Member of the Company

Member of the Company

As God created man, so Shakespeare created Hamlet. He is an infinite mar vel. He is more than a part: he is an element, a realm, a cosmos. He is man in extremis, fencing desperately and gal lantly on the rim of an abyss called fate. To watch him is to be chilled and electrified by the destiny of man.

It is frequently said of Hamlet that no actor can fail in the role. The opposite is more accurately the case.

Shakespeare asks for far more than skill: he asks for a human sacrifice --the actor's mind, heart, body, soul and blood. It is the quality of a life that is test ed in Hamlet as much as the pro fessional gifts of an actor. That may be one reason why so many actors shy away from the role. It threatens to ex pose the limits of their humanity as well as the potholes of their craft. Yet no actor can aspire to the pinnacle of his art without measuring himself against the greatest role in English-speaking drama. The great Hamlets belong to the most exclusive club in the theater. They are the touchstones of dramatic art, and no one who cares about the the ater utters their names without awe:

Forbes-Robertson, Barrymore, Gielgud and Olivier. Last week in a converted London Victorian engine shed called The Round House, Nicol Williamson joined that slim and goodly company at Hamlet's very age of 30.

Lit by Inner Fire. A gangling 6 ft. 2 in., Williamson burns with incandescence and carries with him the smell of smoldering cordite. If he were not lit with inner fire, he would be sin gularly unprepossessing. Alan Brien, col umnist of the London Sunday Times, once described him as having "eyes like poached eggs, hair like treacle tof fee, and a truculent lower lip protruding like a pink front step from the long pale doorway of his face."

What Williamson possesses in tem perament and character is size (there is no pettiness in him), the arrogance if not the elegance of a prince, irascibility (Hamlet's fed-upness with a corrupt court and its fawning fools and knaves), and above all ardor, not unmixed with seething contempt. This is a Hamlet who scoffs and snarls and wields the so liloquies like a switchblade.

Never was a Hamlet less pigeon-livered; yet never was there one who was less "the glass of fashion and the mold of form." Williamson's Hamlet is a drop out from Wittenberg with a Scottish-bred accent that scatters aitches like dandruff and tortures vowels until they scream. Still, the so-familiar lines emerge with a rasping edgy immediacy.

With his mouth stretched like a rubber band, Williamson seems to be chewing through the sense of the lines as if for the first time. One notices with surprise that Hamlet's vocabulary is flecked with coarse, rustic phrases like manure on his boots; he talks of "fardels" and "the compost on the weeds" and "the slave's offal" to offset his university scholar's jargon.

Dressed in a scruffy black cardigan and tights, Williamson has set his emotional barometer for a hurricane from the beginning. He is tuned to his own internal weather, and to hell with the climate outside. He has already slept with his Ophelia, and in the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene he blatantly snuggles in the horizontal with her, defying Polonius to catch them in the act. Few actors can be more sexually insinuative in speech than Williamson, though in Hamlet's dirty, double-meaning banter with Ophelia ("country matters?") the voice is not that of a suitor out to shock but of a weary fornicator already tired of the flesh he has groped too often. As for the closet scene with Queen Gertrude, Williamson would have positively horrified the perhaps apocryphal British playgoer who said: "No gentleman would speak to his mother that way."

Honor to the Sovereign. This is not a gentleman's Hamlet. It evokes the bloody tragedies of revenge from which Shakespeare lifted some of his plots. In fairly vengeful but clean editing, Director Tony Richardson has cut the play to less than three hours running time, erasing a gravedigger here and a courtier there. Returning to stage direction after five years of indifferent film making, Richardson provides no innovative fireworks, but with a firebrand like Williamson on view, who would have noticed?

There is one English sovereign who ranks above the Queen, and the king of playwrights is magnificently served by the hulking man who may some day be the Olivier of his generation, Nicol Williamson.

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