Lynn Redgrave
Playwright of Nightingale,The Mandrake Root, and Shakespeare For My Father recalls opening night of Hamlet at London's National Theatre, in November 1963.
Lynn Redgrave, who played a lady-in-waiting, recounts an unforgettable production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet directed by Lawrence Olivier.
Peter O'Toole was playing Hamlet, and my father (Michael Redgrave) was Claudius the king, and there numerous various ladies-in-waiting. It was long and it was the uncut version, which ran about four hours.
It was directed by Lawrence Olivier and it had some wonderful things in it, but it was plagued with problems. We had a huge set designed by the late Sean Kenny and it looked a bit like – well, it was supposed to be rocks in a big semicircle, but it looked like a huge dinosaur. It was rather ugly and it was placed on a revolve and it was supposed to come around and form different shapes and the revolve was on a rake so the stage was slanted and that meant that when the weight of the "dinosaur" – as we liked to call it – got to the bottom of the revolve on a sort of downhill end, it had to use a lot of energy to get it uphill and sometimes it would stick.
I remember the first time that the revolve stuck was during the first Elsinore scene. The King and Queen are on stage and all of us ladies-in-waiting and lords, Osric, and everybody are milling about.
All of a sudden this thing sticks and there’s about to be all sorts of big entrances and we are trying to push it around with our feet while adlibbing. You know, when people are left to adlib their Shakespeare crowd sounds it tends to come out like ‘So, how are things in Elsinore?' And you hear these ripples of giggles from the audience, and it was quite tricky.
(Peter) O’Toole was at times extraordinary. He was very erratic, his performance. I think he was going through some problems in his life at the time, and of course it was a mammoth undertaking and there were days or scenes – sometimes not whole performances - where he was absolutely electrifying, but it came and went a bit.
(Amanda Plummer will be performing Lynn Redgrave's extraordinary one woman show Shakespeare For My Father at Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts Feb 4 - 25 2007.)
