CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
" THOSE seagulls, or tits, or whatever they were," said the horribly young man when it was all over, " didn't you find them a bit distracting ? " The swallows which he sought thus empirically to identify had indeed threaded the tranquil evening above the actors' heads, chattering in a reflective way ; and from time to time the leisurely chugging of a fishing-boat's engine invaded the courtyard from across the still waters of the sound, and once there was a bugle-call from the barracks in the outworks of the castle. But I can't say I found any of these small noises off distracting. For the Old Vic Company acted in a most compelling way, and if the mind strayed at all it was only into,a sort of lazy wonder at the inconsequence of huthan traditions. It seems as inevitably right to take Hamlet to Elsinore as it is inevitably wrong to take coals to Newcastle ; and yet how tenuous, arbitrary and artificial are the links which connect Shakespeare's chAracter with the great castle at Kronborg. Hamlet is even more elusive in history than on the stage. Once, possibly, somewhere in Denmark, there may have existed a man (not, the Professors think, a prince) with a roughly similar name ; but we cannot even be sure of this. He figured in two different versions of the same legend, neither of which Shake- speare followed, and became the best-known character in literature. Now, three and a half centuries after the play was written and nobody knows how long after the original Hamlet lived (if he ever did live), it seems the most natural thing in the world to go and see him behaving in a violent and fundamentally inexplicable manner in a castle which there is no reason to suppose he ever saw and which differs in various important respects from the premises imagined by Shakespeare. Of all the " Local Boy Makes Good " stories this must be one of the queerest in the history of mankind.
Nothing, however, could have been 'more agreeable than its latest instalment. Mr. Michael Redgrave's performance loses nothing by being transferred to a terraced stage in the great courtyard, and the almost swashbuckling vigour which seems to me such a valuable part of his interpretation is not allowed to overshadow the sorrows and the sensibilities on which more introvert portrayals of the part have chiefly dwelt. Mr. Mark Dignam and Miss Wanda Rotha are particularly effective as the King and Queen, and indeed the whole company maintain a very high standard Mr. Hugh Hunt has adapted his production to open-air exigencies with great intelligence, and the first-night audience—numbering, I believe, about three thousand—clearly enjoyed themselves very much indeed. At the end Mr. Hunt made a short speech in which he suggested that the performance was calculated to increase " the friendship of man for man." One saw exactly what he meant, but as I added up the five murders, the suicide and the various betrayals we had just witnessed I found myself once more pondering on the
disarming inconsequence of the human race. PETER FLEMING.
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