BBC Shakespeare Plays
Preface, by Cedric Messina (Producer)

The BBC television Hamlet is Derek Jacobi, a great actor. In the first season of the BBC TV Shakespeare, he won golden opinions throughout the world for his performance in the title-role of "Richard II". In that production there is a wonderful moment when Sir John Gielgud, playing John of Gaunt, is in the foreground of a shot and Derek Jacobi in the background, two great Richards and two great Hamlets, performances separated by forty years but a reminder of the great British tradition of Shakespearean acting. Jacobi is no newcomer to the role of Hamlet, for just before recording the BBC Hamlet he had spent nearly two years playing him in Toby Robertson's production in the United Kingdom, the Far East and Australia. He flew back from Australia to start rehearsals for this production. I had seen his Hamlet in London, and when the production was in Tokyo I saw it again. To my astonishment, the two performances were almost totally dissimilar, and when we had completed this production I was again surprised, for it seemed to be a synthesis of both performances I had seen. It was a reaffirmation to me that the theatre experience and the television experience of Shakespeare are totally different. The TV production runs for three hours and forty minutes, and was recorded entirely at the BBC Television Centre in Shepherds Bush, London, in February 1980.

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The Production, by Henry Fenwick

Any production of "Hamlet" is defined by the actor who plays the prince. Cedric Messina first thought of Derek Jacobi as the BBC Hamlet when he was casting "Richard II", in his first season of plays. At that time Jacobi was in the early stages of what was to become a mammoth assault on the part of Hamlet on stage. "I went to see it because I thought he would make a very good Richard II, and it then struck me that he would do both very well," Messina says. In the event Jacobi's Richard was indeed one of the highlights of the first season of Shakespeare plays and it was quickly agreed that he should also play Hamlet in the second season. That keystone piece of casting completed, the next step was to find a director, Rodney Bennett. When Bennett came to begin work on "Hamlet" the casting of Derek Jacobi was the only decision that had been taken without his participation: "and a most excellent decision---it's difficult to think of any other actor to play the role in such a total way."

From the outset Cedric Messina had been anxious to play a very full text. Playing with such a full text meant that Jacobi was playing parts of the play for television which he had not been playing in the Old Vic production he had been in for so long. But this was a much less important difference for him than the much more influential difference of playing in a new production with a totally new cast around him. "'Hamlet' depends very much indeed on the other people round him," he points out. "It's not a one-man show where you slot your Hamlet into a variety of Claudii or Gertrudes." He came into the new production for the first reading two days after returning from the last leg of his tour, so, as Rodney Bennett points out with obviously mixed feelings, he had not even been in the country while the director had been preparing for the production. "There were times when I most wanted to talk to Derek," he recalls, "and I kept saying to myself, 'No, perhaps this is a great advantage---we're not getting bogged down in the problem of that central character but looking at it as a total piece, with all the other people in mind almost more than Hamlet.' It is, of course, an immensely long play, yet when I read it, it read at fantastic speed. We were trying to work on the play as though it was a new play. I approached it like a thriller. Although I wasn't able to talk to Derek before rehearsals started, by some happy chance Derek's thoughts were roughly speaking the same as my own. I never felt that Hamlet was this downbeat, depressed, romantic, moony character. On the page he seemed phenomenally dynamic, and if there was something underneath driving him it was anger rather than deep depression....We tried to go for the idea that the only person out of step was Hamlet. At the start of the play Claudius seems to be a perfectly reasonable man, as those sort of villains often are."

It's an interpretation with which Derek Jacobi is in enthusiastic agreement: "I think that in the beginning all the sympathy should be with Claudius; Hamlet's a thorn in everybody's flesh. What Claudius says in that first speech of his is absolutely right: life has got to go on, especially for kings ruling kingdoms who are responsible for a great many other people. Hamlet's behaviour is intolerable---it's as though Prince Charles had had that reaction to Lord Mountbatten's death---you can't behave like that."

On stage Jacobi had played Hamlet as surprised by the dumb show before the play, afraid that it will ruin his trap for Claudius. Rodney Bennett, however, was convinced that Hamlet would expect the dumb show. This left Jacobi in a quandary. He had previously been interpreting the line "Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief" as anger at the players for spoiling his plot. With this justification gone, "I didn't know how to say those lines till one day, watching the dumb show and watching Patrick (Stewart) not reacting, not reacting, suddenly "miching mallecho" in my head referred to the ghost. Before the play I'd said to Horatio, if Claudius doesn't react then it's a damned ghost I've seen; so I'm testing the ghost in the play as much as I'm testing Claudius. Claudius hasn't reacted, that means Ghost is wicked, Ghost has told a lie. And that makes Hamlet during the course of the play-scene interrupt, because he's forcing a reaction---he can't just sit on the sidelines; he's nudging Claudius to react. Claudius is too clever to react---which solves the problem of why he doesn't stop the dumb show. Why should he react to it? Nobody knows about the murder. When he finally does react it's because Hamlet absolutely shoves it down his throat, by which time Hamlet is hoist with his own petard: all the court knows he's mad and when Claudius gets up and say "Give me some light" the whole court would be on Claudius' side to stop that play; it's deeply offensive."

