Creating the World of the Play: Sets, Costumes and Effects

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Even those critics who professed to find the play shallow were impressed by the sheer theatricality of the entertainment offered by the National Theatre at the Old Vic on the evening of Tuesday, 11 April 1967. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Derek Goldby’s production was the way in which it created an impression of an archetypical Hamlet world, a distillation of all the productions within living memory into a Victorian-Gothic atmosphere which emblematised every playgoer’s sensory impression of Shakespeare’s Elsinore, even at those points where Stoppard’s play departs most radically from Shakespeare’s text. Members of the audience arriving for the opening performance were well aware of the status of the Old Vic, as the home of Shakespeare and classical drama in London. The joke of the play’s title was immediately apparent on various levels. Theatregoers had witnessed a number of great productions of Hamlet at the Old Vic. John Gielgud had played it a few times in the 1920s and 30s, Laurence Olivier in 1937 and Peter O’Toole in 1963. In fact O’Toole’s Hamlet was the production chosen by Olivier to inaugurate the first season of the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1963.