Hamlet." By William Shakespeare. (New.)
MR. GUINNESS'S Hamlet enlists rather,than compels our attention. It is far from being a great performance but it is a very intelligent one, and on the night when I saw it little deserved the harsh and in one case brutal verdicts delivered by some of my colleagues after the unlucky opening performance. Mr. Guinness takes us one stage nearer than Mr._ Redgrave did to Don Salvador de Madariap's conception of a Prince who was about as gentle as a stoat. He lets us see that Ophelia is a discarded mistress ; he shows us (and it is one of the better touches in an uninspired production that Horatio is slightly shocked by the revela- tion) the cynical pride which Hamlet takes in having sent Rosen- crantz and Guildenstern to their deaths by a trick. It is for his presentation of what we (but not the Elizabethans) would call the seamier side of Hamlet's character that we shall chiefly remember Mr. Guinness's performance. Elsewhere it suffers from a certain lack of authority, a certain unsureness. Perhaps a main contributory cause of this is the actor's management of his eyes. They are, particularly in the soliloquies, much too restless ; they seem always to be looking away from things, not at them. A producer would have checked this tendency but Mr. Guinness, with more courage than wisdom, elected to produce himself. It cannot be said that he and his colleague, Mr. Hauser, have done their job very well. Of the supporting parts, only Mr. Stanley Holloway's salty grave-digger can be said to be well played, though Mr. Ken Tynan's Player King is quite effective and would be more so if he made more noise. Mr. Alan Webb's Polonius is adequate, but throughout the rest of the cast there is much perfunctory and some misguided playing. But for all that it is a curiously interesting evening, concluding (when I was there) in much more-than-friendly applause and a short, disarming speech from the stage in which Mr. Guinness recalled that the critic who had described him as the worst Hamlet he had ever seen had also decided that The Cocktail Party was "the worst play of our time." . PETER FLEMING.
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