VARIATIONS ON SHAKESPEARE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 23, Issue 583, 25 August 1950, Page 16

VARIATIONS ON SHAKESPEARE

THREE TALES OF HAMLET, by Rayner Heppenstall and Michael Innes; Victor Gollancz. English price, 10/6. ""THIS entrancing volume," the blurb announces, "contains three separate broadcast pieces linked together by the Hamlet theme." The shortest and most straightforward of these, "The Mysterious Affair at Elsinore," is a

harmless bit of fooling by Michael Innes, the detective-story writer (who is also J. I. M. Stewart, of Christ Church, Oxford, a rising Shakespeare scholar with a-strong flair for psychology). The holocaust at the end of Hamlet is made the starting-point for an "investigation"-in pleasant parody of the manner of such literary detectives as Professor Dover Wilson-which reveals that the catastrophe in the play has really~been engineered by Fortinbras, who impersonated the ghost of Hamlet’s father to set in train an action that would clear his own way to the Danish throne. This is amusing- reading, end must have made good listening on the Third Programme. "The Hawk and the Handsaw," also by Michael Innes, is a much more ambitious and less successful effort. This is radio drama with all the trimmings: apparently the author takes his theme at least half seriously; and the resultdespite its air of learning and fashionable psychology-has all the familiar stegey bookishness of Victorian historical reconstructions, It is more like Clemence Dane than anything else, and this can hardly have been the effect intended. Mr. Rayner Heppenstall’s radio play, "The Fool’s Saga," is even longer and much more chaotic: it is based on early Scandinavian forms of the Amleth legend, and deals chiefly. with Hamlet’s two visits to England, perhaps in the 6th Century. It is hard to believe that such a medley of scraps of scholarship and elaborate metrical imitations could be intelligible to any but honours graduates in English-imagination boggles at what it must have sounded like on the air. Mr. Heppenstall is a poet, and as a poet does seem to be enjoying himself at rare moments in his play. But I doubt if this Hamlet volume, as a whole, will raise many laughs outside college common-rooms, and not even the strenuous salesmanship of Mr. Gollanez is likely to succeed in making it popular. It may be recommended with a caution ‘to Shakespeare students: and to all radic script-writers, as a warning of how silly they can be made to look

in cold print.

J.

B.