The theater, the cinema and ourselves (1947)

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a thing, too superimposed, it is impossible to ask anyone to create Hamlet and deal with modernization, imposed from without, at the same time. In 1925 Sir Barry Jackson attempted Hamlet in modern dress in order to bring it nearer to the public, and if they had been able to treat it as naturally as the players it might have achieved its object. But to perform Hamlet in trunk and hose has become so customary that Hamlet in plus fours or a dinner jacket must seem artificial. You cannot get away from the awkwardness, one does not get nearer Hamlet in that way. In 1936-37 at The Old Vic there was an attempt at creating a new and more modern Hamlet by making him an acrobat as well as a philosopher. This was no stage Hamlet in the old-fashioned sense of the word though in the more modern sense he was very stagey. Laurence Olivier leapt amongst the battlements with the agility of an ape, one almost expected him to swing from one of the turrets. But is this modernization, or even what Laurence Olivier really felt? Nearly ten years later we had Alec Clunes, merging the beauty of Shakespeare's words with the beauty of their sound, never superimposing the one on the other but achieving a perfect union. Yet though easy and natural there was something strangely impersonal and, as in Gielgud's rendering, a curious lack of intimacy. Hamlet, after all, was a man, and to speak lines beautifully, avoiding rather obvious pitfalls, is not enough. Bradfield College a year later modernized Hamlet in the best possible way by forgetting that it belonged to any period, Hamlet must be genuinely created from within. Here was no tinkering with Shakespeare, the boy who played Hamlet at Bradfield was really inside the part, the schoolboy yet Hamlet. We believed in him as much as we believed in the rain that drenched us as we watched. "In the mind's eye, Horatio," was said lightly but a little impatiently and there was a youthful impatience in "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy." He might also have added, "you silly ass". Yet again there was impatience though of a different kind in "Rest, rest perturbed spirit," and an almost petulant irritation in "words, words, words". It is possible that the modern schoolboy has more depth and sympathy with life than the schoolboy of yesterday and in this Bradfield Hamlet the depth and sympathy were never forced, it was youth giving us of its best, and it was a very individual youth, not a mass of instructions and stage directions. Modernization must, of course, come if Hamlet is not to be a museum piece but it must come, as at Bradfield, from within and not by a producer's "words, words, words". J. D. Bennett's hamlet. 1946. {Bradfield College.) 15