Through the Time Barrier

Instead of its usual toddling steps toward maturity, television this week took a long stride forward. The big step: Maurice Evans' two-hour production of Hamlet. Shakespeare's greatest tragedy appeared on Hall of Fame (Sun. 3:30 p.m., NBC), ordinarily a 30-minute show presided over by Sarah Churchill and devoted to inspirational playlets. It cost a total of $180,000, required 80 tons of scenery, five cameras, three weeks of rehearsal and a cast of 28. Evans and the other stars were so eager to make Hamlet a success that they worked for the minimum union scale.

Cheek to Cheek. The result was one of the best TV shows ever. Making his TV debut, Evans had to unlearn, in 30 hours of camera rehearsal, nearly all the stagecraft he had amassed in playing Hamlet 777 times on the legitimate stage. "In TV, it's all cheek to cheek," he says. "You can't stand away from another actor and project, like you do on the stage." NBC Director Albert McCleery's biggest job was "pulling down" Evans' projection to TV size. Both men were brilliantly successful, and Evans' famed clarity of diction helped in making sense, to the untutored ear, of Shakespeare's soaring poetry. Sarah Churchill, in her first try at the role, made a surprisingly effective Ophelia, Joseph Schildkraut got pathos as well as villainy from the role of King Claudius, Ruth Chatterton was an adequate Queen Gertrude, Barry Jones bumbled happily and skillfully through his speeches as Polonius, and Wesley Addy brought objective understanding to the role of Horatio.

The TV Hamlet was based on the G.I. version of the show that Evans played for three weeks in Honolulu during World War II. Because he thought Elizabethan costumes too archaic to make G.I.s see the play in modern terms, Evans staged Hamlet as though it were played in Graustark. Designer Richard Sylbert did equally well on TV: the cameras caught the spirit of 19th century romanticism with long vistas of marbled palace corridors, Victorian alcoves, Gothic battlements and

Middle European uniforms. Says Evans: "We tried to picture a court that was military in character as well as decadent." In cutting the four-hour play to less than two hours, Scripters Mildred Alberg and Tom Sand chose to drop entire scenes and such characters as the gravediggers and Fortinbras (whose lines were given to Horatio), rather than make internal cuts in the speeches. Only one of Hamlet's soliloquies ("How all occasions do inform against me . . .") landed in the wastebasket. Twelve minutes were devoted to commercials for Sponsor Hallmark Cards, which has twice sponsored Menotti's Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors.

Lost Hour. Maurice Evans' considerable triumph is the more impressive because he had to sandwich TV rehearsals between his performances in the Broadway hit, Dial 'M' for Murder. On the day before he went on the air, Evans (as well as Actors Barry Jones, Neva Patterson and Francis Bethencourt, all of whom are in Broadway plays) had to act in a matinee and evening performance, lost an hour's sleep with the change to daylight saving time, and then began the final Hamlet rehearsals at 9 a.m.

Evans has had other chances to do TV shows (one was an offer to play Romeo to Dagmar's Juliet), but he has an aversion to "capsule dramas." He agreed to do Hamlet only when he was assured of two hours for the play and on NBC's promise, if the show was successful, to consider doing four full-length plays (not necessarily Shakespeare) each year. Says Evans: "Anything is worthwhile that helps break down the time barrier in television."

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