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"...an admirably
dashing and intelligent central performance from Alan Bates ...
Mr Bates reminds us that Hamlet's tragic flaw was not an inability
to make up his mind but an impulsiveness and intemperateness
that rendered his actions ineffectual: he handles the soliloquies
excellently as if trying to release the tensions inside himself;
and he has exactly the racing mind without which any Hamlet is
a non-starter.
Too many actors scale
the part down to suit their own limitations; Mr Bates instead
captures something of its Renaissance many-sidedness.
The Times
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t
h e a t r e
Hamlet
"Hamlet," by William Shakespeare (title
role)
1971, Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham; Cambridge Theatre,
London
directed by Anthony Page
A Pride of Hamlets
Plays and Players, February 1971
"IT IS WE who are Hamlet," wrote Coleridge in a
moment of supreme identification with the troubled heir to the
throne of Denmark. Yet even that great romantic poet might have
registered puzzlement at the number of young actors who have
recently been presenting the problems of the Shakespearean prince
to audiences throughout the country.
 Alan Bates' Nottingham
Playhouse version, which opened earlier this month at the Cambridge,
seems unlikely to call a halt to last year's rich "Hamlet"
harvest. Already Ian McKellen has been signed to play the prince
for Prospect Productions, and at Harrowgate Martin Potter steps
from the Fellini "Satyricon" to literature's Mona Lisa
in 1971's new year crop of productions. And in March Richard
Chamberlain's TV Hamlet invades the sitting rooms of England.
In interview with
Peter Ansorge and Peter Roberts this month, four of the new interpreters
of the part talk to P&P and discuss why our theatres are
currently so "Hamlet"-obsessed. Though the answers
ranged from the practical to the speculative, each of the interviewees
would probably agree with David Warner's comment on the role
-- "I don't know whether I learnt a great deal about Hamlet.
But I learnt an awful lot about myself."
Alan Bates
"Hamlet is the inner person of all time..."
Alan Bates was in his Nottingham dressing-room, having arrived
for a pre-London discussion with his director, Anthony Page.
Bates is a much more restless character than he often appears
either on stage or the screen. His first subject is his frankest
-- the way he resembles the character he has chosen to play:
"I've done certain parts that have expressed a thinker,
a man with an intense inner life, but never on the scale of Hamlet.
He is the inner person of all time -- the final thing one can
attempt on those lines. Hamlet is faced with a situation he isn't
ready to cope with -- yet he has to do something about it. It's
something I've experienced in various ways -- not being able
to do what you should have. Then making excuses and not living
up to your ideals.
"Hamlet doesn't
trust himself sufficiently. In some ways he's capable of avenging
his father's murder but he can't do it because he's too aware
of everyone else's motives. This is true in life -- if you analyse
something while you are actually doing it, a kind of mental paralysis
sets in. When Hamlet has the chance to kill Claudius while he
is praying, he completely funks it. He talks himself out of the
situation.
"The play
scene is another put-off. Although he claims to be finding confirmation
of what the Ghost told him -- the scene goes beyond the objective
of revenge and killing the king. The play becomes a different
kind of obsession -- one that he can cope with more satisfactorily.
His whole interest is focused on the play. After that he visits
his mother in the closet scene -- and she too becomes a way of
evading his real problem. The attack on his mother is apparently
justifiable, but I think it's something he has always wanted
to do. It's a waste of time when you consider what Hamlet ought
to be doing at this point.
"In fact
out of all the insults that he hurls at his mother -- there are
some extraordinary lines which reveal the depths of his need
and feeling for her. He doesn't have a relationship with his
parents -- both his dead father and his mother are obsessive
to him, something crippling in his mind. His actions and motivations
are governed by his father's unseen finger -- an authority he
can't obey. Apart from Horatio, Ophelia is the closest he gets
to a stable relationship in the play. But Ophelia disappoints
him -- she can't break through the barriers presented by their
situation at Elsinore. Hamlet wants her to be stronger than she
is."
Did Bates draw
on any modern character he has played for his performance of
a man whose neurotic introspective nature leaves him incapable
of doing what he has to? "The part in"Zorba the Greek"
was similar. Although totally different from Hamlet, that was
a man caught in a situation which rendered him almost totally
immobile. He was so introverted, so analytical, that he couldn't
move. He couldn't do anything -- not even dance or sing, though
he desperately wanted to. Even when it came to someone being
killed in front of him he couldn't make himself react."
- Bates thought that Hamlet
would have made a good king -
 Interestingly,
Bates sees the involuntary killing of Polonius as the pivot of
a change in Hamlet's immobile attitudes. "He begins learning
how to do things because of this -- he suddenly grows much more
positive when he learns he is to leave for England. He takes
on the ability to kill, to act. It slowly creeps into him."
Related to this was Bates' choice of 'How all occasions do inform
against me' as the most vital soliloquy in the play: "He
sees himself so clearly in that speech. He understands his relationship
to big events. And he knows he's failed -- completely. It's most
objective. He's not talking about anybody else, or in a fit of
passion (Bates' diagnosis of the problem of Hamlet's 'madness')
-- he is facing up to himself. It's like looking into a mirror.
When he comes back from England he is prepared for action. Suddenly
being out on the field watching Fortinbras' army has made his
whole situation clear."
