The thing with this play
The Independent, 2nd November 1994
As Michael Pennington prepares for this fifth Hamlet (the second for Peter Hall),
the actor replays scenes with David Warner, Marianne Faithfull, Nicol Williamson,
Tony Richardson, Olivier, Gielgud and a cast of thousands.
In 1965 Peter Hall showed me how to play Fortinbras. It was much my best part to
date. But the previous year I had been an undergraduate Hamlet, directed in Cambridge
by Gabor Cossa, a Hungarian antique dealer and enthusiastic amateur who once a year
locked up his shop and put on a play. We had cooked up our production in the back
room, among the dusty clocks. It went OK: George Steiner, no less, enthused about
it in the Guardian, though a local critic did note that “some gestures tended towards
monotony”. A year later, delivering my valediction over David Warner’s Prince at
Stratford, I reckoned I was cooking.
Fortinbras, Peter said, was a glamorous political opportunist who can hardly believe
his luck, arriving at the end to find the crowned heads dead all around. You can
imagine the result: a performance of precocious deliberation and self-indulgence
that must have been more keenly felt by the dead Court of Denmark, holding mortally
still after four hours’ work while I laboured through my moment. I found my place
better earlier in the evening as the bottom half of the Ghost, a 10ft figure theoretically
played by Patrick Magee but really a kind of two-tiered zimmer frame on wheels. The
operator peered blindly through a small grille in the belly of the beast, the back
of his head pressed into the loins of Magee, who stood on the upper tier, his arms
in the great arms of the model, his head in the helmet. I was that operator. The
steeply raked stage had a deep winching channel cut down its centre, a few millimetres
wider than the wheels of my machine, as I often parlously found. Then Magee left
the cast, leaving a recording behind, and another supernumerary was brought in to
join me, miming the action on the upper deck (a cushy job, I thought). The director
asks me to point out that the whole device was a folly of his youth: and indeed it
was eventually cut, unwisely leaving me free to sit and prepare for Fortinbras.
The production, and David Warner’s performance, based on a provisional political
alienation which anticipated the Paris événements by three years, became famous and
rightly so: it combined theatricality with a fascination with the warp and woof of
politics. It was certainly strong enough to contain an aggrieved young actor in a
zimmer frame and a narcissistic Fortinbras.
I played Laertes in 1969, the first full-scale at the Roundhouse, home of Centre
42, idealism battling in the place with patchouli and dankness. The casting ranged
from Gordon Jackson and Judy Parfitt in the north to Michael Elphick and Marianne
Faithfull in the south, Roger Livesey and Mark Dignam in the east to Anthony Hopkins
and Anjelica Huston in the west, with Nicol Williamson in the middle, baleful and
tender, an object lesson in passionate commitment. Elsewhere the show was a riot
of individualism, all bones and muscle and not much brain, and too many of us in
the middle ranks were taking chemical risks for things to stay stable for very long.
The director Tony Richardson presided over the event with a sort of piratical laissez-faire,
dispensing provocatively incomplete ideas like incest between Laertes and Ophelia
(“just grab his cock, Marianne”). The show had balls all right and a terrific Hamlet,
but a rather conventional air, and no politics.
I rejoined the RSC in 1974 and learned that John Barton had an idea to do the play
with me. I immediately felt a great peace, which soon gave way to a more or less
permanent anxiety. Six years later (the interim being mine), we did the production.
I pause: what can a man say about his own Hamlet? The part is like a pane of clear
glass disclosing the actor to a greedy audience; and playing it changes you for good,
and for the better. It may not advance a career, often marking the end of a sequence
of work rather than the beginning; it may bring eccentric benefits, in my case the
freedom of the city of Assisi. Some nights the part felt like slipping on a tailored
glove, others it drove me crazy mad; I can remember a spectator calling “Don’t do
it!” when Osric brought Laertes’ challenge to duel, and severe food poisoning in
the first soliloquy, causing the understudy to start like a guilty thing upon a fearful
summons. John Barton wanted a graceful Hamlet to balance the recent wave of caustic
ones: meanwhile, I thumped Ophelia resoundingly to the floor in the Nunnery Scene.
Many kind and unforgettable things were said to me; on the other hand James Fenton,
not yet Professor of Poetry, called it Hamlet, Prune of Denmark, and then reprinted
his review in an anthology of his writing, so his kindly description now has a permanent
place in many of the lavatories of the land.
During the run, I spent the day with Laurence Olivier. He was my first Hamlet, in
the film, and I still think it very fine. At the moment of sighting me he declared
that I had dyed my hair for the part, just as he had; I privately hoped that my highlights
were more subtle than his had been. Nine years later, on the day that he died, it
happened that I was filming John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease in Tuscany. John Gielgud
and Susan Fleetwood on one sofa, myself on another with Fyodor Chaliapin, the son
of the great singer, now himself nearly 90. Colin Rogers, the producer, came on the
set, sorry to break in, but he felt he must inform is that Olivier had died. Everyone
tried not to look at Gielgud. Chaliapin, a little hard of hearing, continued to tell
me what the painter Repin had said to him in 1913. I interrupted him. “Fyodor, I
think I should tell you that Laurence Olivier has died.” “Aaaagh!” cried Chaliapin,
on a fierce intake of breath, and extravagantly raising his hands before his face
clapped them together in dismay. When they separated, a large fly lay horribly crushed
in one palm. Now, when I think of the passing of Olivier, this crushed fly is what
I see. But what I hear is the voice of Gielgud, talking later about his own feelings
for Olivier. His voice - generous, humorous and sad - was Hamlet’s own.
Preparing to open Gielgud’s theatre, we toured Peter Hall’s third production of the
play this summer to the Herodes Atticus amphitheatre in Athens. Gertrude comes forward
to report the drowning of Ophelia like the messenger coming to tell of the death
of Agamemnon: the evening breeze blows at Ophelia’s dress as if to take her fragile
wits away. During this week a great Russian Hamlet, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, has died.
It is 30 years since I saw him in Kozintsev’s wonderful file, beautiful, mordant
and true; 30 years also since I fell out with Gabor Cossa in the back room of his
shop, and the first of some 600 performances of the play that I’ve participated in.
Gabor never directed me in the end: when it came to the point, he would cast his
eyes proudly heavenward and say that I would explain, since “Michael has his own
ideas”. I didn’t and I still don’t; but I hear the play all the time, rather as Nick
Hornby hears Arsenal, not so much as an obsession but as a condition of life. Now,
after five of the principal parts, in step with mu own ageing (and hopefully to side-step
Polonius) I suppose it’s just the Gravedigger and out.
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