Hamlet comes home from university to find his uncle married to his mother, and his father's ghost haunting the battlements and scaring the watch. Then his father's ghost directs him to seek revenge.
Acting
Jacobi's Hamlet: neurotic, theatrical, utterly exhausting in the best way.
Direction
Rodney Bennett treats TV like intimate theatre—static cameras, living faces.
Production
Elsinore as cramped castle, not epic fortress. Claustrophobia intentional.
Director
Rodney Bennett
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Jacobi had played Hamlet over 400 times on stage before this; his muscle memory shows.
This BBC adaptation arrived same year as Branagh's rise, cementing Jacobi as the 'other' definitive Hamlet for theatre purists.
GB
US
