Excerpts from "Hamlet"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 492, 26 November 1948, Page 9

Excerpts from "Hamlet"

"THE best is yet to be," said Browning, and I am still waiting for the general release of Sir Laurence Olivier’s ‘Hamlet. Meanwhile the NZBS is see_img to it that my appetite for the Old Vic and all its works grows by what it feeds on, and on a recent Monday I was treated to a half-hour programme

of music and spoken excerpts from the film. It was magnificent, though of course the scrappy nature of the programme prevented it from giving listeners a large-scale air-lift and forced them to be content with a few short cultural hops, since they were brought to earth at frequent intervals by studio comments on the action of the play. Would it have been safe, I wonder, to assume that listeners were sufficiently familiar with the play to dispense with these makeshift bridges? In spite of the slight annoyance I felt at the announcer’s probably necessary intrusions the programme had a déeply exciting effect on me, due primarily I think to Walton’s strange and compelling music. Sir Laurence of course had less oppoartunity to exploit the element of sur-prise-all the same I shall not easily forget the sodden despair of his "To Be or Not To Be." ;