Hamlet
1969: Tony Richardson

Judith Crist hailed this as the finest Hamlet ever (at least as of the date of the production) and there’s something to be said for it. I doubt that she could or would say the same today. Certainly Nicol Williamson was at this point near the pinnacle of his somewhat manic career, and he delivers a rich, nuanced performance, colored with a wonderfully flexible voice. It’s a fully cinematic treatment, with understated but distinctly real-world sets and dark corridors; some of the visual moves one finds here foreshadow those undertaken by Zeffirelli about twenty years later.

Some of the production values are strikingly dated, though, with such features as a storm of shrieking strings (a la Psycho) to herald anything unusual, and a hollow electronically enhanced gong-like sound behind the ghost’s speech; the ghost is never seen save as a reflected light in the faces of those observing him, and he speaks in Hamlet’s voice (i.e., Williamson’s). The point, accordingly, seems to be that the ghost is a projection of Hamlet’s own psyche, and so the whole is a kind of split-personality form of internal dialogue. The result is a very psychologized version of the play, presupposing that Hamlet’s mind is genuinely breaking down, which is (to my way of thinking) one of its distinct weaknesses. It downplays the supernatural element, which is necessary for a serious understanding of the play as it was written, and it tends to psychologize what I think Shakespeare meant to be taken literally. I have already put elsewhere what I think is going on in Hamlet, so I won’t repeat that here.

The play is also cut brutally — the whole running length is less than two hours (114 or 117 minutes, depending on what sources you believe). Selections of lines are thinned out like so much hair, and other sections are discarded wholesale. The scene where Hamlet discovers Claudius at his prayers is nowhere in sight, and to my thinking this is a fatal flaw in the production. Eventually Claudius delivers his own speech, but Hamlet does not appear, and hence his decision not to kill Claudius there is swept under the rug. At least on my own understanding of the play, this is the single most important episode, so its inclusion is paramount.

For all its very real limitations, the acting is remarkably good throughout. Williamson at thirty-one is about perfect for the thirty-year-old Hamlet. He plays the role with a restrained power, showing the kinds of nuances one cannot easily realize on stage. Judy Parfitt (the older queen in Ever After and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the older BBC Pride and Prejudice), only three years older than Williamson, plays Gertrude, and so seems a bit unlikely to be his mother. A youthful Anthony Hopkins is only a year older than Williamson, but he is robustly degenerate as Claudius, and his performance really deserves particular attention.

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