Word: gielgud
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...theater. Despite the terrific jump in productions, musicals have not multiplied: ten last season, ten this. Of three U.S. clicks in London, one-The Man Who Came to Dinner-is farce, but Claudia is semiserious, and Watch on the Rhine wholly so. Shakespeare was a sellout when John Gielgud revived Macbeth in July. Shaw has been a hit since Vivien Leigh revived The Doctor's Dilemma in March. (Winston Churchill, a Leigh fan, has seen it twice.) John Gielgud has revived Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which is a smash, plans to revive Congreve...
...different, and on the whole far better, is the Lady Macbeth of Judith Anderson (Family Portrait, the Gielgud Hamlet). A characterization, not a recital, its power in the earlier scenes is flawed by overacting, but steadily improves, leaps the last and highest hurdle magnificently. In the sleepwalking scene, Actress Anderson, with her sick, half-strangled voice, her tottering, sleep-locked footsteps, above all in the terrifying movement of her "bloody" hands, really conveys the ruin of a once dauntless and unflinching nature...
Williams' mythical Lear came just in time to steam London up for a real Lear. Fortnight ago John Gielgud-who played Hamlet on Broadway in 1936-opened in Lear at London's historic, wrong-side-of-the-Thames Old Vic. The stanch Old Vicars-highbrows, artists, workingmen, eccentrics-in tweeds and business suits, did not make for a glittering first night. But because Gielgud was fighting for art in wartime, and because he played the mad, storm-swept, kingly old man with understanding, London's critics voted Lear the most important theatrical event since the war began...
...tabloid Julius Caesar is a hit; so is a marathon Hamlet. A romantic play-Romeo and Juliet-starring Katharine Cornell, does well enough; a largely rhetorical one-King Richard II-starring a then not well-known Maurice Evans, does far better. Hamlet, with John Gielgud, then no name on Broadway, goes over big; with Leslie Howard, a big Broadway name, flops. Tallulah Bankhead cannot last a week in Antony and Cleopatra, Walter Huston cannot last a month in Othello. The simplest answer is almost certainly right: Shakespeare is as popular as his performance...
...tragedy is that many hams who think they can play Hamlet as well as Gielgud refuse to accept their ineptitude, although they might be doing something else more successfully of course, good looks alone may get you by in the movies, but never on the stage, where the talent's the thing...