In December 1992, the Royal Shakespeare Company opened a production of Hamlet, directed by Adrian Noble and starring Kenneth Branagh, at its London home in The Barbican Centre. It was the first RSC Shakespeare production to open in London and then to transfer to Stratford, reversing the company's usual pattern of performance flow. The production ran at the Barbican Theatre from December 12, 1992, to March 11, 1993, then moved to Stratford, where it played from March 18 until May 1. The production was designed by Bob Crowley and featured John Shrapnel (Claudius), Jane Lapotaire (Gertrude), David Bradley (Polonius), Joanne Pearce (Ophelia), Richard Bonneville (Laertes), Rob Edwards (Horatio), and Richard Moore (First Gravedigger).
The production was significant because it represented Branagh's fourth essay of the title role (all by the age of thirty-two) and reunited him with the team of Noble and Crowley, who had created the memorable 1984 stage version of Henry V, which subsequently led to Branagh's highly praised film of the play released in 1989. This Hamlet was an immediate success. Not since the Hall/Warner Hamlet at Stratford in 1965 and the Eyre/Pryce Hamlet at the Royal Court in 1980 had a production of the play stirred such box office interest, particularly among the young. All the London performances were quickly sold out, and on some days the queue for the fifteen seats reserved for sale on each day began at 4:30 a.m.
Noble's approach emphasized the domestic over the political, family over state. He set the play in the period before World War I, seeking to capture its affinities with Ibsen and Strindberg and Bergman: "I have always been interested in Scandinavian art and culture, which have a strange mixture of rich, domestic warmth and remote, cold starkness--like the Bergman films." Crowley took his specific design inspiration from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and provided a series of specific locales, from Ophelia's pale green bedroom, complete with a piano and armoire painted with Scandinavian folk figures, to the red and gold of Claudius' private theatre, to the pale grey desiccated wreaths left over from Polonius' funeral that dominated the final act. Each of these landscapes corresponded to the three major symphonic movements Noble perceived: the early domestic crisis culminating in the nunnery scene, followed by the arrival of the players and the new energies they release in Hamlet, leading to the confrontation with death in the graveyard atmosphere of the final scenes.
Branagh's Hamlet was remarkably polite, sincere, and mature in contrast with a series of manic, neurotic, or passively crippled Hamlets that dominated British productions of the play in the 1980s. His was the first Hamlet in a generation to lend credibility to Fortinbras' judgment that "had he been put on/[He] would have proved most royal." Branagh's initial appearance set the tone. He was dressed in a black Edwardian mourning suit, with his hair neatly plastered down across his forehead and his body held in a rigidly formal posture. In contrast, Claudius and Gertrude were in white and in a celebratory mood (she with champagne, he with a cigar), as though they had just come from the wedding itself. This moment prefigured many in the production that emphasized, as H.R. Coursen has pointed out, the repeated disruptions and dislocations of ceremony and ritual in the play.
As the performance progressed, Branagh slowly let his body relax until he turned into a rubber man in the "sponge" exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The actor's talent for mimicry was similarly released as a weapon against "these tedious old fools" and was not restrained by the straightjacket into which Claudius had him laced after the closet scene. Branagh spoke his soliloquies in a quiet conversational tone, directly enlisting the audience as an ally in his quest to reimagine himself in a world seemingly shorn of trust, loyalty, and decency. Branagh's Hamlet treated the audience with the intelligence and respect he found so painfully absent in Claudius' Elsinore. His clear and patient desire to communicate with us, to make us comprehend the agony and the philosophic dynamic of his dilemma, became the signature of his performance.
The interview that follows was conducted on April 13, 1993, in Branagh's dressing room at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford. It captures his thoughts about the prince and the play as the production neared the end of its run. Those thoughts are likely to have a wider resonance and greater significance should they be translated into a projected film version of the play. The question concerning the commercial success of his film of Much Ado About Nothing, which surfaces at the end of the interview, has now been decisively answered. Surely, following his film of Frankenstein, Branagh's thoughts will turn once again towards Shakespeare and Elsinore. I began the interview with some questions about his plans for Frankenstein, and then our conversation addressed the matter at hand: Hamlet.
