Word: nicoll
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HAMLET. Every Hamlet bleeds in the last scene; Nicol Williamson pours his blood into every scene. Williamson's Dane would have led a sit-in at the University of Wittenberg, or burned it to the ground. The rottenness of the state, the corruption of his elders, the brevity of his mother's love, Ophelia's frail readiness to be her father's pawn-all these nauseate him. Yet his antic disposition never leaves him, and a Hamlet has never been presented with so much caustic wit. With this performance, Nicol Williamson makes all previous Hamlets fade...
HAMLET. Every Hamlet sheds his blood in the last scene; Nicol Williamson pours his blood into every scene. Williamson's fiery Dane would have led a sit-in at the University of Wittenberg, or burned it to the ground. The rottenness of the state, the corruption of his elders, the brevity of his mother's love, Ophelia's frail readiness to be her father's pawn-all these nauseate him. Yet his antic disposition never leaves him, and a Hamlet has never been presented with so much caustic wit. With this performance, Nicol Williamson has turned...
Sense Robbery. A placid, pawky art dealer, Sir Edward More (Nicol Williamson) is abruptly seized with an uncontrollable passion. Its object is Margot (Anna Karina), usherette in a London cinema. Gutted by desire, Sir Edward cannot be home with his wife and child for more than a minute before lunging for the doorway and heading back to the moviehouse. There he gropes through a guffawing audience for yet another glimpse of the girl. At last an assignation is arranged, an agreement extracted. In scenes of purest Feydeau farce, Sir Edward pursues Margot in and out of hallways and bedrooms split...
Chart of Evil. The experience is a distortion of Sir Edward's early gropings in the darkened theater. But now the blackout is permanent, and the laughter an echo of hell in which there can be no conclusion without calamity and no denouement without death. As More, Nicol Williamson moves through the film with a looming rage that is Shakespearean in its intensity.* Bathed in such solar glare, the other actors are lit only by reflection. Karina looks and sounds a tart, but she has little of the compelling eroticism that the part requires. At his worst, Herve should...
HAMLET. Some actors merely occupy space; Nicol Williamson rules the stage. His nasal voice has the sting of an adder; his furrowed brow is a topography of inconsolable anguish. His Hamlet is a seismogram of a soul in shock. Here is a Hamlet of spleen and sorrow, of fire and ice, of bantering sensuality, withering sarcasm and soaring intelligence. He cuts through the music of the Shakespearean line to the marrow of its meaning. He spares the perfidious king who killed his father no contempt, but he saves his rage for the unfeeling gods who, in all true tragedy, make...