Theater: A Mod Hamlet

What a comfort to the American theater the British actor used to be! Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson—the very names gave off a ring of quality. Sir Laurence, Sir John, Sir Ralph if one preferred, and one usually did. On a marquee they read like those royal certifications on English marmalade: contents absolutely guaranteed.

The British actor lent the American theater, an erratic institution at best, a sort of artistic respectability. People of anxious taste who shrank from buying tickets to a Broadway show—the very phrase smacked of vulgarity—queued up reverently for the Old Vic. That was different. That was . . . well, culture.

Those rather regal visits of British theater companies to the American hinterlands made colonials of us all. Critics gave themselves over in safety to unaccustomed transports of praise. School buses confidently discharged squads of students into the matinees. We composed a fullblown myth about the British actor. He was an aristocrat of his craft who made the American actor look like a plebe. There was just no substitute for that repertory training, was there? Above all, we subscribed to the cult of the British voice. Honestly. Was anyone else in the world fit to speak Shakespeare?

Then in the midst of all this decorum, this pleasant and really quite intelligent gentility, all hell broke loose. Instead of the Old Vic or, at worst, the latest well-made play from Terence Rattigan, the traffic from Britain brought John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, together with such non-Establishment exports as Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and Arnold Wesker’s Chips With Everything.

Instead of the knights, a new breed of British actor began to appear: Donald Pleasence, Albert Finney, Robert Shaw, Alan Bates—distinctly not Sir Donald, Sir Albert, Sir Robert, Sir Alan at the moment. They looked tough, they walked tough, they played townies to the older generation’s public school boys. Worst of all, they talked tough, in fact, they even mumbled out of very non-U mouths. Where, oh where had they gone, those patrician inflections as clear and sparkling as cut crystal?

By an irony, the British, who had given the American theater its touch of class, were now taking the leadership in making it savagely déclassé. The line leads in a kind of boomerang arc from Old Vic to Oh, Calcutta!, with the American theater importing British vulgarity almost as eagerly as it once imported British good taste. For vulgarity—earnest, ideological vulgarity—became the new snobbery at nearly the same time the native supply ran short.

But even new blood needs newer blood as time goes on. The latest brilliant British rudeness is a strongminded young actor named Nicol Williamson, who has carried things one phase further. To break with tradition is a radical act. But the most radical act of all is to return to the old orthodoxy and treat it with the new heresy. In other words, the final dare would not be Look Back in Anger but Shakespeare, that holy of holies of official British culture, performed in the life-style of Look Back in Anger. This climax has been reached, more or less, in Williamson’s Hamlet, directed by Tony Richardson, which will be distributed as a film later this year.

The stage production from which the film was made opened in London, then toured to New York, Boston, and California (including Berkeley). Assorted audiences, certainly. Yet nobody in them could fail to register that a kind of cultural showdown was going on and that this was the real play-within-a-play. Members of the older generation, as usual, felt a premonition; members of the younger generation, as usual, shared an expectancy. Another ritual of iconoclasm? Another breakthrough? Whatever the semantics of change, the Williamson Hamlet was one of those destined things we had all been waiting for, in hope or in dread. And regardless of one’s aesthetic judgments—how sadly irrelevant these seem to have become!— Williamson’s performance was sufficiently formidable, sufficiently to its own point, so that Hamlet will never be quite the same play again for those who saw him.

Perhaps the fairest approach is to describe Williamson’s Hamlet as a series of small shocks. In the first place, though he is over six feet, Williamson appears surprisingly small. Slim and tense, he seems almost physically withdrawn, like a telescopic rod jammed half shut. In black with a white collar, he could be impersonating an uptight Calvinist parson. His arms fall rigidly parallel, fingers clenching into the beginnings of a fist. His curly, rather starved blond beard straggles unsuccessfully to hide an incipient sneer.

It is a curious fact, but one can describe Hamlets most economically by comparison with other Shakespearean roles. The British critic James Agate called Olivier’s Hamlet, every inch the Elizabethan athlete, the best Hotspur he had ever seen, and the reader knows exactly what he means. Gielgud’s Hamlet had a touch of Romeo to him (“beauty” is the word that his critics resorted to again and again as their favorite superlative). Williamson, on the other hand, comes on like Iago.

Possibly with tongue in cheek, Williamson has classified his as a “classic” Hamlet. Certainly there are no extremes of staging, no peripheral overinterpretations here. The modern setting—charcoal gray, abstract, a thing of steps, pillars, and screens—dates back at least as far (to judge from the illustrations) as Gordon Craig’s design for the Moscow Art Theater Hamlet, directed by Stanislavsky in 1911. Again, when Williamson’s Hamlet puts a mockbuddy arm across the shoulders of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern during the speech, “What a piece of work is a man!”, this black parody of friendship smacks of 1969, yet Hazlitt attributes the bit of stage business to the Hamlet of Edmund Kean.

