of finality to Angelou’s name: R.I.P.

 

TMZ bizarrely blamed the debacle on an erroneous tip from staff at an LA awards ceremony for the networking organization, BraveHeart Women, where Angelou hadn’t been scheduled to appear anyway, and had only ever planned to send a video message. Just about everything that could be wrong with the story was wrong. And yet it went out. A traditional news-editor’s nightmare.

 

To double-check any tip must count as just about the most fundamental part of any media worker's Reporting 101 toolkit.

 

TMZ has been trading on its reputation for, most notably, getting the story of Michael Jackson’s death, and of course getting it before anyone else. However we can’t, or shouldn’t, put aside other parts of its story-breaking record … not least that a month after Jackson’s death it reported the demise of Ultimate Fighting Championship star combatant Kimo Leopoldo – supposedly from a heart attack at the age of 41.

 

Utterly wrong. And to prove it Leopoldo walked into the Orange County Sheriff's Department in southern California, large as life. Yet well-regarded mainstream news outlets picked up the phony story and published it, including New York’s Daily News and USA Today (as well as the Huffington Post, a website that has pretensions to reliability or even authority). It seems like others, too, need to brush up their Reporting 101.

 

I have nothing (well, not much) against TMZ itself … but can you blame me if I’m feeling some despair about journalism as whole – and our evidently challenged abilities to sort the wheat from the chaff?

 

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TWO ELEMENTS IN the multifaceted experience that is Hamlet come across especially strongly in the Donmar Warehouse Theatre version from London, which opened this week on Broadway. One owes itself to Jude Law’s individual performance (above right) – the other to the production as a whole.

 

Surprisingly enough to me (and this is to confess my doubts in anticipation of his performance) Law gives as convincing a portrayal as I have ever seem of utter self-disgust. He spits out his revulsion at his own “too, too solid flesh” (or is it “sullied flesh”, in Shakespeare’s perpetual punning pop-quiz?) with a venom and passion that makes suicide an alarmingly concrete and vivid prospect for Hamlet, not just the familiar rumination we often encounter.

 

The quite horrifying laceration that Hamlet inflicts on his own human "quintessence" runs through Law’s entire performance, allowing us to hear, see and feel it more often and more deeply than the text - be it in soliloquies or in dialogue - might alone suggest.

 

Law is funnier than I expected, too – and in physical shtick most strikingly of all. Here again, though, it’s in service of a self-abasing, indeed sometimes dehumanizing mission. He grabs the line about King Claudius cannily manipulating his advisors (“He keeps them like an ape in the corner of his jaw: first mouthed, to be last swallowed”) as a chance to rapidly become, both hilariously and disgustingly, an animal – just for five quite astonishing seconds, trailing his knuckles on the ground and stretching out his cheek-muscle.

 

THE PRODUCTION’S OTHER most emphatic theme – this time driven home by the cast and crew as a whole, the Donmar’s own director Michael Grandage, not forgetting (quite vitally) the designer Christopher Oram, who’s worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Britain’s Royal National Theatre - is the whole vexed question of appearance and reality. Hamlet for me provides Shakespeare’s sharpest critique of humanity’s constant mismatching of action and expression on one hand with the truth they are meant to embody on the other.

 

(That’s quite a claim, I know, given the Bard’s obsession with this topic throughout his work in both plays and poems - just search, for instance, all his riffs on the word “seem” - but I still hold a torch for this sprawling revenge tragedy as the subject’s apogee in Shakepeare.)

 

Our innate capacity for dissembling, or simply failing to rise to the truth, resounds deafeningly in this production. It’s inescapable, from the critiques of exaggerated expressiveness, as in Hamlet’s own instructions to the visiting Players’ troupe … from the several condemnations of women’s cosmetic cover-ups … from the overly-demonstrative courtier Osric being held up to ridicule… from Polonius’ double-edged remonstrances with his son about gentlemanly conduct.

 

Finally, and correctively, it registers again when the faithful friend Horatio (Matt Ryan) recapitulates the play’s action as “deaths put on by cunning and forced cause” as well as all the other incredible but nonetheless real events.

 

His promise as a narrator, in poignant contrast with all the lying and conniving that have gone before, is given - even in a parting diminuendo - the heart-stilling emphasis that: “all this can I truly deliver”.

 

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