Hamlet 1963

Financial Times, 23 Oct 1963
It is fitting that the National Theatre, at last translated into the reality, should open with the most famous play in all theatrical literature.

Daily Sketch, 23 Oct 1963:
Trying hard not to be grossly hysterical - I clapped critic's non-flappable hands. Containing myself with sober words - magnificent, beautiful, triumphant, noble. Pretending indifference to gorgeous acting, the like of which I've rarely seen. Ignoring the Sean Kenny sets - a blinding piece of revolving poetic engineering. Hardly giving credit to Sir Laurence Olivier's brilliantly sane and madly lovely interpretation of this (until today) almost impossible play...let me, after five hours, loudly and hoarsely sweet praise for this great Hamlet by Peter O'Toole.

Financial Times, 5 Nov 1963:
Mr O'Toole rails against the world like Jimmy Porter very finely: he is fine in action, too. But where is the dreamer, the poet manqué, the impotent, the self-pitier and the self-punisher? Where is the Prince?

The Times, 23 Oct 1963:
In a curiously belittling programme note Laurence Olivier links Hamlet with the figure of Jimmy Porter and the angries, and goes on to deny him any consistency of character; he "approaches life like an actor, always trying on new characterizations to see if they fit". This eclectic approach, which one can hardly describe as an interpretation, is reflected in Peter O'Toole's performance. Mr. O'Toole, like Olivier, is an electrifyingly outgoing actor, and it is a surprise to see him make his first appearance from a pit in the forestage with his features twisted into melancholy. Nothing that follows persuades one that his temperament is in any way engaged in this state of mind.

Birmingham Evening Mail, 23 Oct 1963:
Peter O'Toole gives us a new Hamlet to remember. The Prince's blondness and his curiously comic trousers are disconcerting but Mr O'Toole settles down to play a virile and often violent Hamlet who holds our attention throughout this almost uncut version.

The Scotsman, 24 Oct 1963:
Mr O'Toole wanders through the first part of the play like a man in a dream. His detachment from the events is heightened by his beginning 'Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I' with a self-mocking laugh and, indeed, it is only with 'How all occasions do inform against me' in which Hamlet is concerned about Fortinbras's unfortunate army, that he shows and communicates a deep feeling of tragedy - much more than he has shown for the closer events of the royal house of Denmark. He is the most republican Hamlet of our time.

New York Herald Tribune, 25 Oct 1963:
Headline 'Olivier, O'Toole Create a Beatnik 'Hamlet'

Sunday Telegraph 27 Oct 1963:
Devastatingly attractive to women, a natural leader of men, the most brilliant brain of the year at Wittenberg University - if such a man can make a mess of his life, who can blame us for not fulfilling our early promise? Hamlet is the most famous excuse in literature for failure. All over the world young men are now acting Hamlet in the bathroom. Such narcissism is understandable in private. On stage, the actor who allows himself to fall in love with the role cannot avoid wallowing in self-indulgence. And this is the central weakness of Peter O'Toole's performance.

Sunday Times, 27 Oct 1963:
When the curtain rose on the National Theatre's 'Hamlet' and I saw the mounting curves of Sean Kenny's dangerous rocks, and the poised figures of the sentinels against the sky, I had a great and delicious emotion of peril, as of one venturing into the realms of threatening ambush: that on looking at Desmond Heeley's rich gold brocades and jewels I felt that I had my hand upon the royalty on an age of high romance, and that when in his very first speech Peter O'Toole's grieved Hamlet spoke of 'customary suits of black' I felt in my throat that catch, down my spine the shiver which Housman says is the reward and the aim of the highest poetry.

Evening Standard 23 Oct 1963:
Another mistake may have been Peter O'Toole's interpretation of Hamlet as an Elizabethan Jimmy Porter. Although it is possible to find a common denominator between Hamlet's view that his time was out of joint and our own angry young men feeling our own world is all wrong, the similarity ends there. Hamlet, unlike Jimmy Porter, had a specific, concrete, direct motivation for his anger, his indecision, his need for action. His father had been murdered and he wanted revenge. If his father had been alive and healthy, there would have been no play. But O'Toole, whose passionate reading of the lines is superb, seems to be making revenge an almost supplementary justification to his deeds.