The changes brought about by a different Gertrude were not quite so far reaching. "I think my feelings towards her are fairly unequivocal in the play. I've found that each Gertrude has had different feeling towards me. I've had three Gertrudes now, Barbara Jefford, Brenda Bruce and now Claire (Bloom), and they've all had different feelings. Barbara was very much the queen, Brenda was very much the mother, Claire is very much the lover. Obviously I've had to change to accommodate that, because they've asked for different things from me, but my thoughts and intentions towards them I don't think have changed very much at all."

It is in his relationship with Horatio that Jacobi believes television production has had the greatest effect. "One can get much more out of the relationship on television than on stage. Whereas on the stage Horatio is around quite a lot, on television you can keep seeing him, keep cutting to him looking at Hamlet, Hamlet looking at him, building up a relationship that is much more striking and important than on stage."

Talking to Jacobi after "Richard II" I had got the impression that he had felt fundamentally frustrated by the strictures of acting the part for television, perhaps because he had never played the part on stage. With "Hamlet", perhaps because he has played it on stage so much, I felt he had welcomed possibilities television had opened up. "I do love the theatre---it is my first love and Shakespeare wrote for the theatre---but in the course of my last tour we did some horrendously outrageous dates like the courtyard of Kronoberg Castle in the wind and the rain, and the snow and the fog and the hurricane; and vast theatres in Japan; and open-air theatres in Greece. The play sort of went out the window a bit. It's a very domestic play and it's such a relief to play it domestically for the camera, to scale it down and let the camera help you. In Kronoberg Castle you had to belt it out for the 2000 people who were something like sixty yards away from you with the wind blowing heavily. 'To be or not to be' may have been said better but it's never been said louder!"

He had fully intended, when beginning the television production, to go back to the very beginning, wiping his mind clear of his stage interpretation. This, of course, proved more easily planned than done, nor altogether desirable. "I only once in the course of rehearsal said, 'What we did before was....'" he remarks proudly. "I did wipe the slate clean, and then gradually things started to creep back in. For instance, line interpretations: it would have been foolish to have wasted so much time and effort and blood trying to find ways of saying a line that were right for the Hamlet that I wanted to do, only to throw all that away and say, 'Oh, I'll say it that way this time because it's a different production.' So gradually things did come back. It's really scaling things down and changing a lot of the emphases. I couldn't play the scenes the same way physically that I'd played them in the theatre: I think that was one of the basic things. I realised the physicality of the theatre performance---moments were associated in my mind with positions, with physical movements, with props---with all sorts of things that had become stepping stones throughout the course of the evening. The other thing is that of course you don't have that sense of the course of the evening. It's all split up over these eight days, all higgledy-piggedly. Thank goodness I've had the experience of playing it in the theatre from A to B, because I do think without that I really would be a bit lost with all the cutting up which is necessary for television."

Opinions in the studio vary on how much his Hamlet has changed from stage to television; some say a lot, others say that it is essentially the same. Jacobi himself is not sure: "A lot of the changes would be in my head, and to a spectator they might not look that radical, though in the actor's head they are important, earth-shattering changes. An actor attaches great importance to a couple of seconds worth of his performance which to an audience doesn't mean anything. I remember in Shanghai a Chinese professor came to see it and enjoyed it very much and sent me his thesis---about 15 pages of very closely reasoned argument about why it should be 'sullied flesh', not 'solid flesh'. It was very learned and I thought, 'Of course it should be sullied.' And he came again and this time I said 'sullied' and he came around and said, 'Of course, in performance it doesn't matter. It's only a word and it's gone like that.' That was a great revelation to him, whereas what he put down was a great revelation to me.

"What I discovered was---I had thought there was only one way I could play it, my way, coming from my personality. Now I do think that the personality of the actor playing Hamlet is important but I've discovered that I can kick it around, I can almost reverse what I've done before and still believe in what I'm doing because it's a very malleable play: it adapts itself to so many interpretations. Line by line, the things one is discovering still!

"The great obstacle in the role is the hoop that the play has become for aspiring classical actors, the fact that you are immediately compared to every actor who's ever played Hamlet before: unlike any other role. They don't trace all the ex-Lears, or the ex-Othellos or the ex-Macbeths, but they always dredge up the old Hamlets for comparison. Are you a modern Hamlet, are you a traditional Hamlet, are you an emotional Hamlet, a political Hamlet, a psychopathic Hamlet---young, old, middle-aged, do you love your mother, love your father? And so the first problem is not to try to be all things to all men but to be true to the Hamlet you think is inside you, which has got to be different from everybody else's. Not necessarily righter than anybody else's; that's what makes it a marvelous part, it's capable of so many interpretations. I didn't have any approach to it, I tried not to intellectualise it, I think the play's been intellectualised out of all existence. The scholars have had a go at it, the directors have had a go at it, it's been attacked from all sides, all angles; it's been set in all periods; analysed, reanalysed; has been approached emotionally, politically, intellectually......Hamlet is a Man, with a capital M. He is all of those things and it depends on the personality of the actor playing him where you think the emphases should be."