SC: Let's move from Frankenstein's monster to Shakespeare's. Olivier said the part of Hamlet obsessed and devoured him. Ben Kingsley has said it is "monstrously greedy." Daniel Day Lewis had to walk away from it in mid-performance. Yet here you are doing it for the fourth time [three on stage, one on radio] in your young career. You seem to feed on the part and to present a stronger line on the character with each production. Can you talk a bit about your relationship to the role?
KB: I think partly it's not destroying me at the moment because I've done it a few times now and this time round I was ready for it. The experience of playing it before allows you to understand what the physical demands of the part are. This time, playing it in a full-length version is perversely easier for the actor. You have more time offstage; fewer of the great scenes and soliloquies are concertinaed together, and so there is air around the actual performance. When I had my first go at the part twelve years ago, I was twenty and in drama school. Then I played Laertes for a year and a half in the 1984 RSC production; it allowed me the opportunity to view the play and the part from another perspective, which was very helpful. There's quite a lot of information swirling around in the atmosphere there, and so, in the context of this fuller, more civilized version for the actor playing Hamlet, I'm allowing the part to play me much more. It's occuring much more naturally; with no other play did I know the lines as well, so I didn't have to invest new energy in trying to learn them. I had the chance to scour all the familiar passages carefully to find new subtleties in them so that they didn't come across as overfamiliar. That was helpful because I wanted to make sure that I understood everything I was saying--completely.
SC: This was the first Hamlet I have encountered where I believed the actor knew what every line meant and wanted the audience to hear all those lines. You didn't, it seems to me, throw anything away.
KB: Yeah. The power of communication is enormous. I had a desire to hold absolutely everything up--not as though I were pointing to a blackboard but just to gain whatever level of meaning I could draw from it. I thought now I had the proper tools at my disposal for the role. Those comments you mentioned at the start would have applied to me much more the last time I played the part [for the Renaissance Theatre Company in 1988]. Then I felt much more crushingly the weight of the ghosts of other performances--the weight of expectation that comes with any young actor playing the role.
SC: And the pressure of being directed by a great Hamlet [Derek Jacobi].
KB: Exactly. It was not a relaxed experience. Then we were doing it in repertory, and we played it on Mondays and Tuesdays. Sunday was always a bleak day with the prospect of having to play it the next two days. But with this one, I have enjoyed every single performance of it.
SC: Even when you have to play it twice in one day?
KB: Yes. Strangely enough. I can't pretend that my heart lifts with getting up early on those days and finding a voice saying, "Good morning, this is your half hour call." But, as always, there is a way in which the natural law of conservation takes place in the voice and the body, which lets you get through two shows. I've been--touch wood--very lucky that the voice has held up. And in those matinée performances, you have audiences who are very concentrated. They have often traveled a long way, and there is an extraordinary spread of ages, from octogenarians to young students. There's a level of commitment to coming and a quality of listening that makes your own performance--even as you are unconsciously conserving enery--more relaxed. And in that condition, you often make discoveries about the part that you don't on other days. Little surprises. New breakthroughs in scenes, new readings of lines.
SC: I saw the production three times: in early January, mid-February, and the last London performance on March 11. It seemed to me that the nunnery scene changed every time I saw it; so did the closet scene. I understand from that that you all are constantly working on various aspects of the performance rather than letting it settle into a routine.
KB: I think we are. Particuarly with someone like Joanne [Ophelia], who is committed to making sure that nothing is taken for granted. One is always trying to deepen things. That seems to me the best thing that can happen to a performance in a Shakespearean production. Once you get by the fiftieth performance--that's a kind of watershed--if it's any good, somehow something happens, and there is a significant sense of a different gravitational weight if it's a play like this. I certainly experienced that with a production of King Lear I directed in which the actor playing Lear [Richard Briers] had to have fifty goes, in crude terms, to warm up into the role. Not having to worry about entrances, exits, lines. We have now passed that watershed with this Hamlet, so the part now is in the blood. We talk to one another about things: I'll talk to Joanne; I'll talk to Horatio...
SC: I thought Rob Edwards' Horatio was terrific--so careful and precise and thoughtful in making sure we understood all the exposition he's responsible for laying out to Marcellus and Bernardo on the battlements.
KB: Yes. Yes.
SC: He's the author. He's going to tell the story. From the beginning, he gives the narrative frame--the historical context--of Hamlet's world.
