Modern Hamlets & Soliloquies: An Expanded Edition

3. DAVID WARNER: The Rogue and Peasant Slave

3 DAVID WARNER The Rogue and Peasant Slave When David Warner was performing Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre one evening, a member of the audience actually entered into the play. It was near the end of the second act, just after Hamlet dismisses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. With a sigh of relief, Warner breathed, "Now I am alone." He raked the stalls with his eyes, scooping in the balcony with a wide look, and then began the soliloquy: "0, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ..." The audience followed him closely. He gave the natural builds in the speech, moving through "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?" At the series of short questions, beginning with "Am I a coward?" Warner paused, just to think about what he'd said. Surprisingly, one of the spectators shouted, "Yes!" Warner responded, "Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, / Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, / Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i' th' throat / As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?" And now a name was shouted out from the audience ! Warner was excited and responded with some vehemence, "Hah, 'swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be / But I am pigeon-liver'd ..." Warner remembered this as one of the most exhilarating nights of his acting career. He was stunned with the rightness of feeling and the naturalness of speaking these soliloquy lines directly to the theatre audience. The text supported him absolutely. No adjustments in timing, motivation , or thought needed to be made. He was still making discoveries inside the act of performance, and it filled him with a sense of awe about Shakespeare's dramaturgy.1 This Hamlet was director Peter Hall's contribution to the social revolution of the sixties. Scruffy, antiheroic, powerless in the sweep of the military-industrial complex of Denmark, Hamlet was recycled and reconstituted to adapt to the needs of the emergent theatre audience for the new Royal Shakespeare Company. Ralph Berry details the way in which the character interpretation in this 1965-66 production broke the mould: First of all, Warner was not shown as attractive. He did not fit the matinee-idol image of the Leslie Howards or the John Nevilles of the past, with their flowing hair, romantic profiles, and gently rhythmic verse. In fact, he was downright unprincely. The production did not offer a delicately costumed and obviously wronged heir to the throne of Denmark.2 Newspaper headlines announced a clear departure from tradition: "AN EXISTENTIALIST PRINCE," 3 "THE UNFINISHED HERO,"4 "MIDDLE-CLASS HAMLET,"5 "PRINCE OF DENMARK STREET." 6 Warner said that the critics took Ophelia's soliloquy too literally: they demanded, "Where IS 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form' that she speaks about, where IS the courtier, where is the soldier, where is the scholar, where is the prince?" Furthermore, Warner's Hamlet was not middle-aged. Up to this juncture in the twentieth century, it was not unusual to see an actor of fifty playing the part. Only Gielgud and Guinness had dared to be so young, both attempting the most difficult of classical roles for the first time in their early twenties. Warner was barely twenty-four. Berry sums up the audience appeal: "The eclat of David Warner's Hamlet sprang from the fact that he looked like, and was, a contemporary of a heavy proportion of the audience."7 Critics emphasized the youthful flavor of the character conception: "He shelters in childishness, seeking to appear not merely too insane to be responsible for his actions, but too young. His disguise is ... the willful untidiness of an undergraduate, the half-baked impertinence of the adolescent who would test his parents' love to the limit of tolerance." 8 "He imprints an image of a pale, defiant boy, immensely tall and thin, trying to live with some sort of honest sense of dimension." 9 Hall's pre-production ideas were spelled out in a presentation to Royal Shakespeare Company actors at the start of rehearsals for the production in the summer of 1965.10 He began with a discussion of Hamlet's "trembling on the point of full maturity."ll Hall emphasized his isolation in 42 David Warner a court where Claudius was a "master of appearances" 12 and Polonius "the kind...