Hamlet on the English Stage Since 1945

Abstract

Like many other things that had been in relative abundance during the pre-war years, Hamlet was, during the immediate post-war period, in short supply. At the start of August 1945, London theatergoers could catch the final stage performances by John Gielgud (1904–2000) at the Haymarket in the part that he had first claimed for his own at the Old Vic in 1930. They may, in October of the same year, have turned out for Alec Clunes’s Dane in its brief run at the Arts theatre; and they might even, in the early months of 1946, have sampled the version that Donald Wolfit had been touring since the mid-1930s. But, in marked contrast to the decades between the First and Second World Wars, in which it was a rare year that did not see at least one showing of the play (reaching a peak of five in 1930), and during which Hamlet accounted for over a tenth of the total of all Shakespeare productions on the London stage, the remainder of the decade saw only one staging of the play in the capital (at St James’s theatre, in 1948).