KB: Yes. He's a good listener; he's gentle; he's not passion's slave, but he has a curious mind. His curiosity is his passion. So we talk. We try never to let it get perfunctory. I was aware as I began this that it was the culmination of the work I have done as an actor on the stage. And probably, I expect, the last time I will play it on stage. There's a finite line, I reckon about thirty-five. It doesn't matter what you look like--whether it's twenty or forty--but there is something about his dilemma, about the urgency of it, that if you are beyond thirty-five just doesn't work. You want to give the actor a smack. You know what I mean? That actor ought to be playing other roles, like the Scottish king.
SC: Yes. It is only actors like Barrymore or Burton or Gielgud who get called back to the part when they are too old for it, but they get called back for other reasons. Their popularity--an audience anxious to see them in the role, however inappropriate it may be.
KB: Exactly. And it's a different experience. I would pay for the chance to have seen Gielgud, even his last one when he must have been forty-four. I was lucky to get such an early start on the role--getting my practice in and then arriving with another opportunity at a rightish age. So I've always felt as I've done this that I wanted to enjoy every single performance.
SC: From Matthew Arnold on through T.S. Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, and other major critics, our century has not been kind to the play or the part, considering both quite bluntly to be failures. I think your performance rescues the part from their reservations, but I wonder what you think about their rather unanimous verdict about Hamlet?
KB: A failure? No. Absolutely not. I'm aware of some of those criticisms, particularly Eliot's, and I think they are wrong. If it's a failure, it is so only in the way that human existence is a failure. It sums up so many paradoxes, contradictions; it details our capacity and indeed our desire sometimes for suffering. Our resistance to what is, our inability to live in the here and now, and our life-long resistence to death. It's Hamlet's struggle to find a place for his attitude to death, suddenly forced into his consciousness by his father's death and his mother's remarriage.
SC: Precisely. His father's death, his mother's remarriage, and the Ghost's command for revenge present him with the immense challenge of refashioning an entire identity: public and private.
KB: Indeed! He discovers that human experience is messy and often irrational. Even before he meets the Ghost, he's in turmoil about Gertrude; he can't understand what she's done.
SC: I hope you are still trying to ram that photograph of Claudius up her dress in the closet scene.
KB: [Big laugh.] It comes and goes; it just depends on the moment each night.
SC: I admired the production's use of photographs throughout, springing as it does from the text's indication that suddenly the price for a copy of Claudius' picture in little has gone through the roof.
KB: That whole scene with Gertrude is one that Hamlet has wanted to have with her from the beginning; it's what he really wants to say when he has to say "Seems, Madam. Nay it is." The one area of the play that I still find it hard to achieve is the "Now I might do it pat" speech. He can't kill directly--only in a moment of reactive passion, as he does with the other deaths.
SC: But isn't that what Hamlet comes to learn about the world? That he must act within its flow rather than retreating from it when it fails to correspond to his conception or plan?
KB: Yes, yes. Or to be as arrogant as to take action that will affect other people. I mean I find him the most unattractive when he's deciding the conditions under which he will kill Claudius. I find him overzealous and irresponsible there: "I don't like doing it this way; I'll do it another way."
SC: That's the moment when you lean forward and seem to whisper in Claudius' ear all the gross moments--when he's drunk, asleep, or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed or at game a-swearing--when you will trip his heels to kick at heaven.
KB: Yes, so that you see Hamlet have a relish there that is rather unpleasant and will lead to his treatment of Gertrude until the Ghost reappears and reminds him that his visitation is but to whet Hamlet's almost blunted purpose.
SC: The Ghost's reappearance is another strong moment in the production. In the performance I saw in February, Gertrude was on the bed trapped in an embrace between you and the Ghost who sits on a chair beside the bed. In March, you were on the bed holding the Ghost's arm, which he had held out to you as you moved towards him in amazement, while Gertrude stood behind you stroking what she believes is your fevered and shattered brain. I think the later staging is one of the production's finest images: the portrait of the ruined family, Chekhovian in its layers of misunderstandings and misreadings. Are you still playing it that way?
KB: Yeah. She's still behind me. Everyone felt strongly that it was a good image, poignant and revealing.
SC: Would you talk a bit about your use of body language in the production? At first you are rigid and formal, and then your body almost turns to rubber in your scenes with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, clearly an expression of your antic, mocking mimicking disposition. Then Claudius has you strapped into that straitjacket to bring you body under his control. When you return from England for the final act, your body seems much more casual and relaxed. Hands in pocket or clasped behind your back.
