Johnston Forbes-Robertson was accounted the finest Hamlet of his generation by George Bernard Shaw, so that must be true. By his own admission, Shaw was never wrong. Hepworth's hour-long production of the Shakespeare play was undoubtedly seen as a very English sort of feature and a reply to Famous Players in Famous Plays that Adolph Zukor was producing in the States. As a result, Forbes-Robertson, who also had the distinction of appearing in the first Shakespearean film (1898's MACBETH, which was just part of the duel) seems to have brought his entire West End cast so that the 60-year-old actor could record his performance as a disaffected college student for eternity.
It's a big performance. It strikes me that not only were the cheapest seats at the back of the balcony aware of everything that Forbes-Robertson said and did, but so was anyone standing in the lobby and quite possibly anyone walking by the theater while a performance was on. His performance is a full stage performance for a generation earlier, with grand gestures and Forbes front stage and the camera (supervised by Geoffrey Faithfull, who would still be a director of Photography in the early 1970s) seemingly set right over the prompter's box, so that every gesture made during the long soliliquies (summed up in brief catchphrases: "To be or not to be: that is the question"; "Alas, Poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio"; et c.) will be caught.
This one makes it clear: the movies are not the stage, pageantry is a different matter and Shakespeare is about the words and thoughts as much as the performances. Without the words, this is an unfortunate mess, just a dumb record of what must have been an exciting stage performance. It's too bad we'll never get to hear it.
It's a big performance. It strikes me that not only were the cheapest seats at the back of the balcony aware of everything that Forbes-Robertson said and did, but so was anyone standing in the lobby and quite possibly anyone walking by the theater while a performance was on. His performance is a full stage performance for a generation earlier, with grand gestures and Forbes front stage and the camera (supervised by Geoffrey Faithfull, who would still be a director of Photography in the early 1970s) seemingly set right over the prompter's box, so that every gesture made during the long soliliquies (summed up in brief catchphrases: "To be or not to be: that is the question"; "Alas, Poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio"; et c.) will be caught.
This one makes it clear: the movies are not the stage, pageantry is a different matter and Shakespeare is about the words and thoughts as much as the performances. Without the words, this is an unfortunate mess, just a dumb record of what must have been an exciting stage performance. It's too bad we'll never get to hear it.