Theatre Journal

Robert Shaughnessy’s Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 1963–1975: Olivier and Hall makes a valuable contribution to Shakespearean performance history and provides a cornerstone to Bloomsbury’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series. Taking as its starting point public calls for a national theatre capable of providing a “house for Shakespeare,” the book charts the essential role that Shakespeare production played in the shaping of the National Theatre (NT) during the Laurence Olivier and Peter Hall eras (4). Encompassing the NT’s establishment at the Old Vic in 1963 to its move to the South Bank beginning in 1975, Shaughnessy analyzes the “most Shakespeare intensive period” of the NT’s history as a quest for identity that maps onto the distinct visions of Olivier and Hall (4). Throughout, Shaughnessy brings pivotal productions to life by drawing on varied sources from the NT archive, including reviews, production stills, and letters from the public. This material, rooted within often turbulent cultural and political contexts, brings a sense of immediacy to these long-ago performances that is keenly felt. Each chapter in the volume pivots on a range of key productions that, together, illustrate how Shakespeare proved central in establishing (and performing the very idea of) a national theatre. [End Page 262]

The first chapter focuses on Laurence Olivier as director and as star; the central productions considered are the inaugural Hamlet (1963), Othello (1964), and The Merchant of Venice (1970). Throughout, Shaughnessy is alive to the impact of Olivier’s star image and his acting techniques on this period of the NT’s history, and he conveys a sense of the kinetic experience of Olivier’s performances, “a phenomenon that was not just seen but felt” (31; emphasis in original). The bulk of the chapter is, unsurprisingly, devoted to the controversial Othello, which is put into productive conversation with Merchant through a focus on Olivier’s use of prosthetics and his famed “outside in” approach to acting. Shaughnessy uses this technique as a way to finely detail the complex, and very different, receptions of each production. Indeed, the excellent analysis of Olivier’s performance style connects both the stories of these productions and their legacies to a more comprehensive understanding of Olivier’s directorship at the NT. The work here establishes the framework of the rest of the book—a burgeoning sense, from the mid-1960s, of Olivier’s encroaching anachronicity; a corresponding evolution in theatrical taste; and a complex relationship between the NT and the RSC, headed by Hall.

This sense of an Olivier, and an NT, poised not always comfortably between tradition and modernity leads into the next two chapters, focusing on the pivotal year 1967 and on the visits of key European influencers, notably Franco Zeffirelli and the Berliner Ensemble (1964–65). In chapter 2, Shaughnessy details the histories of the two productions that dominated the 1967–68 season: Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare-inspired Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Clifford Williams’s all-male As You Like It. Through these productions, Shaughnessy explores the often-conflicting obligations that the state-funded NT had to navigate, juggling financial sustainability with public demand and valued traditions with the shock of the new (87). Stoppard’s play and Clifford’s radical adaptation thus exposed the NT’s own cultural performance in a landscape marked, not least, by the work of the Royal Court and the RSC. Certainly, the NT’s fraught identity is underscored throughout the book by means of its interlocking history with the RSC, which, vexingly, “was already fulfilling most of the functions of a national theatre, and more” by 1963 (17). These are dancing threads that Shaughnessy keeps dynamically alive, leading the reader from Olivier toward Hall and back again.

Indeed, Hall’s 1965 Hamlet, Shaughnessy suggests, may well have been inspired by Zeffirelli’s Amleto, which transferred to the Old Vic in 1964. Coupled the next year with Much...