Elsinore of the Mind

Hamlet has obsessed the Western mind for 369 years. Why? It is not because most people love great works of art. On the contrary, most people find great works of art oppressive, since such works invariably center on the nature of human destiny, and that destiny is tragic. Quite simply, Hamlet is a world, and like the world, it cannot be ignored. Every man has lived some part of the play, and to be a man is to be inextricably involved in the play. Hamlet probes and grips the profound themes of existence--death, love, time, fidelity, friendship, family, the relationships of a man and a woman, a son and father, a mother and son, murder and madness. Above all, it probes the value of existence, man's most anguishing question put in the form that every man knows from the time he first hears and ponders it--to be or not to be.

Far from being a surefire part, the role of Hamlet dwarfs most actors, for the magnitude of the role requires a corresponding size and scope in the actor who plays it. Technique is not enough. Verbal violin play, a graceful carriage, a handsome profile--these suffice for the ordinary Hamlet. The great Hamlet is coached by life itself, schooled by life to think, listen, grow, love, hate, suffer and endure. So rigorous is this demand that in these more than 31 centuries there have been no more than a dozen great Hamlets. Everyone who is alive today has the rare and illuminating privilege of seeing one of them--Nicol Williamson.

Dramatic Vise. This is a filmed version of the play (TIME, Feb. 28, 1969), and Williamson is a man of the theater in the same way that a tiger is a creature of the jungle. This means that he transcends the celluloid and holds the audience in a dramatic vise. His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier and Burton. Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature. Williamson holds a mirror up to the soul.

Two valuable aspects of the film have been contributed by Director Tony Richardson. He has cut the text by about a third, giving the production a brisk pace without mangling it. Olivier's film never evoked "the pale cast of thought." It made Hamlet an agile activist who, as one critic put it, was "too busy" to kill the king. Richardson has concentrated on closeups of heads. The most concrete image in Hamlet is Yorick's skull, the symbol of mortality. The abstract image is the human brain. The existential terrain of Hamlet is the mind, vast as the earth and narrow as the tomb. By concentrating on men's faces and skulls, Richardson has located the essential geography of Hamlet far more relevantly than if he had built some grandiose castle of Elsinore.

Apart from Williamson, the cast is uneven, with Anthony Hopkins' Claudius and Judy Parfitt's Gertrude lacking sufficient force, maturity and sensuality. But Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia is remarkably affecting. She is ethereal, vulnerable, and in some strange way purer than the infancy of truth. Yet the granitic power and sweep of the film rest with Williamson. Here are antic wit, sly, sarcastic irony, erotic longings, a sentient intelligence that lights up thought like the sun at dawn.

Daily Plank. Williamson has something more that sets him apart from almost every other actor. He is a Scot, and every inch the child of John Knox out of Calvin. What he puts into Hamlet and all the other parts that he has played is the passionate intensity of a religious zealot. This makes him a metaphysical actor who asks people to look into the abyss of being. Most people prefer to walk the safe 9-to-5 plank of their daily lives and never look over the edge at fate.

Hemingway once said of the great bullfighter Joselito that, having given greatly of himself in the bull ring, he found the crowd asking for more. And so, said Hemingway, he gave his life, because that was all he had. That is what Nicol Williamson ineluctably gives.

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