Tania Lieven (1961)

Part of the BFI’s ‘UnLOCked’ season, which links to this year’s ‘World Shakespeare Festival’.  (Even though this is a showcase year for Britain, the timing of the Festival is odd, only four years before the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.)  It was frustrating that neither the programme note – a brief run through the relatively few Shakespeare productions on British commercial television – nor the introduction to the film supplied more information about the production.  When I got home and looked it up online, I discovered there were two versions of Hamlet produced by Associated Rediffusion in the autumn term of 1961 – each with a different director and cast and screened, on either side of the half-term holiday, as five weekly episodes.   This raises questions I don’t know the answers to – such as what proportion of schools had television in 1961, and what English teachers thought about pruning the text to fit the programme schedule. This Hamlet, with the five episodes stitched together in a recording retrieved as part of the discoveries in the American Library of Congress in 2010, runs for 123 minutes including closing credits (the most obvious cuts include the opening scene on the ramparts).   The BFI monthly programme booklet and note for the screening made a lot of how much playing Hamlet meant to Barry Foster, and the screening was introduced by his widow Judith Shergold, a likeably unconfident public speaker.  I hope it was a slip of the tongue when she described how her late husband had tried unsuccessfully to track down the recording and ‘the BBC said they knew nothing about it’.

I like to think it was consideration for the needs of people preparing for exams, as well as limited technical resources, that caused Tania Lieven and her cast to put themselves at the service of the text rather than try to dazzle the audience.   There’s a good deal of conscientious but unremarkable acting from the likes of Neville Jason (Horatio), Peter Copley (the Ghost) and David Sumner (Laertes).  Jennifer Daniel’s very limited Ophelia is more of a problem.  Judith Shergold talked amusingly of Barry Foster’s anxiety about his crinkly hair and how, on the advice of a friend, he had it cut and, in effect, ironed for the occasion.   This was a smart move:  there are some wigs in this production that are not just unconvincing but evidently ill-fitting:  you notice both Laertes and Claudius checking their hairpiece is still in place at very unlikely moments.   (I assume the episodes screened were pre-recorded but that the recording itself was a single take.)   Michael Aldridge is pretty good as Polonius, although the character is richer when an actor gives you the idea that Polonius believes himself to be highly sophisticated (as Oliver Ford Davies did in the television adaptation of the David Tennant Hamlet a year or two ago).

Barry Foster is a vigorous Prince:  there’s never a suggestion with him that the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.  (William Russell played Hamlet in the other – and preceding – Rediffusion production.)   Foster’s appetite for the role is obvious and appealing but he’s very self-aware.  The soliloquies (although I’d dozed off briefly at ‘To be or not to be’ time) are delivered in incantatory style and somewhat overwrought, even though Foster uses a fine voice to sonorous effect.  As a result, when Hamlet is telling the players how to perform, you feel this is a case of do as I say, not as I do.  Foster is much better when he forgets himself and plays to another actor instead of the camera.  He’s especially good with the two women.  The closet scene is excellent, and the Freudian edge to Hamlet’s relationship with his mother comes across strongly – not least because Patricia Jessel, without the head-dress this Gertrude usually wears and her hair down, looks so much closer in age to Foster here.  (There’s an effective resonance in the closeness between Gertrude and Hamlet in the final death scene.)   Sydney Tafler, with his long experience in cinema, is unsurprisingly more relaxed than most of the others in front of the camera.  Because he became typecast as a spiv in cinema, the other elements of his performance as Claudius are surprising, however – and a pleasant surprise.   In the early scenes, he gives the new king a believable shallow charisma; later on, Tafler’s throttled voice gets across the impacted guilt inside Claudius.  The players themselves are too hammy to be alarming but Tafler’s reactions to ‘The Mouse Trap’ are good.

I enjoyed this Hamlet more than I would ever expect to enjoy the play on stage or even on film if it were done now.  It made me realise what an old-fashioned and narrow idea I have of ‘genuine’ Shakespeare – doublet and hose.  I found the absence of tricksiness a real relief.  ‘I’ve seen it before:  he dies’, is what John Osborne’s mother is alleged (by the son who loathed her) to have said, when Osborne asked if she was coming to see a production of Hamlet in which he was appearing.  For the most part, the actors in this Associated Rediffusion version allow the meaning of the lines to come through clearly and afresh:  the persistence of death in those lines, in Hamlet’s lines especially, shocks and thrills.

5 July 2012