Zeffirelli tackled Hamlet for the first time, urged on by Giorgio Albertazzi, then in company with Anna Proclemer.
The two were old friends: Florentines of the same age, they had known each other since, as boys, they had acted in the various youth amateur companies in their city. Zeffirelli had also procured the newcomer Albertazzi a small part in Visconti’s Troilo e Cressida.
It was a great and solid bond that Albertazzi described in a 1965 interview in “Sipario”: “Zeffirelli is an inventor of shows, he has a plastic intuition of the theatrical spectacle that is almost always perfect, that goes beyond any critical conception. […] His most extraordinary quality is the courage he has to do what he feels, without critical frustration. He is the healthiest and happiest working director I have met: theater must be done with joy, as we did when we were kids, he always says.”
Countering this is Zeffirelli’s recollection of the actor in his Autobiography: “Giorgio was born to be Hamlet. He had the inner stature, the mystery, the supreme intelligence. Our destinies were reunited on this most fortunate occasion. Ours was an entirely new reading of the absolute masterpiece of theater in poetry, suggested also by the restlessness of those years.”
A letter to his friend Masolino d’Amico, during the preparation of the play, recounts the whole new way of conceiving Hamlet’s text. The letter is dated October 15, 1963:
“Dear Masolino,
[…] You will know that I am doing Hamlet in Rome and begin rehearsals on November 3.
[…] I am setting this Hamlet in my own way, a new way in which there is only one thing clear, yet: ‘it will be a modern vision’-.
I’m going to repaste everything: today, tomorrow, a thousand years ago-I would like the romantic melancholies, the fury of the Elizabethans, the horror of the Middle Ages, but above all the ‘moods,’ the resignation, the nastiness and the uproar of today. How I will do this I do not know.
However, I have devised a stage device that, at least, has the merit of being able to adapt to any turn the play will take. It is a highly advanced device, this yes, almost futuristic.”
Minimalist only in appearance, this concave and enveloping “scenic device,” utterly nondescript, is actually a veritable theatrical machine that from time to time becomes the Elsinore bleachers, the throne room, the queen’s room, re-proposing in a contemporary key the neutral stage of Elizabethan playhouses, in which a few props suggested the place of dramatic action.
On it moved Hamlet, “a neurotic without a shadow of melancholy in a turtleneck sweater and bleached hair,” as Albertazzi recalled him many, many years later.
The moment of the highly anticipated monologue was then a real coup de théatre: in the empty stage, little by little, Hamlet/Albertazzi slowly emerged from underground, from “a large hole that was a kind of navel” placed in the center of the proscenium.
The splendid costumes of the leads made by Danilo Donati avoided a precise historical connotation, superimposing ancient fashions on contemporary ones, made from extremely contemporary fabrics.
After a triumphant tour in Italy and abroad, in September 1964 the play landed at the Old Vic in London, then directed by Laurence Olivier, for the celebration of the fourth centenary of William Shakespeare’s birth.
It was the first time the English theater hosted an Italian-language production.
This is how Zeffirelli justifies his intention to bring the text back to a popular audience like the one that crowded Elizabethan theaters:
“This tragedy has often been presented as the summa of existentialism, burdening it with all kinds of philosophical complications. I wanted to go back to the original sources: jealousy and revenge. Shakespeare had written […] a family saga told as a great epic story, full of facts and action. That’s what had originally nailed the Globe Theatre audience to follow Hamlet for five hours.”
So for this operation there was “a need for a new and surprising icon for young audiences.” Zeffirelli chose Mel Gibson known to the general public primarily for his action films (Mad Max and Lethal Weapon).
Pushing in that direction was a certain popular purpose: “I saw Hamlet not as an introverted prince, but rather as an ambitious young man, […] bred to be an aristocratic ‘superman,’ the best in all disciplines. […] Gibson was perfect for the part, in the way I intended to bring the character to life. What’s more, to be able to have the hero of Hollywood action movies as the protagonist of the most classic of classics was really a winning idea.”
A warrior Hamlet then, ‘physical,’ definitely ‘pop’; as is evident right from the movie poster in which the protagonist holds a heavy sword in his hands.
In the middle, in 1979, comes a further project for a theatrical Hamlet that was never produced and stands as an ideal trait-d’union between the previous two.
The play was to star a rising Hollywood star. Richard Gere.
Gere had recently become famous to movie audiences for Terence Malik’s Days of Heaven, and he was fresh from filming John Schlesinger’s Yankees and Paul Schrader’s American gigolo, not yet released in theaters, which would shortly thereafter decree his consecration as a sex symbol.
Zeffirelli’s idea was to dedicate this new production “to young people, especially for the youth of American universities, but for all the youth of the world”; since: “Hamlet has an extraordinary anticipatory and modern force that is renewed in all generations. Young Americans have not seen much Shakespeare in the theater, and so I thought it was only right to re-present his major tragedy, which is the story of a young man as if it were today […].”
Three great protagonists for three completely different versions of the Shakespearean play that confirm, however, a single reading of Hamlet’s character: Hamlet is “our contemporary,” taking the form of the age he passes through, the changing guise of time.