Channelling the ghosts: the Wooster Group’s remediation of the 1964 Electronovision Hamlet

Summary

‘THE PARTICULAR INTENSITY AND NERVES OF THIS’

In early February 1964 when the buzz around the scandalous affair between Richard Burton and American screen goddess Elizabeth Taylor was at a fever-pitch, a new Broadway-bound production of Hamlet began to take shape in Toronto under the direction of the already legendary John Gielgud and starring Burton in his third go-round in the title role. Rehearsals with a uniformly accomplished supporting cast of British and American actors – which included such then and later-to-become stage-luminaries as Hume Cronyn, George Rose and John Cullum – proceeded at a speedy clip, though not without distractions prompted by occasional sightings of Ms Taylor. Sources indicate that Burton accepted instruction from Gielgud in an understatedly deferential manner – amicably trading anecdotes with him about fellow stage-legends, Ralph Richardson and ‘Larry’ Olivier – but seldom followed the old master’s directives, much less seemed to work very hard at mastering his lines. Although the cast uniformly evinced respect and admiration for Gielgud – who seemed to know all their parts by heart and could rehearse them backwards and forwards – they also found themselves at sea without a rudder as opening night beckoned, lacking any determinate sense of an overarching concept or sustained interpretive focus for the production itself. Seriously professional to a fault, the cast was often bewildered by the variability of Gielgud’s daily notes and directives, which would require, for example, the actor playing Guildenstern to be meekly obsequious in one scene, aggressively inquisitorial in another, without developing a consistent through-line of interpretation that would render his changes in tone coherent.