Simon Stone’s Elsinore, Andrew Scott, and the Last Hamlet of Ian Charleson
I. A Monitor in the Wings
The first Hamlet in Elsinore is watched by people who are not watching. Simon Stone opens his film backstage at the National Theatre on an evening in September 1989, among technicians for whom the longest part in Shakespeare is a shift to be got through. Owen Gleiberman, who reviewed the film for Variety from its first screening at Telluride, describes their mood as somewhere between tedium and entertainment. Steve Pond of TheWrap adds that what we are given of the stage arrives through backstage monitors and from the wings. Out in the light an elderly actor playing the Ghost keeps losing his lines. The prince loses patience, or loses something larger, and goes. He has no face: Gregory Ellwood notes in The Playlist that Daniel Day-Lewis is represented by a stand-in whom the camera never identifies, and Pond confirms that no archival footage is used. Then the wings fill with talk. Barbara Goslawski, writing from Toronto for Screen Anarchy, remembers the scene chiefly for its backstage gibes, everybody in the building ready with a line about the star who walked.
It is a funny way to begin a film about a dying man, and the joke has a second edge that takes a while to feel. For some minutes a viewer who came in cold might suppose that the film concerns this other, more famous actor and his collapse. It does not. The best-known walkout in the modern British theater is used as a door, and once the door has been opened the film has no further interest in it. A part has been vacated. Somebody will have to go and live in it.
The facelessness is shrewd. To cast a recognizable actor as Day-Lewis would have started an impersonation contest in the first reel, and the film has only one impersonation it wants us to think about. It also lets the most famous living screen actor pass through a movie as a rumor, a pair of shoulders, a disturbance among stagehands, which is roughly how most of the people in that building experienced him that night. Stone came to films from the stage; he has directed Hamlet himself and has worked at the National. Stephen Beresford, who wrote the screenplay, had a play produced there before he wrote Pride. The backstage they have built is a workplace before it is anything else, with a workplace’s appetite for disaster happening to somebody senior.
Look at what the sequence has already established about seeing. A performance of Hamlet is in progress and the film declines to show it to us whole. We get a relay on a small screen, a slice of stage between black flats, the backs of people whose job is to know the cue after next. Reviewers who dislike Elsinore complain, with some reason, that it never lets its own Hamlet stand still long enough to be judged. The habit begins here, in the first minutes, and here it reads as candor. In the theater Stone has rebuilt, great acting is a rumor that travels down a corridor. The people in the wings learn that something has happened before they understand what it was.
The historical evening was 5 September 1989. The National’s archive preserves the show report written that night by the stage manager, Ernest Hall, which records the leading actor’s unscripted exit; a second report, two days later, notes the warm reception for the understudy, Jeremy Northam, who had been playing Laertes and was promoted to prince between one scene and the next. The Ghost that season was David Burke. The newspapers quickly supplied a legend in which Day-Lewis, whose father, the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, had died when the boy was fifteen, looked at Burke and saw his own parent. Day-Lewis has since said, in an interview with Time in 2012, that playing Hamlet had indeed meant being in touch with his late father in some sense, but that he has no memory of any ghost appearing to him on that awful evening. Richard Eyre’s published diaries add a deflating detail. The actor had decided three months earlier that he would not stay with the production to the end of its run in the Olivier that November.
So the record offers exhaustion, grief, and a planned departure that arrived early and in the worst possible manner. The film offers, depending on which critic one reads, either a fit of temper at a colleague’s dried lines (Gleiberman) or something closer to breakdown (David Rooney, in The Hollywood Reporter, writes of Day-Lewis collapsing and then walking off while cast and crew mill about in confusion). The two descriptions do not quite fit together, and the misfit is worth keeping, because it says something about how the scene must be shot. An exit glimpsed on a monitor and from the side can be read as anger by one attentive professional and as collapse by another. Inside five minutes the film has made its witnesses disagree. Witnesses to the theater generally do.
Beresford’s screenplay then does something that the angrier reviews hold against it and that seems to me one of its better decisions. It goes back about a month and picks up a different actor in a different part of London, doing something much less ...
