Olivier

When several of Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare films came back to New York recently, it occurred to me that he has not performed a Shakespearean role in this country for nearly a quarter of a century. The last one was Antony, in 1951, to his then-wife Vivien Leigh’s Cleopatra. The only previous one was Romeo, to Leigh’s Juliet, in 1940. His Shakespearean reputation here rests largely on his films: Henry V, Hamlet, Richard 111, and Othello. So handsome are they, and so electrifying is Olivier’s reading of their verse, that no adverse critical estimate of them should deter him who hasn’t seen them.

But. These same films also embody the much that is wrong with Olivier’s Shakespearean conceptions, and with Shakespearean productions in general. Apropos of the theatrical gimmickry so often inflicted on the poet, Time’s T. E. Kalem has remarked that it all suggests a fear that the greatest playwright who ever lived can’t be counted on to hold an audience without “help.” Directors live in deathly fear of being thought stodgy, and I have heard of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which all the males had light bulbs in their codpieces, which lit up at moments of amorousness.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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When several of Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare films came back to New York recently, it occurred to me that he has not performed a Shakespearean role in this country for nearly a quarter of a century. The last one was Antony, in 1951, to his then-wife Vivien Leigh’s Cleopatra. The only previous one was Romeo, to Leigh’s Juliet, in 1940. His Shakespearean reputation here rests largely on his films: Henry V, Hamlet, Richard 111, and Othello. So handsome are they, and so electrifying is Olivier’s reading of their verse, that no adverse critical estimate of them should deter him who hasn’t seen them.

But. These same films also embody the much that is wrong with Olivier’s Shakespearean conceptions, and with Shakespearean productions in general. Apropos of the theatrical gimmickry so often inflicted on the poet, Time’s T. E. Kalem has remarked that it all suggests a fear that the greatest playwright who ever lived can’t be counted on to hold an audience without “help.” Directors live in deathly fear of being thought stodgy, and I have heard of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which all the males had light bulbs in their codpieces, which lit up at moments of amorousness.