Monitor [27/10/1963]

Synopsis: Anthology arts series. Huw Wheldon chairs a discussion on Hamlet with Orson Welles, Peter O’Toole and Ernest Milton. O’Toole describes Hamlet as a play about three sons all trying to avenge their fathers in different ways. Welles says that he likes to hear an actor associate Hamlet with Elizabethan times. There is a general discussion on whether Hamlet was deranged. Wheldon asks why didn’t Hamlet kill Claudius; Welles replies that there be no play if he did and there are 5 acts to go. Ernest Milton believes the lines should be spoken with musical rhythm. He says that if you play Hamlet when young then you can go on and play the role when you are much older, but you cannot play it for the first time when you are old.
Series: Monitor
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Television
Transmission details: 27 Oct 1963 (Channel: BBC)
Duration: 45 mins

Notes: The footage may be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/archive/hamlet (accessed 12/2009). The entry notes ‘Incomplete. Audio drop out’.
Reviews: Anthony Burgess, reviewing the discussion in The Listener (7 November 1968, p 706) began his assessment ‘I am heartily sick of men sitting around tables’ and went on to write ‘O’Toole’s exhibitionistic parade of scrappy, often irrelevant, reading and Welles’s Ercles roars battered the greatest Hamlet of our time [Milton] to silence. It was a shameful performance’.