Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater

5. Giants and Pygmies

chapter 5  Giants and Pygmies Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its entirety. Eight minutes shorter than Gone With The Wind. —margaret webster With a reprieve from performances for four months, Webster traveled through Europe, observing from London to Paris to Genoa the impending catastrophe of a world slouching toward war. Hitler’s armies were poised to overrun Czechoslovakia and Poland, precipitating Britain’s declaration of war. It was the summer of 1938. Against this backdrop, Maurice Evans decided to take as his next professional step an uncut version of Hamlet, and Webster faced a truly immense task as the director. First, she had to discover Shakespeare’s “uncut text” and then determine how to stage it so that Broadway audiences could endure a four-hour performance exclusive of intermissions. With characteristic wit, Webster suggested to her friend that they should advertise the uncut Hamlet as “Eight minutes shorter than Gone With The Wind.”1 Webster had seen at least a dozen Hamlets in her time and performed in two of them. She had appeared as a gentlewoman with John Barrymore in London in 1925 and later played with John Gielgud, Martita Hunt, and Donald Wol‹t in the 1930 Old Vic production that transferred to the West End. As she worked on an acting text, her self-con‹dence, tenacity, and good sense prevailed over the twin pitfalls: con›icting scholarly interpretations and the various stage traditions that Hamlet had spawned over the years. In an illuminating remark Webster said, “If the play is really as dif‹cult as they [the scholars] seem to believe, Maurice can’t act it, I can’t 85 direct it, nobody can understand it and we better not do it. So I shut the books and went back to the text.”2 Despite the many scholarly words written about the play, Hamlet is a play of the theater. This was Webster’s guidepost throughout. She set herself the task of making decisive directorial choices, dealing with interpretation, period, scenery, and costumes. In consultation with designer David Ffolkes, Webster and Evans decided to set the play in the Elizabethan period—the ruffs, farthingales, and doublets of Shakespeare’s time. The stage itself would be kept open by covering over the orchestra pit, creating the apron that had worked so successfully in Richard II. Webster began the search for an acting text with the First Folio, the Second Quarto, and even the First or “Bad” Quarto. She said of her research, “I soon found myself in the midst of a kind of bibliographical thriller-mystery with a number of villains, a labyrinth of clues, and two protagonists, in the shape of ‘F 1’ and ‘Q 2’ who soon became almost as vivid to me as Hamlet himself.” She also consulted John Dover Wilson’s The Manuscript of Shakespeare ’s Hamlet. As she revealed in her own writings on the play, she applied an actor’s knowledge of stage practice to the arguable points. Her actor’s sensibility committed her inevitably to the First Folio (checked against the First Quarto and “theatrical need”) as the more authentic text, because it seemed to be “the playhouse version for playhouse reasons.”3 More simply put, the First Folio was most likely printed from the original stage manager’s prompt copy at the Globe and represented what the company had played. Before leaving New York for the summer months, Webster and Evans agreed upon a cast, with the exception of the king and queen, who had eluded them in auditions. The day before she sailed to London on the Normandie in the company of the Lunts, she went to a matinee of Orson Welles’s production of Heartbreak House at the Mercury Theatre and found Queen Gertrude—the Viennese-born Mady Christians. She was playing Hesione Hushabye with a “radiant sensibility” opposite Orson Welles as Captain Shotover and Geraldine Fitzgerald as Ellie Dunn.4 It turned out that Webster and Christians had a great deal in common, including theatrical parents and growing up abroad. Born in Vienna into a theatrical family, Mady Christians (née Marguerita Maria Christians) had studied acting with Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Like Webster, she had traveled as a child with her parents in and out of New York City. Her father, Rudolph Christians, like Ben Webster, was also a well-known actor. He joined the German repertory company at the Irving Place Theatre, near Gramercy Park in lower Manhattan in 1912, and a year later became...