Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shakespeare asks for far more than skill: he asks for a human sacrifice -the actor's mind, heart, body, soul and blood. It is the quality of a life that is test ed in Hamlet as much as the pro fessional gifts of an actor. That may be one reason why so many actors shy away from the role. It threatens to ex pose the limits of their humanity as well as the potholes of their craft. Yet no actor can aspire to the pinnacle of his art without measuring himself against the greatest role in English-speaking drama...
Forbes-Robertson, Barrymore, Gielgud and Olivier. Last week in a converted London Victorian engine shed called The Round House, Nicol Williamson joined that slim and goodly company at Hamlet's very...
What Williamson possesses in tem perament and character is size (there is no pettiness in him), the arrogance if not the elegance of a prince, irascibility (Hamlet's fed-upness with a corrupt court and its fawning fools and knaves), and above all ardor, not unmixed with seething contempt. This is a Hamlet who scoffs and snarls and wields the so liloquies like a switchblade...
Never was a Hamlet less pigeon-livered; yet never was there one who was less "the glass of fashion and the mold of form." Williamson's Hamlet is a drop out from Wittenberg with a Scottish-bred accent that scatters aitches like dandruff and tortures vowels until they scream. Still, the so-familiar lines emerge with a rasping edgy immediacy...
With his mouth stretched like a rubber band, Williamson seems to be chewing through the sense of the lines as if for the first time. One notices with surprise that Hamlet's vocabulary is flecked with coarse, rustic phrases like manure on his boots; he talks of "fardels" and "the compost on the weeds" and "the slave's offal" to offset his university scholar's jargon...