By
H. G. Kippax
Sidney Morning News
12/79
Those who have been waiting eagerly for The Old Vic Hamlet will not be
disappointed, I think. It is
a deeply considered—absorbing—production, and Mr. Jacobi’s Prince is at
least two-thirds of a great performance.
But I do suggest that you leave your preconceptions at home The production superficially is straightforward, played in
Tudor costume against sombre, towering flats and drapes. There are no perversities, no impositions in the name of
originality. The text, cut to three
hours playing time with one interval, determines all.
But the production has a very definite point of view, and its logic can
be surprising. You will not find a
“noble” Prince in any conventional sense; indeed, hardly a Prince at all,
for there is little sense, court, kingdom, politics.
This is a domestic tragedy, a tale of two families fatally embroiled in
crime and intrigue. What is rotten
is nothing so complex as the State of Denmark.
It is erring human beings—representatives of corrupt, muddled, agonized
humanity itself.
The note is struck in an opening dumb-show.
This is not imposition, as I feared at first; the interpretation
validates it. In murky light
Hamlet, his father, his mother and his uncle confront each other, circle each
other, eye each other. We are shown
a world of suspicion.
The domestic note emerges in the first court scene.
The king is a bully; the queen grumpish, overdressed, insensitive.
Their business is the ordering of family affairs, notably the family’s
problem child—a sulky Hamlet, fretting to escape to Wittenberg.
Frustrated, he gives us his first soliloquy—a mingling of grief,
disgust, and spleen. The key is
low, the pressure light, Hamlet? One
begins to wonder!
Plainly something is needed if the most popular play ever written is not
to drizzle down the drain. It comes
soon enough. The meeting of Hamlet
and a towering, superbly sonorous Ghost is a slow lightning stroke.
I have never seen it better acted. It
galvanizes the whole play. And it
sets this Hamlet on a course headed for stark, bleak tragedy.
The meeting devastates Hamlet. From
then on there broods over the whole play the question, Is this an “honest”
Ghost? Well, is it? Here, I think not—though Mr. Robertson imposes no answer.
Certainly, from this scene onwards a miasma of suspicion, cruelty and
creeping callousness envelops this enclosed and inescapable world.
No, this Hamlet is not Wilson Knight’s “villain,” the play’s
destructive element. Mr. Jacobi is
more complex than that. His Hamlet
works on three levels—the admirable man of reason and of greatness of heart;
the man of assumed antic disposition, cruel, malicious, insensitive (see his
almost psychopathic detachment from the dead Polonius); and, the heart of the
mystery, the man steered off-course, out-of-joint, by the sheer shock of the
Ghost and the weight of the duty laid upon him.
This is not an odeipal Hamlet.
His motive and his cue for passion is the murder of his father.
It comes from the Ghost, not Gertrude.
Mr. Jacobi’s grief with the Ghost is overwhelming; and it pervades the
rest of the play, as the interplay of sanity, assumed insanity and “nervous
breakdown” unravels the knotted thought, the contradictions, the passions of
the part.
The passions, above all. This
Hamlet is passion’s slave. It
corrupts him in the end, it exhausts him. Baffled,
he goes to his death fatalistically, quiescently, almost acquiescently.
The play ends with a great evil purged, but without comfort.
I have called the Hamlet two-thirds of a great performance.
That is because with the final descent
into fatalism, the acting loses tension and the play’s interest falls
away. Its heights are the great
scenes of passion—above all, with Ophelia and Gertrude, both heartbreaking.
In these we can bow, like Raskolnikov, to suffering humanity itself in
the image of this tortured, torturing, lonely man.
It is virtuoso acting that remains unflinchingly faithful, in perception
and nuance, to the text—contradictions, ambiguities and all.
Mr. Jacobi is Gielgud’s successor, building from many parts a whole.
And he proclaims his succession with most miraculous organ—in tones
trumpet-tongued, or in a whisper.
I have no space for the others and that is unfair.
This is a strong company, beautifully spoken, and with a dazzling command
of pace. Let me single out
one—Miss Bruce, finding as the character grows, dignity and pathos in
frivolous, stupid, selfish Gertrude. Brilliant.