But “revolutionary” interpretations of Shakespeare are a shilling a dozen. Only last year Joseph Papp produced a Hamlet in Central Park with Claudius as a kind of Castro, complete to cigar and beard, Ophelia in a miniskirt, and the Danish palace guards as American GI’s. The play-within-a-play was staged as a home movie filmed by family friend Horatio with his trusty handheld camera. Incidental rock music was furnished by the composer of Hair.

The fact is, almost every Hamlet is, must be, experimental. As the Polish scholar Jan Kott put it: “Hamlet is like a sponge. Unless it is produced in a stylized and antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time.” Yet at this point neither production gimmicks nor underlined topicalities are enough, and Williamson and Richardson have not particularly bothered with them. Their heresy goes far deeper than toying with Hamlet in evening dress and the like.

What Williamson has done is to commit nothing less than the supreme sin against the canon. He has not only made Hamlet villainous, which might be forgivable, he has made him downright unattractive— Shakespeare without charm, if one can believe it. What an infinite remove we are from Gielgud’s Hamlet: a “black arabesque” with a voice like “a Stradivarius controlled by a master.” Or even Olivier’s Hamlet: marred by an Oedipus complex, thanks to Tyrone Guthrie’s reading of Dr. Ernest Jones, but so bouncingly healthy that most spectators apparently failed to notice.

Williamson’s Hamlet has a nervous, almost mincing step. When he is not moving, he seems to be sniffing the air like an animal searching out still another enemy. But mostly he does keep moving—gracelessly, compulsively. He does irritating things with his hands: stuffs them to his mouth when he is in panic (and he is often in panic); flexes them as if each finger had a separate cramp; flails them through the air in tense, right-angle patterns, like a German conductor at triple speed. He camps about the court, simpering, coyly wiggling his eyebrows, patting the knees of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, making grotesque little scarecrow leaps at Polonius; he is a Shakespearean clown turned malignant.

Above all, Williamson offends through his voice, that celebrated act of nasal effrontery which distressed London critics far less than New York critics, who mislabeled it a “Midlands ‘ accent. Williamson was, in fact, born near Glasgow and later lived near Birmingham. It must remain a moot question whether he is competent to read the Old Vic line; he is quite up to doing excellent imitations of Gielgud and Olivier in private. But speculation about Williamson’s technical equipment is as apart from the issue as if one were to speculate whether Allen Ginsberg could write a decent traditional sonnet. The point is, even if Williamson could rival Gielgud, he would have chosen not to.

Williamson’s Hamlet is as profoundly anti-beautiful as any contemporary work of art, and until one is exposed to its abrasiveness one may not be aware how habitually one has associated “beauty” with Shakespeare. Has there ever been an unbeautiful Hamlet? We see right through the matinee-idol sort of Hamlet, of course. We condescend to Edwin Booth, the Victorian Hamlet par excellence, described by his supporters as full of “grace,” “polish,” “fluency,” and accused by his detractors of “making statues all over the stage.” Booth rather drippingly summed up Hamlet for his age as “above all things a gentleman, even to those he hates.”

But then, hasn’t every age idealized Hamlet alter its own image? There are unfilled spaces, a kind of “color-him-yourself” quality, to Hamlet. Considering the impact he makes, he remains strangely undefined—a protean hero, all things to all readers: the philosopher-prince to the Age of Reason, the graveyard romantic to those brought up on Gray’s Elegy. To Goethe, Hamlet was Young Werther, illustrating “the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it.” To Coleridge, he was simply Coleridge, perhaps with a dose of laudanum: “continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.” To the Moscow Art Theater, at least one observer noted, he was a “murderer with a Dostoevskian touch.”

But in all these variations, one presumes, Hamlet had beauty: physical, moral, spiritual, at worst, diabolical beauty. He was, in short, a hero, more or less as the particular time or place saw heroism. Williamson has given us Hamlet as an antihero, a mean, nasty man who leaves embarrassingly empty of meaning speeches like: “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”

Williamson’s Hamlet is measured in negatives so absolutely that he does not even have the hard clarity that is the usual literary advantage of a villain. One is reminded of a stage direction for jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger: “To be as vehement as he is is to be almost noncommittal.”

Chopping his rhythms, fighting the mesmeric flow of sound like a minister working against the King James Version, Williamson gives refreshed readings that set an audience on the edge of their seats. But almost without exception, the lines lor which his Hamlet is memorable are those that curl and shrivel with sarcasm, despair, or self-contempt. His face convulses, his nose squirms as if at an insufferably foul smell for the soliloquy, “O! that this too, too solid [sullied?] flesh would melt . . .” With what supreme disgust he spits out, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” He can be venomously funny, the original black comedian, with odd little throwaway lines like those imagining Claudius draining “his draughts of Rhenish down.”(Richard Burton once remarked that Hamlet was the only tragic figure with a sense of humor, though he may not have foreseen quite this.)

Williamson’s Hamlet operates out of a sort of policy of weakness. When in doubt, he collapses into free-floating hysteria. Even his oaths come out petulant. He is less an avenger than a slinking grudgebearer. All Hamlets exclude all other kinds of Hamlets, and by this rule, every Hamlet is a loser: what he leaves out in the name of consistency will be larger than what he contains. But why choose to present all that is flattest, narrowest, most repugnant—the Hamlet that excludes the most?

