THE THEATRE
Hamlet." At the New.
I MUST confess that I went to see Robert Helpmann's Hamlet antici- pating a disastrous failure, and this cannot be considered surprising, since his only appearances on the stage up to the present have been in ballet. It is true that he excels in miming rather than in dancing and that his performances as the doll-maker in Coppelia and in his
own remarkable nightmare ballet of Hamlet—to name no others—
have been of outstanding merit ; also that in Comus he had a speak- ing role in which he spoke exceedingly well ; but none of this gave one sufficient grounds for supposing that he could act—even with moderate success—the most difficult and exacting role in dramatic literature, a role in which many famous actors have proved inadequate.
Nevertheless, I have to record that Mr. Helpmann's is the best Hamlet I have ever seen, and I have seen most in our day, from Forbes-Robertson and John Barrymore to Laurence Olivier, Ernest Milton and John Gielgud. Yet Mr. Helpmann is by no means ideally endowed by nature for the part. He is slightly built, of less than average height, like most good dancers, and his voice is light in quality. In spite of these apparent handicaps, he is tremendously impressive, and the chief reason for his success is not merely his intelligence—for there have been notably intelligent Hamlets who notwithstanding this were failures—but the truth and sincerity of his conception of the part. He convinces me that here more than in other actors' performance known to me is Shakespeare's Hamlet. The key-speech to Hamlet's character (which, however, is all of piece throughout the play, both in word and action) is in Act III, Scene I, in which occurs the famous line, once universally misunderstood: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
The word conscience here, of course, does not mean conscience in the narrower moral sense, but consciousness, sensitive awareness, and Hamlet's tragedy is just his possession of this profounder aware- ness than is normal. The horror with which the murderous sen- suality of his mother fills him goes so deep that the very springs of his life are poisoned, and this is well brought out in the present production by Margot Graham's clever portrayal of the Queen as a beautiful sensual woman, naturally lovable but not naturally chaste. Most actresses shirk the part and the Queen appears as a mere dummy, but Miss Graham's performance gives the support essential to Mr. Helpmann's imaginative and poetic conception. This con- ception gets across primarily because there is. none of the usual sham Shakespearean ranting in the production. Mr. Helpmann speaks quietly, always distinctly, and with nowhere a false emphasis. His quietness may let us miss some of the lyric beauty of Shake- speare's lines, but this, I think, is intentional ; he has chosen to suggest rather than to underline, and nearly all actors make the fatal mistake of underlining and exaggerating when they speak poetry, thus totally destroying its beauty, whereas Mr. Helpmann, by con- centrating on truth rather than beauty, convinces by his sincere and natural (but oh! how exceedingly difficult to achieve!) simplicity. The result is that we feel that everything that Hamlet- says could not be said otherwise, and this reality makes the performance intensely exciting. As Ophelia Miss Pamela Brown was worthy of her Hamlet—delicate, sensitive and passionate. I must not omit to praise the effective costumes and decor by Leslie Hurry. The pro- duction has many merits, among them a dramatic unity of atmosphere (the moving drop-cloth when Hamlet follows the ghost of the King is a mistake), and several striking and legitimate crowd effects. Gus McNaughton's First Gravedigger is excellent, and Basil Sydney looked well as Claudius, but was too casual, failing to give the necessary forcefulness to the part. Claudius should inspire fear ; this would help the audience to understand more clearly how necessa1y it was for Hamlet to feign madness. One could write at great length about this production, which ought to draw full houses
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