There Is Nothing Like a Dane!: The Lighter Side of Hamlet
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About this ebook
There is Nothing Like a Dane is an affectionate compilation of mostly funny (but sometimes serious) bits and pieces about Hamlet - interwoven with Clive Francis's delectable caricatures of various members of the theatrical profession strutting their stuff.
The great hall of fame is duly visited, though its inhabitants are not always as dignified as they would like to seem. Here are glimpses in word and pictures of the likes of Donald Wolfit, Kenneth Branagh, John Gielgud, Henry Irving, Jonathan Pryce, John Barrymore, Alec Guinness, Richard Burton and of course, Laurence Olivier. The tone is also elevated now and then by contributions from great writers such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding and P.G. Wodehouse. But the chief delight is in the unexpected: a stubbornly mustachioed Ophelia in Poona, India, an inadvertently horn-rimmed Hamlet on London's Waterloo Road - and would you believe Tony Hancock, Tommy Cooper and even June Whitfield as the Prince of Denmark?
This is a book for actors and audiences - and Shakespeare buffs on their day off.
"A charming bit of fluff for Shakespeare enthusiasts."--Publishers Weekly
Clive Francis
Clive Francis is well-known as an actor as well as a caricaturist. He has made over a hundred television appearances, while his London stage career began in 1966 with There's a Girl in My Soup. He performed in a large number of shows in London's West End, including Graham Greene's The Return of AJ Raffles, Somerset Maugham's The Circle, Simon Gray's The Rear Column, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School of Scandal, Noel Coward's Look after Lulu, Michael Frayn's Benefactors, Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw and Alan Bennett's Single Spies. He joined Alan Ayckbourn's company at London's National Theatre in 1986 and was Scrooge for two years running in the Royal Shakespeare Company's A Christmas Carol. He is the author of There Is Nothing Like a Thane! Clive Francis has been caricaturing professionally since 1983 and has had seven solo exhibitions including three at the National Theatre. He has designed a number of posters and book covers, including two for Alec Guinness and two for John Gielgud.
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Book preview
There Is Nothing Like a Dane! - Clive Francis
Introduction
CLIVE FRANCIS
It was during the summer of 1955 that my sister Caroline and I were persuaded to enter a fancy-dress competition being organised by the local dancing school in Eastbourne. The gentle persuader was our mother Margaret, who being an ardent lover of the Bard thought that we would both stand a positive chance of winning the five shilling book token if we went as Lord Hamlet and the fair Ophelia. My sister was four, and I had just turned nine.
Even at this early age my head was swimming with thoughts of becoming an actor and playing all the great Shakespearean leads, and so the chance of dressing up as one filled me with enormous enthusiasm. Caroline, on the other hand, just did as she was told. Dressed in an old nylon nightie of my mother’s she was entwined from head to toe in lengths of ivy, honeysuckle and bind-weed, with a garland of pungent parsley and rosemary neatly plaited into her hair. She looked adorably loony and was instructed when facing the judges just to ‘Smile sweetly, and hum a bit!’
I wore a pair of my mother’s black tights, folded over several times at the top, a huge ruffled shirt - which had just a hint of Chanel - and under my arm a skull, that my mother had borrowed from the local art college. In great trepidation of being about to look a complete burk, I walked hand in hand with my sister towards the Reeve Folkes Dancing School.
As soon as I entered the lobby, I knew I had made a mistake. I was confronted with a harem of girls in various shapes and sizes, all parading up and down in voluminous multi-coloured outfits depicting clowns, fishes, golliwogs, blancmange fairies etc; all squealing hysterically as mothers and nannies tried desperately to bring them under control.
Needless to say I wanted the ground to open up. I wanted to disappear. To evaporate. Anything rather than parade ruffled up to the ear-drums in a pair of wrinkly tights, with a borrowed skull and a sister unconsciously tripping over a nightie now heaving with foliage. I was aware also of a lot of young female eyes staring at us as we stood hand in hand in the corner of the hall. Not another fellow in sight, well apart from one, and he wasn’t much help, as he’d come dressed as Muffin the Mule.
My mother’s hand was now pressing firmly on my back, as she tried to coax us further into the hall. There was no time to lose. I needed immediately to conjure up any vestige of acting talent that might have kindled inside me, and, simply, die!
With a loud wail I clutched my stomach, fell to my knees and rolled writhing and wailing until I knew I had the attention of pupils and parents alike, who were now deeply concerned as to what had happened to Mrs. Francis’s little boy.
My mother rushed me home and put me to bed, where, after a suitable pause, I made a remarkably quick recovery.
My sister, on the other hand, was abandoned to fend for herself. And when, after parading round the packed room, smiling and humming all the while, she was asked who she was supposed to be, said, I don’t know. But I think I’m meant to be mad!
It is extraordinary for me to think that forty years on, my son Harry, now aged six, has also been bitten by the venomous acting bug. Shakespeare is the equivalent to him of Enid Blyton to any other child. He can, and does, without any coaxing, dress up in his sister’s black tights, ram a red plastic oversized tomato under his arm (representing the skull of course) and perform To be, or not to be
- although, in his case, we get "the sling shots and arrows of outrageous fortune!"
I saw Hamlet for the first time forty years ago at Croydon’s Pembroke Theatre in the Round (my chief remembrance being of a lady next to me who spent most of the nunnery scene waving desperately to her friend sitting opposite.) It is, without a doubt, the most famous play ever written; certainly the most quoted and certainly the most talked about. Which is amazing when you consider that there are no jokes (well, apart from a couple; and they’re rather dubious), one rather barmy song and most of the cast get bumped off by the end of Act 5. And it’s over four hours long.
When I began compiling this book I was intrigued by the number of wild eccentrics that have essayed the role. Hamlets who have been bald, mad, foreign and shortsighted; and the odd occasion when he has been performed by ladies, puppets, dogs and undernourished children. In short the whole project became an obsession. So determined was I to track down every anecdote, parody and song ever written on the subject that my collated material began to grow to mammoth proportions. But fascinating though it all was I discovered that there weren’t many laughs - which for a bleak, bitter tragedy it certainly needed. So I then began to rummage through music hall archives and theatrical libraries for amusing anecdotes and reminiscences; at the same time ceremoniously hacking away and losing at least two thirds of my original idea. This wasn’t an easy task, but then there are only so many stories regarding a loony, morose, self-obsessed Prince that one can take.
It has been staged in every country in the world, on nearly every island under the sun, and, I’m sure, upon every star that twinkles within our firmament. In fact Hamlet has every chance of getting a reputation, unless it’s very careful, of being done to death.
No offence i’ the world
ACT 3, SCENE 2.
That it should come to this.
ACT 1, SCENE 2.
Imagine