If Williamson’s Hamlet were taken by himself, he might seem a skillfully vicious exercise in deprecation and self-deprecation. But Williamson clearly does not intend him to be taken out of context, by himself. Implicit in the antihero is a judgment of life: he is absurd, so the argument goes, precisely because all of life is absurd. This is his justification as well as his self-justification. It certainly has to be the justification for Williamson’s Hamlet that, like every new Hamlet, he projects a concept of the world to match himself. C. S. Lewis was right: Hamlet, that vague, fill-me-in man, is finally less a character than a map of “a certain spiritual region through which most of us have passed.”

What is the “spiritual region” of Williamson’s Hamlet? He is a Hamlet who was born the year World War II started. He is a Hamlet who was six years old when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He is a Hamlet who was only seventeen when Look Back in Anger opened. His whole professional life has been spent in the post-Osborne theater playing roles like The Ginger Man, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, and Bill Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence, a character who practically defines Williamson’s Hamlet: “I myself am more packed with spite and twisting with revenge than anyone I know of. I actually often, frequently, daily want to see people die for their errors. I wish to kill them myself. . . .”

Kott makes it a kind of test for Hamlet: what book is he carrying in the scene when he baits Polonius? A modern Hamlet, Kott suggests, might be carrying Sartre (possibly Nausea?), Camus (doubtless The Rebel), or Kafka (The Castle?). But Hamlet is an amateur actor. Why not a play? Williamson’s Hamlet, it is reasonable to suppose, might be carrying Beckett— Waiting for Godot, perhaps, open at a passage like: “They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

Death lies at the very core of Williamson’s Hamlet. The Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight might have been reviewing Williamson’s performance when he wrote: “Hamlet is inhuman. He has seen through humanity . . . his consciousness works in terms of Death. He has seen the truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the universe: and the truth is evil.”

Here is a Hamlet within the new convention—absurd, existentialist, even nihilistic; the cliché quality of the words tells us just how completely it has become the convention. Still playing the outsider from force of habit, Williamson is the insider now. It is Olivier and Gielgud whose noses are pressed against the window. Williamson has earned the right, for the time being, to say, as David Garrick did of his Hamlet two centuries ago: “I reduced Shakespeare to the thought of my century.” He can even judge his success by the cries of the wounded as Garrick, again, could do with the critic who sputtered: “By God, if he is right, we have all been damnably in the wrong!”

Yet there is a sadness to this kind of triumph. The very young in Williamson’s audience take pure pleasure; but then, in the pleasure game, the young hold all the options. No one Williamson’s age or older can really “enjoy” or “like” this Hamlet. He is a Hamlet representing a catastrophic loss in humanity, and watching him—this is the dangerous thing about Hamlets—one cannot help computing one’s own losses, both as a member of the audience and as a member of that world outside which makes so dispiriting a Hamlet appropriate.

What does it say about Williamson, what does it say about his audience that their shared moment of truth seems to come when he juggles Yorick’s skull at grave’s edge, as if no other symbol, no other scene were half so true? Needless to add, Fortinbras, Hamlet’s twin-image for redemption, has been completely edited out.

Earlier generations constantly worried over the problem: why does Hamlet procrastinate? No problem for Williamson and us. We accept paralysis as practically the norm. To our forefathers, who assumed an internal harmony of sorts within the human personality, Hamlet’s selfcontradictions were a vexing literary mystery. Would the real Hamlet please stand up? Today his fragmentation is what we feel most at ease with—brothers all of the “disordered will,” in Leslie Farber’s phrase.

It should be humiliating to us that his neuroticism is what makes Hamlet a man of our times. For here, obviously, is not only a half Hamlet but a half man. Hamlet, one suspects, is a humiliation as well as a measure of career success to Williamson. For Williamson’s finest, most Shakespearean quality is agonized dissatisfaction. Life is not good enough, and he knows it. But he is not good enough, and he knows that too. There is nothing sniggering or complacent about his pessimism. In the end, an ancient rage at imperfection—that dark other side of the love of good—raises him to the levels of tragedy, subliminally enriching His Hamlet almost in spite of himself.

Yet as a touchstone of contemporary theater, of contemporary culture in fact, this Hamlet produces a discomfiting test. It tells us we have gained our freedom: we have got rid of hypocrisy and most inhibitions all right. It also tells us the bad old news: that every victory over tradition has its built-in ambiguity. In the exciting name of freedom, those who jettison the past tacitly accept their consequent poverty, gambling that it will be temporary, that they will strike it rich again soon, on their terms. Measuring ourselves against Elizabethan richness, we become painfully aware we have not found our new richness yet.

In the final analysis, we do not judge a classic; it judges us. And for now, the judgment of Hamlet upon us is that we are marvelously intense but paying the usual price for intensity, in narrowness. Our admirable standards of honesty have cost us almost everything else. As proxy for his generation like all who play the role, it is Williamson’s excruciating honor to give us a Hamlet blind in one eye but too honest to fake a report on more than he sees: impotence, terror, and a rum end for all.