Towards a Poor Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1975

Summary

I would be doing the late Buzz Goodbody a disservice if I called the production of Hamlet at Stratford in 1975 hers. Against the tide of our ‘director’s theatre’, over which the Royal Shakespeare Company has long exercised a moon-like influence, she found the courage and the skill to release the play to the actors. The actors, for their part, responded with a performance whose alertness to the text was not only exemplary but constantly invigorating. For the second time this decade Stratford has provided us with a major theatrical exploration of a familiar text; and this Hamlet, unlike Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is imitable.

I was once in a production of Ironhand which overwhelmed audiences in Manchester's small University Theatre. Transferred to the Teatro Regio in Parma it dwindled. Hamlet was not performed in the main auditorium, but in the bare and comfortless small studio/shack named, or unnamed, The Other Place. To call the production imitable is not to claim that it is transferable. It belonged to the physical context in which it had been rehearsed, and which it exploited.