The Trappings and the Suits of Woe

John Gielgud was the perfect Hamlet. He'd have told you so himself if you'd asked him when he was alive.

Why not? It was true.

He wasn't particularly modest about it, nor should he have been. He not only played Hamlet on stage from 1929-30 in such a revolutionary, quicksilver way that the damned part was his but he directed it again and again with others -including Olivier and Richard Burton, whom he more or less discovered - until, like Kenneth Brannagh now, when he came into a room the first thing your mind muttered was "Oh. It's Hamlet".

Yes, that's him from a publicity still, over there.

It's hard to think of him as a young man, lithe and springy with a full head of hair since, at least in this country, it seems he's always been old. Playing old or older men like Arthur's butler or Pope Pius XII or Edward Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. His Hamlet was never filmed, by the way. He refused the offer and played mostly character parts (in films anyway), with some exceptions, the rest of his life.

But he was very young once. And a stunningly strong leading Shakespearean man. Some of his personal correspondence, written over nearly a 70-year span, has been distilled into a series of readings by the BBC and I've been listening to them for the last few nights on my iPod. Read by Derek Jacobi - he of I, Claudius fame and yet another actor made famous playing Hamlet - they paint a fascinating, if at times gleefully bitchy, picture of Sir John the actor and Johnny G. the Gossip Diva.

Cast as Cassius in the 1953 version of "Julius Caesar", he vents on Brando's vocal style while gushing over Marlon's musculature. Lawrence Olivier, his protege he watched supercede him as the archetypal Shakespearean lead, gets mixed notes on his technique (too stiff) while Vivian Leigh, Olivier's wife at the time, is found hopeless as a stage actor.

It's all very catty and at times, cloying. It also helps that the BBC puts some context into the quotations so that those unfamiliar with Gielgud's herculean efforts to revive classical British theatre in the 30s can understand what the devil he's talking about. His letters to Lilian Gish are uber-gossipy while the ones he writes to Paul Antsee, his longtime lover, dither between asking for forgiveness (Sir John was a bit of a rover in those days) and extended pillow talk.

Gielgud, a consummate professional in his stagecraft, was generous to his friends and colleagues and must have been a bit of a sly tyrant as a director. But, unlike most actors, he wanted everyone around him to be better than he was.

Imagine that. Being better than Gielgud. On stage with Gielgud. Boggling, really.

Acting, for those who've never been on stage, is a sort of elaborate confidence game you play on people: your director, your fellow cast mates and best of all, the audience. It is deliciously fun and backbreaking-ly hard work but you need to have a certain mad quality to be really any good at it. You also have to be able to memorize enormous amounts of script, have the patience of Job and the ego of Napoleon, be born with the spatial awareness of a house fly and after all that be able to shuck the person you are offstage to become an utter stranger. Then be able to toss the stranger off like a worn shoe at the end of the show.

Gielgud wasn't just good at it, he was nearly the perfect actor. His speeches in Hamlet were tossed off at such speed and yet with such grace that audiences were given little choice but to pay rapt attention to him whenever he came on stage. In one of his letters he confesses that the speed of his delivery did not always allow him to understand or care what he was saying.

It didn't matter. Try saying this bit from Act 1, Scene 2 [you're all alone on stage, by the way, so the house is yours] without tripping on your tongue:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

Uhuh. I thought so.

And he could sing, too.