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The National Theatre's Hamlet: A Record
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
The National Theatre's 1975–1976 production of Hamlet was its first since the inaugural production of 1963, director Peter Hall's first since the 1965 Royal Shakespeare Company version, and Albert Finney's first attempt at the title role. Originally intended to be the first play done in the Olivier Theatre, the large thrust-stage auditorium in the National Theatre's new London building, it instead became one of the last to be presented at the Old Vic when construction delays postponed the opening of the new house. Hamlet opened at the Old Vic on 10 December 1975, and moved to the Lyttleton, the smaller proscenium theatre in the new building, on 16 March 1976, to continue in repertory through the year.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1978
References
1 The description that follows is based on notes taken during the performance of Monday 26 July 1976.
2 This interpretation of Horatio may owe something to Gordon Jackson's in the Tony Richardson/Nicol Williamson production and film.
3 Again this recalls the Richardson film, in which this scene was played in the royal bedchamber, with Claudius and Gertrude in bed.
4 Finney had some trouble with his lines this evening, perhaps because he had been off for over a week. Earlier, he had gotten lost in “What a piece of work is a man,” and cut about half of it. In the Hecuba scene “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” became “and brief impressions,” and “What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba” came out “or he to her.” His nervousness became increasingly obvious and reached its head in this scene, where he finally went up completely in his long speech to Horatio, and had to call for prompting twice within three or four lines. That crisis past, he had no more trouble, thought it was difficult to tell how much of his tension in the next few scenes was acting.
5 The only other time I've seen the end of the scene played this way was in an obscure London fringe production in December 1973, featuring an unknown (to me) Indian actor-director named Madhav Sharma.
6 With the intermission and the subsequent action, Finney had been offstage for exactly one hour.
7 This final tableau inevitably called up memories of the end of Olivier's film of Richard III. But the crown had not been developed at all as a symbol here, as it had in the film, and it seemed more like a self-conscious attempt at a final flourish than an effective climactic image.