Hamlet’s tale is a maze of mystery. His avatars come and go, seldom better than nine-days’ wonders. Yet how easily collecting them turns into a compulsion. Giorgio Albertazzi, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet in a turtleneck is one I’d jump to see again, likewise the 31-year-old Ian McKellen’s Hamlet 1.0 (eclipsed in his day by Alan Bates and Richard Chamberlain), Robert Wilson’s Hamlet who played all the other roles, too, not to forget Zeb Mehring, Christian Camargo, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ralph Fiennes, Nicol Williamson …
In a roll call going back to 1900—the year Sarah Bernhardt briefly donned the inky cloak at Manhattan’s since-vanished Garden Theatre—Broadway’s Hamlet numero uno by acclamation has been the Welsh coal miner’s son Richard Burton at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1964. With John Thorne’s whip-smart backstage drama The Motive and the Cue at London’s National Theatre last year, that production and the personalities behind it claimed the attention of a new generation. Happily, we can also catch Burton’s portrayal for ourselves, as filmed at the tail end of his record-breaking 137-performance run.
The prestige of the event rode the coattails of tabloid sensationalism. Burton’s phase as a matinee idol of lofty ambition and then as a mere movie star lay far behind him. By now, his scandalous liaison with Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra had catapulted him to supernova celebrity. For the box office, the Burtons’ private wedding between tryouts of Hamlet in Toronto was the cherry on the cake.
Burton took direction from John Gielgud, the preeminent Hamlet of an earlier generation then fading from fashion. For a breath of fresh air, Gielgud conceived the staging as a run-through in rehearsal clothes. In imperfectly yet passably remastered black and white, the moving images focus attention squarely on what’s cooking, not on idle window dressing. Proper costumes—good ones, boldly graphic—figure solely in the all-important play-within-the-play that Hamlet nicknames The Mousetrap.
At center stage, Burton shows us his face like an open book. Wild and whirling words (a given in Hamlet) alternate with musings of disarming gentleness, steeped in Virgilian compassion. Soliloquies shade pensive rather than bitter. Burton’s hardest blows land in bare-knuckle bouts with Hamlet’s two women, first his sweetheart, then his mother. If he gives showy athletics a pass, the imagination he sometimes lavishes on as little as a syllable flashes like St. Elmo’s fire. “Breath”—as in “Give it breath with your mouth,” an instruction on how to play a pipe—glides from grainy baritone up to a pinging falsetto, the R a perfect trill. Amazing! Equally so, “Ay, so, God be wi’ ye!,” Hamlet’s dismissal of a courtier who doesn’t know when to skedaddle, each tiny word a separate thunderbolt.
For more back story, consult Letters From An Actor, by William Redfield, a principal source for Thorne’s play. Cast (with incomprehensible star billing) as the clueless Guildenstern, Redfield was in position to see a lot. “Why,” he wondered, referring to Burton, “should anyone give up $500,000 and more per picture in order to slither into a hair shirt?” Redfield obsessed a lot more over actors’ existential hair shirts than he did over money, but we’ve all got bills to pay. “The film version played four performances in a thousand theatres,” he discloses with smothered fury, “and has grossed (to date) a total of $4,000,000. The financial details of this venture involved a mass screwing of the acting company so excruciatingly delicious that only a separate letter could do the tale justice. Another day. Another diary.”
The Richard Burton’s Hamlet is available for streaming on YouTube
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
