Hamlet Without the Prince

In all the vexations, triumphs and reversals of my dramatic career at St. Columba’s College—a century-old boys’ school inconveniently situated in the picturesque foothills of the Dublin Mountains—I never imagined that but a few years later I would find myself in the unique and privileged position of observing a fully staged performance of Hamlet in the same location, without its leading player.

My kinsman Tyrone Guthrie, a relative of my mother’s, invited me and his niece Julia Butler to the opening night of his production of Hamlet at the Gate Theatre in June 1951. I was sixteen at the time, and living in the Guthrie home, Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan, where my father was managing the estate as a retirement post. Ronald Ibbs, an English actor who settled in Ireland in the 1940s, played Hamlet. The production was announced as being “in modern dress,” which the Dublin theater columnists snidely attributed to a desire by the management to save money on costumes; in the event, it emerged that the residents of this twentieth-century Danish palace were sumptuously and nostalgically attired—as indeed was customary in all European courts at that time—in the outdated yet expensive habilments of previous generations.

Julia and I were at separate boarding schools and an exeat for each of us was achieved following a formal exchange of letters between the director of the production and our respective headmaster and headmistress. Julia’s headmistress was so incensed at the idea of an Elizabethan play being presented in modern dress! that for a moment there was doubt that she would allow her pupil out for the evening; she relented when she learned that she would be introduced to the celebrated Tyrone Guthrie when he called for his niece at Knockrabo School.

I had no difficulty in obtaining an exeat from my headmaster, the warden of St. Columba’s. I was at that time entirely stagestruck, but any night out in the city would have been a novelty and an excitement. At 6:30 pm I boarded the single-decker bus that plied from Kilmashogue Bridge to the city center and arrived in time to recognize several famous faces from the world of stage, screen, and radio edging their way through the Gate’s cramped hallway. There was the truly glamorous Noelle Middleton, the earliest Irish announcer on BBC Television; the man with the face like a clenched fist must certainly be “K,” the soubriquet of Séamus Kelly, the Irish Times theater critic; the exceedingly corpulent gentleman and the lady who made up for it by being as thin as a pikestaff were the earl and countess of Longford who would have leased the Gate to Ronald Ibbs Productions for the run of the play. Then Tony Guthrie arrived with Julia and her friend Sarah Perry. It had been explained as being part of the exeat transaction that he should also deliver these young ladies back to their seat of educational incarceration following the three-hour performance.

In the two intermissions, Tony led us across the street to a cafeteria named Rio for coffee and colored cakes—Julia whispered that he didn’t want to get embroiled with autograph seekers in the theater lobby. He asked our opinions of various actors and looked pleased when I said I thought Godfrey Quigley as Horatio was especially good. I had seen the Olivier motion picture of Hamlet that summer and we had read the play in school so I felt supremely knowledgeable. Tony didn’t enquire what we thought of the Ophelia, who was Mrs. Ronald Ibbs, and I sensed that he felt that had he done so I might be forced to say she seemed a little, well, heavy, for the part; had I been asked I would have suggested that she would have made “a fine Gertrude.” However, as Miss Coralie Carmichael was (I thought) a superb Gertrude—as regal and guilt-consumed as Eileen Herlie in the film—any bold suggestion of replacing her with Mrs. Ibbs might have spoiled the composure of the intermission coffee party.

After the actors had...