The Hamlet Project: Richard Burton (1964)

Richard Burton’s Hamlet stands out amongst the “Hamlet” films as it is a filmed play – it was created during Burton’s 1964 run on Broadway, directed by John Gielgud. As such, it’s unique since it allows the audience to see the work as Shakespeare intended, on a stage, and with a great actor in command.

The film ran for a week in theaters and made an astonishing $6 million in that limited time. It survives because Burton kept a copy for himself when others were destroyed. It is not a conventional film, though it has different camera angles, close-ups, full stage views, but preserves the immediacy and intimacy of the stage. As the film opens, one can hear the crowd chatting before the curtain rises at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City. Some of them may be talking about Martin Luther King Jr. or President Johnson. The Beatles are in the midst of their first U.S. tour. And Burton is at the height of his fame, age 39, still basking in the aftermath of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor during the making of “Cleopatra.”Gielgud said Burton struggled not so much with the role as the suffocating nature of his fame as part of "Liz and Dick."

The play ran for 138 performances, the longest run the play had on Broadway, and could have gone much longer except that Burton tired of it. The staging was reportedly the result of a bargain between Burton and Peter O’Toole, conceived during the filming of “Becket.” Burton appeared as the prince under the direction of Gielgud, but the play was staged in modern dress because of Burton's distaste for tights. The idea was to depict a “rehearsal” of the play, though the actors reportedly went through several variations before arriving at their “costumes.” Burton plays Hamlet in casual black. Gielgud “appears” as the ghost of King Hamlet, though only in a shadow projected against the wall, with a recording of his voice. There is very little staging, few props, a theater largely of the mind. 

It was the last time Burton tackled the role, and the last time Gielgud was involved in a stage production of the play. Burton had previously played it to great acclaim in the UK, even for Winston Churchill at the Old Vic. He later said he could hear the old man's rumble from the seats, reciting the words with him syllable for syllable. "And I could not shake him off … in ‘To be or not to be’ he was with me to the death.” That was the same run where Gielgud supposedly came to Burton's dressing room to take him to dinner, but there were so many visitors that he begged off. "Shall I go ahead," Gielgud asked, "or wait until you're better - I mean, ready?" It was a story Burton loved to recount, a measure of respect for the actor. Unfortunately, his turn as the ghost is our only filmed performance of Gielgud in the play, aside from a cameo as Priam in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version of "Hamlet." 

The film can only preserve so much. Cast member Alfred Drake, who played Claudius, said that Burton had a theory that Hamlet “could be played a hundred ways, and he tested every one of them. Within one scene, you might get Heathcliff, Sir Toby Belch, and Peck’s Bad Boy.” Knowing this, we must be aware that we are only getting this particular performance recorded. 

 

Burton was obviously influenced by his director, who he saw in 1944 in the role. Gielgud, reportedly, was aware of academic readings of "Hamlet," but he was wary of theory, contemptuous of Freudian shadings, confident enough in his own interpretations. The story among the cast is that Gielgud knew every line of the play, and could recite each character's speeches, and the replies. In rehearsals, Gielgud reportedly spotted where Burton stole some of his mannerisms from his earlier performances, then remarked that he was the only person who would have recognized this. According to Jonathan Croall's Gielgud biography, the director knew Burton's performance would be more vigorous and extroverted than his own. His challenge, then, was to rein him in. Burton, showing what he could do on a stage, is playing to wake up the people in the cheap seats.

Acting on the stage is obviously different than film. To begin with, there's the presentation of the body. The stage actor has to be conscious of the fact that the audience can take in the sight of their entire body - because of this, their body language becomes part of the performance in a way that does not always happen in film. The film of Burton's "Hamlet" makes this clear in several ways.

At the appearance of the ghost, he hunches over in fear. As the ghost describes his murder, Burton’s Hamlet clutches his ear as if to take out his father’s poison. He crosses himself repeating the ghost’s parting words, “Adieu, adieu.” At the moment he realizes what he must do – “Oh, cursed spite!” – his voice breaks in recognition of his inadequacy. Still, his presence in the play has some of the same problems as Olivier's – he is too old to convincingly play a student, his face too world-weary and weathered. When his knowing anger appears at the coming of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it’s hard to imagine him pausing in carrying out his father’s revenge.