KB: Certainly. I wanted the first act to be very held in, restrained; I was determined to be correct and proper in mourning for my father. The remarks by Murray Cox [Consultant Psychotherapist at the Broadmoor Hospital] in the program about interrupted ceremonies in the play was behind the thinking here. Gertrude's marriage interrups Hamlet's ability to mourn his father properly. Hamlet wants to be an example of what he believes is correct behavior. I wanted him to be precisely turned out and formal and correct and princely and aware that the nation has been deprived of the proper ritual for honoring his father by Claudius and his marriage to Gertrude. Then I wanted to be clear that this Hamlet puts on his antic disposition, which is why we used the straitjacket in the fishmonger scene; it's a prop that goes with his double-talk, and it made--waving the straitjacket's flapping arms as I walked backwards away from Polonius--a visual image for the bloody difficult line you struggle with, "you, sir, should be as old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward."
SC: Yes. And it got a huge laugh too. Was the straitjacket your idea?
KB: I think so. We talked about it and used it later on. Adrian at one point suggested using a fencing jacket, but we decided the straitjacket was a better idea. It became one image of Hamlet's long dance of destruction, which moves from his appearance with his clothes all awry to Ophelia, through the scene with Polonius and then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and culminates in his raw anger exploding in the scene with Ophelia.
SC: Speaking of the nunnery scene! Since you are in her bedroom, it was the first production I've seen where Ophelia doesn't lie when Hamlet asks her, "Where's your father?" He is at home and in her clothes closet.
KB: [A surprised little laugh.] You're right.
SC: The nunnery scene is another one where the production has presented various versions. In each, Ophelia's reaction to Hamlet's sexual advances--sometimes gentle, sometimes rough--seems to cue his suspicions.
KB: Yes, but his suspicions begin even earlier when she makes the move to return his love letters and tokens. He finds this odd coming from her; he immediately thinks someone must have put her up to it. The question about her father comes at the conclusion of all those questions about "Are you honest? Are you fair?" And those slightly tricky sentences about his own situation. I have in my own mind a link with a voice saying: don't sell yourself; don't be manipulated; don't be used--the way she is being used by someone else.
SC: Is that why your explosion of anger gets focused on her little leather case containing the letters? When you turn on her, you pick it up and hurl it across the floor, which sends her to her knees trying to pick up the letters spilled out of it.
KB: We had a good moment there last night, actually. A bit of a breakthrough in terms of storytelling. In terms of clarity of storytelling. As I was delivering the lines about the power of beauty to transform honesty from what it was to a bawd, I picked up one of the letters and then used it as a concrete object to underscore "I did love you once."
SC: Improvising such spontaneous discoveries in performance doesn't throw your fellow actors?
KB: No. Those are the exciting moments. You just need a good sense of editing--to know what to keep in of moments like that and what to cut out. Joanne is very good to work with in allowing those liberties.
SC: One night, when you entered with Horatio for the graveyard scene, as you came downstage through all the decaying wreaths from Polonius' funeral, you reached down, picked one up, and read the card on it. What motivated you to do so?
KB: I always think of those things as gravestones and memorials as I'm walking through the graveyard. They have a magnetic and hypnotic effect, for they are powerful images, and to be absorbed momentarily by them is a way of preparing for the exchanges about death with the Gravedigger.
SC: I thought you gave marvelously precise attention to the entire "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow" speech, particularly the way in which you sounded the "nows" and took a deliberate pause between "leave" and "betimes." Was this moment a defining one for your interpretation of the part?
KB: Well, I think without loading it too much, that that's what he's heading towards. That simple but profound statement of his own readiness for death. He has a premonition "how ill all's here about my heart" concerning his own death and that it may be imminent. Horatio clearly recognizes it, which is why he embraces his friend when Hamlet tells him to "Let be." Hamlet knows that Claudius knows he knows. He's back, and he's a threat. Claudius knows that his attempt to send him off to England to be killed hasn't worked. The battle has commenced sometime ago.
SC: Yes, he's been waging a civil war against the King with a power of one.
KB: Exactly. So his suspicion and his common sense have to make him wonder what the King is doing with this elaborate wager about the duel. But he no longer agonizes over trying to outguess his adversary.
