The "Hamlet Year"
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Abstract
DANISH critic conferred the title of Hamlet-aar on the theatriA S cal season of 1953-1954. Beginning in Stockholm in September, Hamlet spread across Scandinavia, appearing in the repertory in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, in G6teborg, Sweden, and in Aarhus and Copenhagen, Denmark. The "year" will come to a conclusion in June with the performances of the Old Vic company at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, and only these final performances can be in any way considered conventional. For Hamlet, surprisingly enough, is not the usual Shakespearian thing in the Scandinavian theater. After two centuries of existence, the Royal Theater in Copenhagen has just given its one-hundredth performance of what the Danish Tourist Agency seems to have adopted as the National Drama. Nor is there any clearly assignable reason why six Hamlets should suddenly appear in six communities that had hitherto been more than willing that Elsinore should bear the burden. The Hamlet Year was one of those coincidences that happen far too seldom nowadays, a conjunction of performances for which the Shakespeare-lover and theater-student alike must be grateful, affording as they do the rare opportunity of looking upon several pictures side by side and judging performances not from memory (with its tricks of elimination and emphasis) but from living experience.