Burton’s greatest gift as an actor was his incomparable voice, and he uses it to great effect throughout the play. "My whole concentration was on trying to remember the prose which is much more difficult than remembering the verse," he said. "I could recall the monologues with no trouble." 

But his performance threatens at times to overwhelm the rest of the cast. When Robert Milli’s Horatio says the ghost “harrows me with fear and wonder,” he hardly seems convincing. While Burton luxuriates in the rhythms of the language, some of the cast seem uneasy with the verses. Their movements, in the early going, appear stiff and reserved. Of course, the point of the play is not “realism,” but performance. It’s heightened reality, manic reality, “a fiction, in a dream of passion.” Gielgud later said his only help for Burton was to "show him how the more relaxed scenes were played so he wouldn't have to tear himself to shreds in scenes..."

The difference in cast members becomes more evident with the entrance of Polonius, played wonderfully by the scene-stealing Hume Cronyn. He ambles about the stage in business suit, leaning on his cane, flicking down his reading glasses, and spouting nostrums with self-satisfaction. His scenes questioning the would-be madman Hamlet (How say you by that?) ring all the comedy out of the lines. Cronyn isn’t treating Shakespeare as a holy text – he’s an actor embodying a role, not singing a song.

But there are times when Burton is. As Hamlet degenerates into his feigned madness, he struts and frets about the stage, slurs his words, holds his pauses, dances about in his own pleasure, and blows through the soliloquies occasionally at a speed that does not speak of reflection. This was particularly true of his “To be or not to be,” which seemed to come and go with hardly a ripple. Some of this is normal for a play, as an actor has to pace himself and hit the right moments, conserving energy. Perhaps this night, there were different areas where he wanted to hit the high notes.

I was particularly annoyed early in the play with Claudius, played by Alfred Drake. His presence seemed barely there to me, and his performance hardly rose at all to meet Burton through the first part of the play. But this was clearly his strategy, because he came to absolute life in his confession scene, and the character emerged in all three dimensions in a few seconds. Suddenly he wasn’t reciting Shakespeare with a cliched gravity but was a genuinely guilty, grieving man, confronted with the result of his crime. One can quibble with this direction though. Anyone with a knowledge of “Hamlet” knows what Claudius is up to from his first appearance. He’s of course, hiding in plain sight. Playing him as a man hiding his crime within the ceremony of office is one way to put a fresh face on the part. But I still felt Drake played it a little too nondescript in the beginning. His performance going forward until the end, though, redeemed some of the colorlessness of the early acts.

And Burton kept finding ways to bring out the humanity in Hamlet as the play continued. His tearful scene with Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) showed the prince’s love for his mother with only a hint of the Freudian patina that mars so many mid-20^th century productions. He puckishly kisses Claudius on the cheek as he leaves for England. And for me, his best scene was “How all occasions,” as his performance brought out all the shading and implications of the speech as a companion piece with “To be or not to be.” His Hamlet is now resolved, and ready to meet his fate. 

This reminds me of what Peter Ackroyd wrote of "Hamlet," that it is not necessarily a play where Hamlet declares who he is, but rather, who he is becoming. Burton's later speeches occasionally show flashes that Hamlet has emotionally moved from where he was at the play's beginning.

There was one interesting bit of staging in the final scene. Claudius retreats to the throne as Hamlet rushes at him with the poisoned cup. Claudius gasps and dies with his body sprawled on the throne. Hamlet, in his last lines, casts Claudius’ remains to the floor, points at his enemy, laughs in victory, and dies on his feet, slumping into Horatio’s arms. Horatio then places Hamlet's body on the throne, at last, just as Fortinbras enters to seize the kingdom, the unhappy rule of the turbulent prince ending before it could even begin. According to Croall, when Gielgud saw the film, he was dismayed, as by this performance Burton had lapsed back into the flamboyance and tricks the director had tried to restrain.

Because of the film, we see an exhausted Burton, spent from his three-hour performance, noticeably heaving for breath on the throne when he’s supposed to be dead. The camera proves a more pitiless observer than the bored patron dragged to the theater by his wife for an evening on the town. 

Previously: Toshiro Mifune

Also: Laurence Olivier 

Also: Kenneth Branagh

The opening: The Play's the Thing... 

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