Abstract
Abstract
In April 1949, the US State Department announced the selection of an American theatre company to take a production of Hamlet to the Shakespeare Festival in Elsinore. This chapter tracks the entangled agencies that saw the production through sponsorship by ANTA (American National Theater and Academy), and the personal involvement of President Harry Truman and his White House staff, to the conflicting political commitments of the production’s creative team: producer-financier Blevins Davis, designer Nat Karson, actor-director (and Hamlet) Robert Breen, and veteran British actor Clarence Derwent (Polonius and President of Equity). It shows how the cooperative principles associated with the production’s affiliation to ANTA began to founder under the combined pressures of Breen and Davies’s aspiration to establish their partnership as a state–private enterprise and the association of Karson and Derwent with ‘un-American’ political activities.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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