John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s fraught, botched, triumphant Hamlet

In 1963 two Hamlets went into production: one directed by Laurence Olivier, the other by John Gielgud. The situation had been engineered by Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. The story goes that while shooting the film Becket, Burton and O’Toole had decided they should each play the Prince under either Olivier or Gielgud and they tossed a coin over who would get which director. O’Toole got Olivier; Burton got Gielgud.

Both productions – booze-drenched affairs – went ahead, but the Hamlet that became a showbiz legend was Burton’s doomed Dane.

Burton looked up to Gielgud. He had played Hamlet a decade before, and in it he copied Gielgud’s word elongation (‘In a dreeeeam of passion’). Gielgud, for his part, was keen to stage something for the 1964 Shakespeare quartercentenary and liked the poetic, dark pessimism of the starry Welshman.