No John-a-dreams, this

In 1964, just as he was about to reach the heights of gossip notoriety, Richard Burton starred as Hamlet on Broadway, in a production directed by John Gielgud, whose own performances of the role stressed the beauty of Shakespeare's line. The production immediately sold out, so the producers decided to enact what passed for "pay-per-view" in that day: one live performance was filmed, and presented simultaneously in movie theaters across the U.S. on one night. Then all the prints were to be destroyed. However, Burton kept one print for himself, and, of course--and thankfully--it's made its way to DVD.



The film was shot in black-and-white, on a stage devoid of scenery, with the minimum of props (and those used are ratty in the extreme), the actors wearing casual contemporary clothes. Gielgud wanted the words to shine forth, so he called it a "final run-through" Hamlet, with nothing to distract the audience from the text--most of which he used. The cast, besides Burton, was mainly American, with the notable exception of the Ghost, which was shown as a monstrous shadow with Gielgud's voice. Alfred Drake, normally a musical lead, played Claudius, and not too badly (except he died like a punk, as Samuel L. Jackson might put it); the most famous American was Hume Cronyn (pictured in the still), who got quite a few laughs as Polonius.

That fact points out the strength and weakness of the film. It is a performance, with a live audience, and thus is one of the few presentations on film of Hamlet as an actual drama on a stage. Unfortunately, the film is directed more like a film, in that during Hamlet's soliloquies, Burton is shot in various forms of close-up; scenes with two characters are done in a two-shot, with the entire stage shown only to establish a scene or when absolutely necessary (as during the final duel). An audience sees Hamlet in the theater as an entire image, as it were; if an actor is alone on stage, it is up to him or her to make us look and make our own mental close-ups.

And Burton does this chiefly with his voice, although at this stage of his life he was surprisingly graceful, and had not entered that degree of alcoholism that prevented him from holding a gun steadily in Where Eagles Dare, thus prompting co-star Clint Eastwood to do volunteer to do all the shooting. As I've mentioned a few entries ago, Hamlet is a role well suited to Burton's strengths, particularly his voice, with a superlative control of range both in loudness and pitch, biting the words off: "to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets," delivered in throaty growl, for instance. A friend of mine saw this performance in New York, and said Burton was amazing, which I can well imagine. His Hamlet is angry, intelligent, and witty.

My students generally do not like this version, but it provides magnificent examples of stage acting to contrast with movie acting, as well as a performance that some have called one of the two best Hamlets of the second half of the twentieth century. The other? That's for next time.

Acting

When I was researching my review of a biography of British playwright John Osborne, I found a DVD available in Britain of a film by Tony Palmer about Osborne. It arrived too late to be useful for the review, but I'm still interested in Osborne, and I finally got around to watching it last night. It contained interesting archival interviews with theater people like Kenneth Tynan and Tony Richardson, as well as interviews with Osborne himself and contemporary playwrights who have been influenced by him, such as David Hare.

But by far the most fascinating bits were filmed excerpts from Osborne's plays as they were performed in the theater. This included extensive color footage of Olivier in The Entertainer ("you'll be out by half-past, uh, half assed"), as well as Osborne himself and his wife at the time, Jill Bennett, in A Patriot for Me. The performances though that astounded me were those of Albert Finney in Luther and Nicol Williamson in Inadmissable Evidence. The were revelatory, unbelievably transformative.



Take Finney's. His voice became deeper, his words seemed to be masticated and then spit out, his forearms corded and taut as his sleeves of his monk's gown kept rolling up. You could not take your eyes off him. I don't think this was merely due to the differences between acting on stage and in film. There is something about the transitory nature of dramatic performance that allows for this risk-taking; probably also the nature of film acting, with its breaks, pauses, and retakes, ameliorates the momentum a theatrical performace can build, especially with the long speeches Osborne gives his main characters.



Same effect with Williamson. His portrayal of Bill Maitland, a lawyer undergoing a breakdown, was riveting. In fact, this entry was going to be about what happened to Nicol Williamson's career, since at one point, to me, he had the greatest promise of any British actor. His Hamlet was original--barbed and acerbic--his Merlin suitably alien and chilling after the avuncular Merlin of Sword in the Stone, his Sherlock Holmes quirky and intelligent (the performance as well as the character). The IMDB mini-biography explains why his career kept self-imploding. He looked fine and was wickedly witty in his contemporary (2004) interviews in the film.

Interestingly enough, a film performance by Finney was also included in this documentary--his title role in Tom Jones, for which Osborne wrote the screenplay. And in it Finney seemed to be younger, less heavy, altogether lighter. Make-up was not the only explanation. He was acting, in the best British tradition. Olivier's Archie Rice is nothing like his Othello. Seems obvious, right?

Well, another movie extensively excerpted was Tony Ricardson's version of Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which stars Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter. And while I watched Burton's performance, I discovered that he really wasn't a very transformative actor at all. His Jimmy Porter is not all that different from his Hamlet. His voice is a magnificent instrument--to hear those soliloquies in the theater ("Frailty, thy name is wOMAN!") must have been thrilling. But he does the same vocal tricks with his Porter, modulating his voice and then jumping on a word (vIRGIN!"). Maybe he became a star too soon and didn't do enough repertory work, but he did not have all that much of a career to throw into the bottle when he finally did that.

But, as Finney said, it was Osborne's works at the Royal Court Theatre that gave him and other less "well-bred" actors opportunities to play leads in dramas instead of gardeners, and for that we can all be grateful.