SC: The Hamlet of act two would have backed away from the confrontation; he would have been overly wary about committing himself don't you think?
KB: Yes...yes, or reacted in a different way. But it goes back to the graveyeard scene and even the earlier determination that "my thought be bloody or be nothing worth." I think he faces the bleakness of that graveyard scene, that final notion: Is this all we are? That Alexander and Caesar have come to plug a bunghole or to stop a hole to keep the wind away. There's a certainty of the inevitability in it all. An understanding that this is what we all come to. The same end to all human existence. The knowledge that we are all going to die. He doesn't come back with any particular plan of action.
SC: That's one of the play's beauties. It's the only revenge tragedy I know where the revenger has not become as morally corrupt as the villain. Normally, the revenger plans the awful final killings--think of the pie Titus Andronicus concocts and bakes and serves to Tamora, for instance--but here it is the villain, Claudius, who once again introduces deceit and poison into the world.
KB: Yes, he reacts. What will come will come. But he does come back. He puts himself, again, in Claudius' way. I feel that "The readiness is all" and that whole speech is an affirmation of life. As soon as you can embrace death and accept its reality, you are liberated from worrying about when it will come. He sees that endlessly worrying about death prevents him from entering the ebb and flow of life. He's got to get on with living. The attitude he adopts is: I can't worry about it; I've got a show to do tonight.
SC: I'd like to ask some quick questions about production details. When 1.2 opens, are we meant to understand that we are at Claudius and Gertrude's wedding reception?
KB: Yes, the first formal celebration of the wedding.
SC: What was the reasoning behind setting the action against the Christmas season. I've always read Marcellus' speech about "ever 'gainst that season comes/Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated" to indicate precisely that now is not that hallowed time.
KB: I'm not sure. It was possibly that we were rehearsing near Christmas, that there was something in the air which just made it pungent. I also think that both Adrian and Bob were influenced, scenically, by Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and it led them to include the big Christmas tree in the scene when the Players arrive.
SC: That's very interesting. The production often seemed to me to have links with Bergman's world. If you are already thinking about a possible film to flow from this production, I think Bergman's style and landscape fit the play very well. Trains chugging along against a cold, white, bitter landscape.
KB: Yes.
SC: Do you enjoy working with Adrian Noble? Were you looking forward to coming back to the RSC and working with him again?
KB: Very much so. We have a very clear relationship. We both like to get on with it. He's a marvelous editor. He's good at giving actors their heads and then being very shrewd in helping them edit a performance down into its essence. I enjoy the give and take with a man with so much intelligence and so many ideas. It's especially important in one of these x-ray parts, where you are naked and vulnerable and where you pour out so much of your self and experience, that you have someone with good judgment to assess what you are doing--what works and what doesn't.
SC: One of the elements many have responded to in your Hamlet is his courtesy, his decency; he's one of the few Hamlets in recent memory about whom one might think that "had he been put on" he would have "proved most royal." Did you consciously set out to stress his nobility?
KB: I wanted to stress that here was a man with a point of view; he has a strong view of the world he discovers himself in at the beginning of the play. Hamlet does have a basic decency and courtesy. He has what I call spiritual manners; at his best, he is gracious and kind but not pious in his interaction with others. He's genuinely delighted to see Horatio; he wants to treat others well, to include them. Horatio isn't Hamlet's "poor servant" but his "good friend"; he greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as "my excellent good friends"; he wants the Players to be well used, with dignity and honor. By contrast, he finds Claudius ostentatious, crass, and overbearing. He knows he could be a more gracious and generous king than Claudius; he could create a better atmosphere; he could do a better job.
SC: That sense of being able to do it better and of wanting to create a good working condition for your fellow artists must have been part of your own motivation for starting Renaissance and then making the move into film.
KB: Certainly. That's what I hope I have been able to accomplish.
SC: Have you begun to give serious consideration to making a film of the play?
KB: Of course, I would love to. I'd like to set it in the Renaissance and use it as a way of teaching the public about the nature of Shakespeare's theatre. It all rather depends on the commercial success of Much Ado About Nothing. If I can't make Shakespeare live for a broad audience with all the Hollywood that got packed into the film, then I doubt I will be able to raise the financing for a Hamlet film.
SC: Thank you for being so generous with your time.
KB: You are most welcome.
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