HAMLET IN MODERN DRESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 217, 20 August 1943, Page 4

HAMLET IN MODERN DRESS

HIS is the record of one who went to see "Hamlet in Modern Dress" in Christchurch, and-to™ write something mainly about™the modern dress, but came away inclined (though scarcely qualified), to write at length on "The Present Greatness of Shakespeare." How absurd to dilate on the effects of the modern dress, and dishonest, too, as. if the real and significant event were not "Hamlet" himself. As if it were not in New Zealand literally the chance of a lifetime to see staged that little-known play by an obscure and partly-discredited author. I am not being funny. I seem to remember some recent arguments about Shakespeare in The Listener. Somebody said, or was quoted as saying, that Shakespeare didn’t like the Workers. * "To the best of our belief," said the programme, "this is the first time in the Southern Hemisphere that Hamlet has been played in modern dress." Not doubting the importance of the occasion for the Southern Hemisphere, I was more occupied with the thought that for me-and I suppose for a good few others in the Little Theatre at Canterbury University College that eveningit was the first time Hamlet had been played at all. The prospect of modern dress, therefore, both attracted and repelled. Repelled, because it seemed we were to be bothered at a critical moment of experience by a controversial addition which the university college Drama Society might well have spared us. For the rest, Douglas Lilburn had composed music for strings specially for this production; Miss Ngaio Marsh and

Dundas Walker had had a considerable hand in it. On the fourth of its five nights the play had again overfilled the small house — well over 1000 saw it — and there was more talk in the town about HamJet than about any current Repertory Society effort for the subintelligentsia, not quite hot from London. : ue ba Ba ]F you want to justify modern "dress for Hamlet you say that the ‘play if its essentials is timeless; that "period" dress (11th century Danish? Or Elizabethan?), puts all the fusty associations of a bad tradition between us and

Shakespeare; that to the end of the 18th century they always did it like that; and that it has been done _ successfully abroad in recent years. These may be good and sufficient reasons, but this Christchurch production needed no appeal to them. Laertes’ burberry, Bernado’s battledress, and the King’s dress-

ing-gown doubtless had a part in producing the total splendid effect. But if the sun that is Shakespeare, broke through, wakening and warming us, as in fact it did, "modern dress" was by no means the only cause. In a cast inevitably uneven in merit — from the really outstanding Hamlet, Laertes, and

Polonius to the less impressive Horatio and Ophelia — there was not one of these students who did not seem to understand and ‘love the part..And the whole was brilliantly organised; the action swept forward through +a series of commandingly staged scenes, There were 17 scenes, the play being "cut to half its published length in order to fit the standard acting time." be * * "EF: LSINORE. A platform before the castle." Francisco at his post, in tin hat and army greatcoat, armed with service rifle, bayonet fixed. As on some New Zealand coast defence post, so at Elsinore, "Enter to him Bernado"-similarly a i. So the very first scene gave us the extreme of modern dress. Against a blue-lit cyclorama the figures looked larger than life on the small stage. The familiar challenge and reply came with heightened reality was it "modern dress" that did it? The worst fear was past, at all events. Shakespear’s lines and New Zealand’s Army having proved so little incongruous, Hamlet might wear plus-fours, an he pleased. Hamlet, in fact, wore belted black jacket and black slacks. Here was a compromise with modernity. The King, the Queen and Polonius also compromised, with an approximation to the court dress of some small principality: bright uniforms covered with insignia. A Ruritanian touch was inevitable; but it seems that the society, lacking coupons for the purchase of costume materials, had to on local resources in the way of wardrobe. The Ghost, of course, had no modern precedent to guide him, but Dundas Walker made himself a

most stately shade "in form and manner like the King that’s dead." Ne he & FTER the triumph scored with battledress, modern dress had still some really difficult tests to pass. The burial of Ophelia, with the women following in modern black day clothes and heavy veils, might in anticipation have seemed doomed to falsity; but again it succeeded. Shakespeare’ by that time was. so utterly in command of both audience and cast, that cremation might almost have been substituted without disaster. The duel, that is, (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) the fencing match of Hamlet and Laertes, lost nothing by representation as a correctly played bout, with masks and foils and umpire, the contestants in slacks and white shirts, ] ILBURN’S music for three violins, . heard first as an overture, then between scenes and in a little sombre march for the entrance and exit of the Court was very pure and clean sound, almost cold. It had the effect, even before the curtains parted, of making the mind clear for the tragedy to pass. Music like this, and this particularly, seems both to demand and to meet the demand made in Yeast’s lines: "Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done; Who can distinguish darkness trom the soul?" It displayed the humility which is the proof, at times, of all real creativeness, seeming to gain power by submissive entrance into its great context, The musicians were Nancy Brown, Eve Christeller and Margaret Sicely. ie Ht me A NOTE on the Little Theatre: it was time something was done with it. When the Boys’ High School moved nearly 20 years ago from the university block, Professor Shelley (then Professor of Education), had the old_ school assembly hall, latterly, used for. classes, converted into a_ well-equipped little theatre for his Drama Society; from the Drama Society grew the Repertory Theatre Society, whose ideas were too big for the Little Theatre, so that in recent years its possibilities have been almost forgotten by the public and grossly neglected even in the college

itself. It holds just under’ 200 persons; everyone is near the stage. The roof is high, barrel-yaulted. The stage itself can do all most producers require, and more than some would need. A rare asset is the cyclorama for background lighting. More Shakespeare should be played in such a place-not to mention Marlowe, Webster, and others, according to taste and time available, Perhaps, too, there may be a contemporary piece or two worth playing, but overlooked bv |

the Repertory Scouts,

A.

C.

Ass DRESS productions of Shakespeare have been ventured in London and New York and on the Continent with some success, returning to a perfectly respectable Shakespearean tradition. In the 18th century, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra appeared in crinolines, and as "Theatre Arts" said in 1926, after a New York production of "Hamlet in Modern Dress," by Sir Barry Jackson, "the slightly exaggerated costumes of old London seem strange to us to-day, not because they were cut from contemporary patterns, but because their lines contributed so little to the suggestion of the characters they clothed." It would be interesting to know whether in 200 years this verdict will apply to the production by Orson Welles, at the Mercury Theatre, New York, in 1937, of "Julius Caesar’ in modern dress-presented as "a study ot Fascism." (Above: A photograph of Alexander Moissi playing Hamlet in modern dress in Vienna about 20 years ago).