Bates thought
that Hamlet would have made a good king, that he does finally
resolve the problem of action. Why is the play being revived
so frequently? "Well, it's modern insofar as 'Hamlet' is
the story of most establishment set-ups. But the reason why everyone
is doing it is because it's on all the school lists -- and also
there happen to be a number of actors of an age when they want
to play it. That's a good enough reason for anyone!" |||
Guardian, 13 January 71, Phillip Hope-Wallace:
"On two critical accounts I am prepared to call Alan
Bates's Hamlet masterly; keenly intelligent and deeply moving
at the moment of "how all occasions do inform against me..."
a speech phrased with the effortlessness which bespeaks perfect
emotional identification with the ... I nearly said "notes,"
but it is, of course, the thing you recognise when Alfred Brendel
plays the slow movement of a Beethoven sonata. The other speech
from "Then we defy augury" down to "The readiness
is all" came so much from the heart and again so intelligently,
unselfconsciously delivered that one was entirely caught up.
... I found the episode with Yorick's skull admirably human and
touching, the mere shadow of a smile catching the humour. ...
Angela Scoular's Ophelia is one of the best I recall. ... Never
miss a "Hamlet," not this one, anyway.
Sunday Times, 22 Nov 70,
Harold Hobson reviewing the Nottingham production:
...This "Hamlet" remains resolutely anti-theatrical
to the very end...every rhetorical flourish is methodically knocked
on the head and the only real emotion is reserved for the comparatively
unimportant incident of Yorick's skull, which Alan Bates' Hamlet
regards with a rare and whimsical sorrow. ...The very first time
I saw Mr Bates I admired him without misgiving. This was in John
Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," when he played the
small part of the hero's friend, and showed in it such kindness,
affection, and devotion that i had eyes only for him and for
Mary Ure's patient, long-suffering Alison. This unblushing tribute
to my perspicacity would be more convincing if I had actually
said all this at the time. Unfortunately I did not: so I say
it now.
Mr Page's ideas
about "Hamlet" prevent Mr Bates from displaying the
same qualities that were so striking when he first appeared,
but that he is still a master of them he shows in his friendly
patience with the music hall logic-chopping of the intolerable
gravedigger, and his serene sadness when he takes up Yorick's
skull. Otherwise in this production he is at his best in the
uncommon swiftness of his thought and speech when he is in debate
with characters who inspire in him only contempt.
Daily Telegraph 13 Jan 71, John Barber
"A lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature." Goethe's
description of the Prince of Denmark kept coming to mind during
Alan Bates's performance in the Nottingham Playhouse's "Hamlet,"
now at the Cambridge Theatre. For unquestionably Mr Bates here
embodies such a nature. With his heavy-featured, rather modern
good looks, his big physical presence and his furry voice, he
brings a true prince to the Danish court. Nothing he does is
false or unharmonious. Throughout he has the dignity of a sensitive,
deeply wounded boy... He is at his best when tenderly chiding
Ophelia for loving him, or when wringing his mother's heart at
the opening of the closet scene...
Evening Standard, 12 Jan 71, Milton Schulman
Alan Bates, virile and handsome, provides a well-spoken, deliberate,
persistently brooding Hamlet with few of the shades of humour
and grandeur which makes this character so eternally rewarding.
- from "Five and Eighty Hamlets" by J.C. Trewin
copyright 1987, New Amsterdam Books, 1992
(first published by Century Hutchinson Ltd., London)
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- EARLY in 1971 another director, Anthony Page, at the Cambridge
Theatre in London, agreed with [Jonathan] Miller by removing
the first scene, a perilous gash, a very limb lopp'd off. Alan
Bates, to my regret, was visible before a word was spoken, entering
in customary solemn black before the court had assembled. Again
we had lost a passage once deemed to be inviolable. Elsewhere
during the night I had not noticed cutting more obtrusive; not
so much the removal of the Gravedigger's early verbiage, but
an intermittent mincing of the text: the loss, say, of Polonius's
introduction of the Players and Hamlet's "A station like
the herald Mercury."
 Decor was unexpected, a metal-box
Elsinore. It was nearly forty years since Theodore Komisarjevsky's
so-called "aluminium" "Macbeth" at Stratford.
Now at the Cambridge we had, in effect, an aluminium "Hamlet,"
set in sliding panels that, as they flicked to and fro, caused
me to think less of "Denmark's a prison," which could
have been the intention, than to wonder whether Hamlet might
not be missing some Danish tube train. Alan Bates, who inhabited
these bare, gleaming spaces, a relaxed, cogently spoken actor,
aged thirty-six, was not generally a Shakespearian, though he
had played Richard III at Stratford, Ontario; brought up with
the Royal Court company in its explosive period, he was in the
original cast of "Look Back in Anger." In this "Hamlet"
he missed few points without making me profoundly aware of any:
no doubt he could have graced the Danish throne, yet he had little
magnetism, no touch of splendour in a correct, rather dispiriting
performance that down the years has slipped into the ruck. Round him the standard was respectable: a
moderate Polonius and Ophelia; some dubious casting (a tough,
compact Fortinbras, not much like the "delicate and tender
prince"). Most performances, as I think Desmond MacCarthy
said, can leave traces on the sand when the tide has ebbed; this
one had in Douglas Wilmer a smooth compact usurper, and in Celia
Johnson's Gertrude, with a voice like brittle spun glass, the
portrait of a puzzled mind, regally tactful in small things but
foolishly overcome.
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- Trewin has been drama critic of the London Observer, Punch,
and the Illustrated London News.
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