The players are not rarefied artistes but down-to-earth entertainers who juggle and eat fire to amuse their audience before their play. Hamlet’s scene with his mother in her chamber seethes with a nasty sexuality. Everything about this production is real and grounded and earthy. That doesn’t happen, of course - Hamlet eventually does talk with the ghost of his father (Paul Scofield)… but that turns out to be as grounded as a scene from a ghost story can be: I think it’s the most creepy, most horrific depiction of that moment, when the dead king explains to his son how he was murdered, precisely because it seems so real. You almost suspect, at first, that even the ghost will be dispensed with as nothing more than a fanciful story. We don’t even get the ghost, at first, don’t get that scene with Horatio and the guards confronting the spectre. Hamlet absolutely is totally in control of his faculties, even if he is a moody, sulky bastard. Gertrude (Glenn Close) absolutely is hot for the new king (Alan Bates). Normally, with any other story, that might be a bad thing, but most productions of Hamlet tend toward the ambiguous - is Hamlet crazy, or isn’t he? is he faking? does the faking actually make him crazy? does Gertrude really love Claudius? is she faking in order to secure her position? and so on - so there’s something kinda refreshing about a production that, punning aside, makes no bones about it. There’s nothing meta about it - there’s little open to interpretation. I like how different it is from almost every other production. I saw the 1990 Franco Zeffirelli mounting of the story of the Mad Dane years ago and I must admit that it didn’t really make much of an impression on me then, but now, having watched it after seeing a whole bunch of different interpretations of what could be the greatest play ever written… I like it. And even though it may be embarrassing for USC to backtrack, it should reinstate valedictorian Tabassum as a speaker at commencement.Yeah, he’s shouty, like he always is, but I kinda like Mel Gibson as Hamlet. I hope Docking and fellow administrators stay firm in their commitment. We welcome Riley Gaines to our beautiful campus, and we feel confident our students will be inspired by her commencement address.” 'In fact, this is precisely the purpose of universities – to engage in civil discourse of controversial issues. “Adrian College has never shied away from presenting and debating substantive disagreements on campus,” Adrian President Jeffrey Docking said in a news release. A student LGBTQ+ group started an online petition urging the college to “disinvite” Gaines. Gaines is used to attracting pushback – and even violence – on campuses, so it’s probably no surprise to her that there are factions of the Adrian community who aren’t happy that she will speak at the school. Last month, Adrian College announced that Riley Gaines would be its commencement speaker on May 5.Īthletes sue NCAA: These women say transgender rules discriminate against them. Meanwhile, administrators at private Adrian College in Michigan are handling their own “controversy” in much better fashion. Adrian College offers a better way to handle controversy “Implicit in the idea of a campus committed to robust expressive rights is that administrators won’t censor their students just because they have controversial views,” FIRE said in a statement. And FIRE points to how California law requires private, secular colleges and universities to give students the same speech rights they’d have at the state’s public institutions. While USC is a private university, it commits to First Amendment-like free speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression faults USC for how it handled this situation. And if it knew of a tangible security threat, it should be upfront about that. Rather, the university should have committed to keeping her and others attending graduation safe.

To be or not to be speech