Hamlet at Elsinore is a 1964 television version of the c. 1600 play by William Shakespeare. Produced by the BBC in association with Danish Radio, it was shown in the U.S. on NET. Winning wide acclaim both for its performances and for being shot entirely at Helsingør (Elsinore in English), in the castle in which the play is set, it is the only version (with sound) of the play to have actually been shot at Elsinore Castle.

This programme was recorded and edited on video tape (2" quadruplex) and not 'filmed'. The director was Philip Saville. It was the longest version of the play telecast in one evening up to that time, running nearly three hours. A 1947 telecast of the play had split it up into two ninety-minute halves over two weeks.

The Canadian actor Christopher Plummer took the lead role as Hamlet and earned an Emmy Award nomination for his performance. In supporting roles were Robert Shaw as Claudius, Donald Sutherland as Fortinbras, Roy Kinnear as the Gravedigger and Michael Caine, in his only Shakespearean performance, as Horatio. Sutherland, Caine and Shaw were, at the time, almost completely unknown to American audiences, and just before the presentation's first U.S. telecast, Plummer began to gain popularity in the U.S. because of his appearance in the 1965 musical film The Sound of Music.

 

One of the most significant of all television Shakespeare productions on television was produced nearly fifty years ago as a contribution to the quatercentenary celebrations of the playwright’s birth. The idea for a television version of Hamlet recorded on location at the castle where the events are set originally came from Danmarks Radio. The project became one of the earliest major European co-productions and was pioneering in its exclusive use of outside broadcast cameras to record a drama. It also resulted in a distinguished adaptation that is engaging, insightful and often thrilling.

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There was, however, a tradition of companies playing Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, a Renaissance palace built rather later than the medieval king Amleth whose legend was one of Shakespeare’s sources. Denmark’s Royal Theatre from Copenhagen staged a spectacular production there in 1916. Visiting troupes from Britain included the Old Vice Company with whom Laurence Olivier performed the lead role in 1937, while Michael Redgrave was the prince when the same group returned in the summer of 1950. The Old Vic Company went again in 1954, this time with Richard Burton.

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Under the terms of the broadcast co-production arrangement BBC Television provided most of the fifty-strong creative team, including director Philip Saville and producer Peter Luke together with the cast, while the Danes contributed the magnificent location, 230 soldiers as extras and two outside broadcast units staffed by forty engineers.

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Almost all drama at the time was shot with multiple cameras in television studios, but Saville extended the techniques of this form by taking to the castle units that were usually deployed for state occasions and sports events. Two-inch ‘quad’ videotape was used for the recording, and this contributes both the vivid immediacy of many sequences but also the ‘streaking’ across the images, especially during the nighttime scenes.

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The twelve days of rehearsals and shooting were plagued with problems, including persistent rain and fog, as well as the regular blasts of the Elsinore foghorn. Saville quickly learned how to shoot 24-second takes that nestled into warning signal’s regular periods of silence. There were times too when Saville was deploying ten cameras for a scene, although some of the most effective parts of the drama, such as the fractured sequence of locations for ‘To be or not to be’, are shot with just one or two cameras.

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Sydney Newman, Head of BBC Television’s Drama Group at the time, described Hamlet at Elsinore as ‘the most wonderful, complicated and exactly production ever done for television’. Including the special cable that was needed to run electricity from the nearby town, the total budget was announced as £40,000, of which the BBC contributed £25,000.

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Christopher Plummer makes a fine Prince, but tucked away in a production file in BBC Written Archives at Caversham is a cable recording an even more intriguing casting idea. The brief message to the Artists Booking Department at BBC Television reads, ‘Previous commitments prevent my accepting your kind offer. Thank you for thinking of me.’ It is signed, ‘Sincerely, Marlon Brando’.

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Plummer was cast largely on the strength of his theatre work at Stratford, Ontario, where he had taken the role seven years before. He apparently insisted that the 18 year old Jo Maxwell Muller be cast at Ophelia, and other major roles went to Donald Sutherland, Michael Caine and Robert Shaw, none of whom was nearly as well-known as later film careers would make them. 

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